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Introduction

In the first half of the second millennium A.D., northern Mozambican port towns were frequented by traders from Somalia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Arabia, Persia, and India. The Portuguese were able to wrest much of the coastal trade from Arab Muslims in the centuries after 1500 and to set up their own colonies. Portugal did not relinquish Mozambique until 1975. Large-scale emigration, economic dependence on South Africa, a severe drought, and a prolonged civil war hindered the country's development until the mid-1990s. The ruling Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) party formally abandoned Marxism in 1989, and a new constitution the following year provided for multiparty elections and a free market economy. A UN-negotiated peace agreement between FRELIMO and rebel Mozambique National Resistance (RENAMO) forces ended the fighting in 1992. In 2004, Mozambique underwent a delicate transition as Joaquim CHISSANO stepped down after 18 years in office. His elected successor, Armando GUEBUZA, served two terms and then passed executive power to Filipe NYUSI in 2015. RENAMO's residual armed forces intermittently engaged in a low-level insurgency after 2012, but a late December 2016 ceasefire eventually led to the two sides signing a comprehensive peace deal in August 2019. Elections in October 2019, challenged by Western observers and civil society as being problematic, resulted in resounding wins for NYUSI and FRELIMO across the country. Since October 2017, violent extremists - who an official ISIS media outlet recognized as ISIS's network in Mozambique for the first time in June 2019 - have been conducting attacks against civilians and security services in the northern province of Cabo Delgado.

Visit the Definitions and Notes page to view a description of each topic.

Geography

slightly more than five times the size of Georgia; slightly less than twice the size of California

People and Society

30,888,034 (July 2021 est.)

note: estimates for this country explicitly take into account the effects of excess mortality due to AIDS; this can result in lower life expectancy, higher infant mortality, higher death rates, lower population growth rates, and changes in the distribution of population by age and sex than would otherwise be expected
country comparison to the world: 46

Mozambique is a poor, sparsely populated country with high fertility and mortality rates and a rapidly growing youthful population - 45% of the population is younger than 15. Mozambique's high poverty rate is sustained by natural disasters, disease, high population growth, low agricultural productivity, and the unequal distribution of wealth. The country's birth rate is among the world's highest, averaging around more than 5 children per woman (and higher in rural areas) for at least the last three decades. The sustained high level of fertility reflects gender inequality, low contraceptive use, early marriages and childbearing, and a lack of education, particularly among women. The high population growth rate is somewhat restrained by the country's high HIV/AIDS and overall mortality rates. Mozambique ranks among the worst in the world for HIV/AIDS prevalence, HIV/AIDS deaths, and life expectancy at birth.

Mozambique is predominantly a country of emigration, but internal, rural-urban migration has begun to grow. Mozambicans, primarily from the country's southern region, have been migrating to South Africa for work for more than a century. Additionally, approximately 1.7 million Mozambicans fled to Malawi, South Africa, and other neighboring countries between 1979 and 1992 to escape from civil war. Labor migrants have usually been men from rural areas whose crops have failed or who are unemployed and have headed to South Africa to work as miners; multiple generations of the same family often become miners. Since the abolition of apartheid in South Africa in 1991, other job opportunities have opened to Mozambicans, including in the informal and manufacturing sectors, but mining remains their main source of employment.

19.2 years (2011 est.)

note: median age at first birth among women 20-49

improved: urban: 93.2% of population

rural: 58.3% of population

total: 70.7% of population

unimproved: urban: 6.8% of population

rural: 41.7% of population

total: 29.3% of population (2017 est.)

improved: urban: 61.8% of population (2015 est.)

rural: 18.8% of population

total: 34.1% of population

unimproved: urban: 38.2% of population

rural: 81.2% of population

total: 65.9% of population (2017 est.)

Environment

severe localized food insecurity:
due to economic downturn, localized shortfalls in staple food production, and insecurity in northern areas - an estimated 1.65 million people require humanitarian assistance at least up until September 2021; populations in Cabo Delgado are experiencing the severest levels of acute food insecurity, where an estimated 227,000 people are facing "Emergency" levels of food insecurity, reflecting the effects of the conflict on livelihoods and rainfall deficits that caused a drop in cereal production in 2021

(2021)

