‘Samora Machel is not dead but lives on among us’

OR Tambo’s words resonate as we memorialise the power of the Frelimo leader, writes Janet Smith

OR TAMBO developed a relationship with Samora Machel during the 1960s when Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) and the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique or Frelimo) had adjacent training camps at Kongwa in Tanzania.

Drawn to Dar es Salaam like hundreds of other cadres from southern Africa’s liberation movements, they’d taken up pan-African socialist Julius Nyerere’s offer for refuge. Together, the men destined to be heroes agitated for the front line, attracted by Nyerere’s ideology of ujamaa, the traditional classless collective which saw socialism as an attitude of the mind. Tambo and Machel would share Nyerere’s commitment to the marginalised; his argument against political prestige.

Many, particularly those from MK, would arrive in Dar es Salaam on flights from Moscow. New Marxists, students of dialectical materialism and the AK47, they would find each other in Nyerere’s merger of the infant republic of Tanganyika and the post-revolutionary archipelago of Zanzibar.

A decade before, Nyerere had used the political infrastructure of a civic and student organisation to create the Tanganyika African National Union, and then struck a nationalist covenant with the Left once total independence was secured. He could now stretch out the brotherly hand and offered the ANC leadership a small patch of land for use by MK at Kongwa, about 400km south of the capital.

However, in keeping with his vision of Africans stepping up, he offered little assistance in transforming what was a lonely village, into a camp. It was out of that setting that Tambo, Chris Hani, Ambrose Makiwane, Lennox Lagu, Joe Modise, Moses Mabhida, JB Marks, Joe Slovo and other ANC and SACP leaders – wherever they found themselves around the world – would approach the movement’s vociferous battles. These would emerge first in Dar es Salaam and then at Morogoro, also in Tanzania, with the arguments centred mostly around the party’s meritocratic tendencies.

But into this mix, and outside the ANC’s internecine conflict, came aspirant Marxist-Leninist Machel, who had left his country to pursue its nationalist struggle in neighbouring Tanzania. He was later put in charge of the Frelimo camp at Kongwa, where the southern African revolutionaries would operate side by side for a time in developing their guerrillas.

A nurse, Machel’s consciousness had grown around racist wages in hospitals in then Lourenço Marques, and when that drew the attention of Portugal’s colonial police, he was forced to make his way to Dar es Salaam. This happened – legendarily – via a plane out of Gaborone, whose passenger list was made up of ANC recruits. It was then that he apparently first made contact with Marks.

Machel got military training in Algeria before he helped consolidate troops, and Frelimo’s soldiers were ready far earlier than MK was to launch their independence war. While the ANC’s national executive committee (NEC) bickered over inserting cadres into then Rhodesia to open infiltration routes into South Africa and tried to solve other massive divides, Machel was already on the battlefield, commanding Forças Populares de Libertação do Moçambique (Popular Forces for the Liberation of Mozambique) fighters.

By 1966, he was made head of the army, and when Frelimo’s founder Eduardo Mondlane was assassinated by a parcel bomb in February 1969, Machel was appointed to a presidential triumvirate. The ANC, meanwhile, was internally severely disrupted at the time and meeting at Morogoro, where non-Africans were finally allowed to become members.

A year later, after Mondlane’s deputy Uria Simango denounced his comrades, Machel became president of Frelimo with nationalist, poet Marcelino dos Santos, as his deputy.

If he had not been killed in the plane crash in Mbuzini, Mpumalanga, close to the Mozambique border 30 years ago today, Machel would have just turned 83. But his influence at the time of his death was incalculable for its revolutionary strategy, its determined anti-imperialism and its devotion to socialism.

He only had 11 years in power, with the People’s Republic of Mozambique born on June 25, 1975, a mere six months before the People’s Republic of Angola, which would long remain engaged in a brutal civil war. Invaded from the south by armoured columns of the SADF, supported by the satellite rebel force of Jonas Savimbi’s Unita, Angola saw its first president Agostinho Neto appeal to Fidel Castro, who sent troops as well as arms and supplies in a bellwether for internationalism.

In the same way, it is widely accepted that South African students’ unequivocal support of Frelimo, which culminated in massive pro-Frelimo rallies held by the South African Students Organisation and the Black People’s Convention at Turfloop and the University of Natal in Durban in 1974, helped define the black consciousness movement in this country.

The students defied the vicious apartheid security apparatus, which accelerated its brutalisation, arresting such revolutionary luminaries of the time as Muntu Myeza, Cyril Ramaphosa, Saths Cooper, Abram Tiro, Barney Pityana, Mosiuoa “Terror” Lekota, Strini Moodley and others, charging them under the Terrorism Act. That’s why it was especially moving to see Ramaphosa laying a wreath at the site of Machel’s death at Mbuzini on Monday. We have no way of knowing what foments in the deputy president’s consciousness these days, but we do know what he once was.

Small wonder he and others were so inspired by Machel, who led by example. His powerful words still matter today, especially to an ANC in such conflict.

“For a leadership body to work with the masses, it must be united,” Machel said. “When there are contradictions, this gives rise to rumours, intrigue and slander. Each faction tries to mobilise support for its views, dividing the masses. When we are disunited, the rank and file lose confidence. In the process of struggling for unity, we must know with whom we are uniting and why.”

And Tambo’s words about Machel resonate, too. Speaking in 1987 at the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa, he said: “Samora Machel is not dead but lives on among us, inspiring us to continue his life’s work and to realise his vision of a prosperous mother continent that would be respected by the nations of the world for its genius and its humanism.

“The racist enemies of Africa who plotted and carried out his murder had hoped that their heinous deed would set us back by blotting out this vision. They will be proved wrong.”