Renamo grief for Dhlakama
Gathered on wooden benches in the shade of a mango tree on Saturday, scores of supporters of Mozambican rebel opposition leader Afonso Dhlakama could barely believe he had died.
Dhlakama led Renamo for nearly 40 years, through a bloody civil war and into an era where the party has legislators in parliament while also retaining armed fighters.
Dhlakama died unexpectedly on Thursday at 65, leaving his party reeling in shock and struggling to contemplate a future without their talismanic leader.
Outside the party’s local headquarters in the small town of Dondo, Renamo supporters and former militants mourned and recalled fighting with him.
“We have come together to sing, to pray and to wait for the instructions of the party about the burial arrangements,” Bernardo Joao, a Renamo activist told AFP, his voice full of emotion. “We believe that Dhlakama came to liberate the people who lived in slavery.”
Some party faithful cried quietly and held their heads in their hands as they grieved in the choking dust along the main road from Beira to Zimbabwe.
Dhlakama was a central figure in Mozambique’s history since independence from Portugal in 1975.
He led Renamo, then backed by apartheid South Africa, through the deadly civil war against the Marxist-inspired Frelimo government until the conflict ended in 1992.
He then evolved Renamo into an opposition party, which failed to take power from Frelimo in elections and again took up arms from 2013 to 2016.
“If he had fallen during the war, it would have been different, but he survived. He died of an illness,” said one mourner, Joao Bernardo. “For us, that is a victory.” Dhlakama — who died of a suspected heart attack — had lived for the past two years at a secret location in the remote mountain scrub of Gorongosa, not far from Dondo.
He fell sick last week and died on Thursday before he could get medical help.