Government

Democratic Movement of Mozambique (Movimento Democratico de Mocambique) or MDM [Daviz SIMANGO]
Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frente de Liberatacao de Mocambique) or FRELIMO [Filipe NYUSI]
Mozambican National Resistance (Resistencia Nacional Mocambicana) or RENAMO [Ossufo MOMADE]
Optimistic Party for the Development of Mozambique or Podemos [Helder Mendonca]

three equal horizontal bands of green (top), black, and yellow with a red isosceles triangle based on the hoist side; the black band is edged in white; centered in the triangle is a yellow five-pointed star bearing a crossed rifle and hoe in black superimposed on an open white book; green represents the riches of the land, white peace, black the African continent, yellow the country's minerals, and red the struggle for independence; the rifle symbolizes defense and vigilance, the hoe refers to the country's agriculture, the open book stresses the importance of education, and the star represents Marxism and internationalism

note: one of only two national flags featuring a firearm, the other is Guatemala

Economy

At independence in 1975, Mozambique was one of the world's poorest countries. Socialist policies, economic mismanagement, and a brutal civil war from 1977 to 1992 further impoverished the country. In 1987, the government embarked on a series of macroeconomic reforms designed to stabilize the economy. These steps, combined with donor assistance and with political stability since the multi-party elections in 1994, propelled the country's GDP, in purchasing power parity terms, from $4 billion in 1993 to about $37 billion in 2017. Fiscal reforms, including the introduction of a value-added tax and reform of the customs service, have improved the government's revenue collection abilities. In spite of these gains, about half the population remains below the poverty line and subsistence agriculture continues to employ the vast majority of the country's work force.

Mozambique's once substantial foreign debt was reduced through forgiveness and rescheduling under the IMF's Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) and Enhanced HIPC initiatives. However, in 2016, information surfaced revealing that the Mozambican Government was responsible for over $2 billion in government-backed loans secured between 2012-14 by state-owned defense and security companies without parliamentary approval or national budget inclusion; this prompted the IMF and international donors to halt direct budget support to the Government of Mozambique. An international audit was performed on Mozambique's debt in 2016-17, but debt restructuring and resumption of donor support have yet to occur.

Mozambique grew at an average annual rate of 6%-8% in the decade leading up to 2015, one of Africa's strongest performances, but the sizable external debt burden, donor withdrawal, elevated inflation, and currency depreciation contributed to slower growth in 2016-17.

Two major International consortiums, led by American companies ExxonMobil and Anadarko, are seeking approval to develop massive natural gas deposits off the coast of Cabo Delgado province, in what has the potential to become the largest infrastructure project in Africa. . The government predicts sales of liquefied natural gas from these projects could generate several billion dollars in revenues annually sometime after 2022.

Communications

general assessment:
one of the first countries in the region to reform telecom market and open it to competition; the mobile segment has shown strong growth; poor fixed-line infrastructure means most Internet access is through mobile accounts; DSL, cable broadband, 3G, and some fiber broadband available; LTE tests underway; roll out of national fiber backbone and upgrades to infrastructure; submarine cables reduced the cost of bandwidth; importer of broadcasting equipment from China (2021)

(2020)

domestic: extremely low fixed-line teledensity contrasts with rapid growth in the mobile-cellular network; operators provide coverage that includes all the main cities and key roads; fixed-line less than 1 per 100 and 48 per 100 mobile-cellular teledensity (2019)

international: country code - 258; landing points for the EASSy and SEACOM/ Tata TGN-Eurasia fiber-optic submarine cable systems linking numerous east African countries, the Middle East and Asia ; satellite earth stations - 5 Intelsat (2 Atlantic Ocean and 3 Indian Ocean); TdM contracts for Itelsat for satellite broadband and bulk haul services (2020)

note: the COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a significant impact on production and supply chains globally; since 2020, some aspects of the telecom sector have experienced downturn, particularly in mobile device production; many network operators delayed upgrades to infrastructure; progress towards 5G implementation was postponed or slowed in some countries; consumer spending on telecom services and devices was affected by large-scale job losses and the consequent restriction on disposable incomes; the crucial nature of telecom services as a tool for work and school from home became evident, and received some support from governments

Transportation

major seaport(s): Beira, Maputo, Nacala

Terrorism

Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham - Mozambique (ISIS-M)

note: details about the history, aims, leadership, organization, areas of operation, tactics, targets, weapons, size, and sources of support of the group(s) appear(s) in Appendix-T

Transnational Issues

South Africa has placed military units to assist police operations along the border of Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique to control smuggling, poaching, and illegal migration

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In the first half of the second millennium A.D., northern Mozambican port towns were frequented by traders from Somalia, Ethiopia, Egypt, Arabia, Persia, and India. The Portuguese were able to wrest much of the coastal trade from Arab Muslims in the centuries after 1500 and to set up their own colonies.

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Page 43

Portugal is noted as the first modern European country to have large numbers of black slaves. As one of the major sea powers of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, Portugal also shipped and sold large numbers of African slaves to other parts of the world. Not surprisingly, the issue of slavery has shaped racial tensions between Portugal and Africa. It dominated Portuguese colonialist practices and prompted Africans to hold hostile attitudes toward the Portuguese. Other offensive colonialist practices also complicated race relations between blacks and whites in the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Cape Verde.

