Mozambican War of Independence
FRELIMO opened its armed struggle against Portuguese rule on 25 September 1964 with an attack on an administrative post at Chai in Cabo Delgado. Portugal was the last European power to concede in Africa, and it did so last because its regime depended on not conceding. The Estado Novo under Salazar had redefined the colonies as overseas provinces in 1951, making them constitutionally parts of Portugal, and fought simultaneously in Angola from 1961, Guinea-Bissau from 1963 and Mozambique from 1964. FRELIMO was formed in exile in Tanzania in 1962 from three regional movements, and led by Eduardo Mondlane, an anthropologist who had worked at the United Nations and taught in the United States. The war was fought in the north and centre, and the movement built schools, clinics and its own administration in the areas it held, which is what distinguished it from a purely military campaign. Mondlane was killed by a parcel bomb in Dar es Salaam in 1969, and Samora Machel took over. Portugal committed some 60,000 troops, used chemical defoliants and forced resettlement into aldeamentos, and never lost militarily in Mozambique — it lost in Lisbon. The Carnation Revolution of April 1974, made by officers exhausted by thirteen years of colonial war, ended the regime, and independence followed on 25 June 1975. Around 800,000 people had died in Portugal's three wars, and 250,000 Portuguese left Mozambique within months. A civil war backed by Rhodesia and South Africa began in 1977 and ran to 1992. Machel was killed in a plane crash on the South African border in 1986 in circumstances never settled. Mozambique joined the Commonwealth in 1995, the only member never ruled by Britain.
- Year: 1964 CE
- Category: Political
