Mozambican Independence
Mozambique became independent on 25 June 1975 after a ten-year guerrilla war, and was at war again within two years. Portugal had held the coast since the sixteenth century and the interior since the late nineteenth, and had refused every decolonisation trend of the 1960s on the doctrine that its African territories were overseas provinces of Portugal rather than colonies. Frelimo launched its war in 1964 under Eduardo Mondlane, an American-educated sociologist who was assassinated by a parcel bomb in Dar es Salaam in 1969; Samora Machel succeeded him. The war was fought mainly in the north and never threatened the cities, and what ended it was the collapse of the regime at home. Portugal was spending nearly half its budget on three colonial wars, and the officers who overthrew the dictatorship in Lisbon in April 1974 did so substantially because of them. Independence came fourteen months later, on terms that transferred power to Frelimo without an election. Some 200,000 Portuguese settlers left within months, taking or destroying what they could, and the country lost most of its skilled workers, doctors and administrators at a stroke. Machel declared a Marxist-Leninist state, nationalised land, schools and health care, and supported the guerrillas fighting in Rhodesia and South Africa. Rhodesia and then South Africa answered by creating and arming Renamo, and the civil war that followed ran to 1992 and killed some a million people, largely through famine and the mining of the countryside. Machel died in a plane crash on the South African border in 1986 in circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained. Mozambique joined the Commonwealth in 1995 without ever having been British, which is the only case of its kind.
- Year: 1975 CE
- Category: Political