SLAVERY

Southern Europe had a tradition of slavery that dated to ancient times. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Portugal enslaved captured Muslims as Christians engaged in the Reconquista (the recapturing of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims). Beginning in the 1440s, voyages sponsored by Prince Henry the Navigator and his successors brought black slaves from Africa to Portugal. The 1455 papal bull Romanus Pontifex issued by Pope Nicholas V justified these activities by authorizing the Portuguese monarch to subdue all "enemies of Christ" wherever they were and to keep them in perpetual slavery. The Portuguese African trade evolved from raids along the African coast that began in 1441 to more peaceful exchanges with African chieftains and merchants by the 1450s.

The trade in African slaves soon extended from Mauritania to the area along the upper Guinea coast. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the trade extended to the Congo and Angola. Most of the slaves gathered from the African mainland were transported back to Portugal and then sent to Spain or South America. Slaves were also imported from Guinea and sent to Cape Verde. The island of São Tiago (Santiago) in the Cape Verde archipelago became a distribution center for slaves on their way to the Americas. São Tomé later assumed this role. In the upper Guinea area, Portuguese traders, entrepreneurs, and degredados (exiles) penetrated into the interior. Called lançados (outcasts), they often settled in African villages. The lançados served as intermediaries in the slave trade and frequently left Euro-African descendants who acted in the same capacities.

The Portuguese slave trade is divided into four periods. In the Guinea wave of the sixteenth century most of the slaves came from both upper Guinea (Senegal River to Cape Palmas) and lower Guinea (Volta River to Cape Catarina). In the seventeenth century, the Portuguese pulled slaves from equatorial and central Africa, particularly Angola and the Congo, as well as Guinea. By the eighteenth century, the Portuguese slave trade expanded to the Gold Coast (Ghana) and the Bight of Benin. In the nineteenth century, Portuguese slaves came predominantly from Angola and Mozambique.

In the eighteenth century, the slave trade came under attack from within Portugal. The Marquis of Pombal pushed through legislation that eliminated the slave trade. On September 19, 1761, legislation halted the transportation of slaves from Africa to Portugal. On January 16, 1773, legislation passed to emancipate black slaves living in Portugal. Existing slaves, however, remained in bondage for the remainder of their lives. Slavery continued in Portugal, although slave traders were often prosecuted.

In the nineteenth century, changing European opinion gradually eliminated Portugal's involvement in the international slave trade. In 1854 all slaves that were the property of the Portuguese government were freed. Two years later, all slaves owned by Portuguese town councils, religious organizations, and churches were freed as were all children born of slave mothers. Finally, the Portuguese government, headed by the Marquis of Sá da Bandeira, Page 44 enacted a law on February 25, 1869, to abolish slavery in Portugal and all of its colonies.

The end of the slave trade removed the most obvious purpose for Portugal's presence in Africa. These colonies lacked effective Portuguese administration for other purposes. In Guinea, the Portuguese had comparatively little presence. In Angola, Portuguese control existed little beyond the ports of Luanda and Lobito. In Mozambique, apart from the virtually autonomous prazos (agricultural estates) that were developed starting in the seventeenth century along the basin of the Zambezi River, Lisbon's authority could be found only on Mozambique Island, at a few points on the Indian Ocean coastline, and in isolated riverine strongholds.

These Portuguese administrative and commercial outposts were chiefly supervised by a heterogeneous Creole population. In Cape Verde as well as São Tomé and Príncipe, the majority of the population was Creole. In Mozambique, the Creole elite engaged in trade with India and eventually succeeded in taking control of the Zambezi prazos. The concept of a Portuguese empire in Africa in the late nineteenth century was problematic because of this dominant Creole presence. Portuguese merchants and adventurers continued to view the remnants of Portugal's South American empire as their natural source of operations and accordingly devoted their energies and resources to Brazil.

AFRICAN COLONIES IN THE AGE OF IMPERIALISM

Meanwhile, Portugal had lost most of its territory in Asia, but the decline of Portugal's East Asian empire increased interest in its African colonies. The increasing push by other European countries to engage in African imperialism also pulled the Portuguese to Africa. During this phase, Portugal focused on expanding its outposts in Africa into nation-sized territories to compete with other European powers on the continent. It had mixed success. Portugal lost its claim to the Congo in the 1880s to Belgium, largely as a result of diplomatic maneuvering. Yet it won arbitration in the 1870s when the French president ruled for Portugal against British complaints over its control of Delagoa Bay in Mozambique. The bay formed a major outlet for the rapidly developing Transvaal and constituted a very useful piece on the political chessboard upon which the partition of Africa was played out. Portugal lost an attempt in 1890 to establish a single colony across the breadth of Africa by connecting Mozambique and Angola when Britain politically blocked the effort. The Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1891 formalized Portugal's imperial borders in Africa with a fairly relaxed definition of "effective occupation." The treaty, however, also required Portugal to exercise systematic control of its African colonies and to expand the Portuguese presence in Africa.

The African colonies played a critical role in the Portuguese economy. They provided a protected market, supplying raw materials at prices cheaper than the world market rates and buying Portuguese products that had a low world demand. Foreign exchange earnings from exports and services also reduced the chronic deficit on Portugal's balance of trade. To safeguard the advantages brought by the colonies, the Portuguese had to protect the white population in Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) Africa against possible African competition by the policy of economic segregation. Numbers of impoverished whites had emigrated to the colonies. The immigration relieved population pressure in Portugal, one of the most crowded and poorest countries in Europe. Of equal importance to Portugal, the white settlers provided a bulwark against rebellious Africans and covetous Europeans in neighboring African countries. Accordingly, whites were congregated in the cities or other places of critical economic importance. They pressured Portugal to defend their interests with edicts that favored whites over Africans and Creoles.

RISE OF AFRICAN RESISTANCE

In the 1950s and 1960s, three factors helped to bring about a change in traditional Portuguese colonialism. A general anticolonialist sentiment bubbled up as the result of economic and political developments in Europe in the wake of World War II. France and Great Britain granted independence to almost all of their African colonies. Portugal, forced to defend its presence in Africa, introduced some nominal reforms. In 1951 it also recategorized its African colonies as Portuguese provinces to block any intervention efforts by the United Nations. Meanwhile, armed revolts led by Africans offered blacks an alternative to the acceptance of Portuguese domination. Portugal introduced more reforms in response to the revolts. And finally, in the 1960s, industrial interests began to compete for the dominant political role that agrarians in Portugal had long held. The need for a less restricted economy, new labor techniques, and increased productivity demanded changes both at home and in the formerly inflexible economic and social structures of the colonies.

Rather than paying wages to free black workers, as the other colonial countries did, Portugal forced compulsory labor from blacks. Portugal first responded to the anti-colonist movement by passing legislation in 1955 that regulated the use of compulsory labor for public works. The use of compulsory labor by private concerns had been formally abolished by law in 1928. Nevertheless, the practice remained widespread, and Portugal instituted

Page 45

heavier penalties on those using such labor in an effort to give the ban bigger teeth. These two responses were designed to improve Portugal's standing in world opinion. Unfortunately, as the United Nations subsequently reported, in 1956, 500,000 Africans in Mozambique were forced to work on cotton farms. Each head of household received an average of $11.17 as a year's payment for the labor of an entire family. In 1958 an estimated 120,000 Africans were still conscripted in Angola, and about 95,000 worked for private employers.

Page 46

Africans who were not forced to work were discriminated against by being paid considerably lower wages than whites. In Angola in 1958, white carpenters earned an annual average of 3,120 escudos, whereas black carpenters earned an average of 1,690 escudos. White cooks earned 3,334 escudos, whereas black cooks took home 500 escudos. In no skilled occupation did blacks and whites earn equal pay, and the gap was substantial. The average pay of African workers was 600 escudos, while white workers typically earned six times as much.

Portugal enacted legislation to address both the problems with wages and the continuing problems with compulsory labor. In 1960 minimum wage laws were enacted. But because employers were permitted to deduct as much as 50 percent from wages for clothing, food, and board, most black workers remained trapped in poverty.

Rioting and fighting in Angola in the early 1960s prompted Portugal to abolish all forms of compulsory labor. The ban had very limited effect. In 1969 a Portuguese government report on the implementation of the 1957 abolition of forced labor reported that such working conditions continued and were expected to continue. Civil, military, and paramilitary authorities defined forced labor on the grounds of national security. At the request of individual employers, police and paramilitary authorities used various means of repression, including extreme violence, to control rebellious workers. Anger among blacks continued to fuel the various liberation movements in Portugal's African colonies.

The liberation movements gained recruits in the 1960s. Large numbers of white settlers, however, wanted to remain under Portuguese control. They even helped to develop a rationale for continued imperial control: The whites argued that Portugal had established a nonracial form of cooperation with the Africans, unlike the racist apartheid regimes in British Africa. They asserted that the races socialized, worked, and married, creating a unique Luso-tropical civilization. While the Portuguese were clearly not as obsessed with race as the South Africans and Rhodesians, Portuguese Africa did not exactly qualify as a color-blind paradise. Africans and Creoles remained trapped in poverty and at the mercy of a repressive police state designed to crush any attempts at rebellion.

Portugal took several steps to try and maintain control over its colonies in this era. In 1961 it abolished the legal distinction between "civilized" and "noncivilized." The latter group, consisting of almost all blacks, had no civil rights, with all of the economic and social consequences resulting from this status. The assimilados, or Africans who had fully adopted Portuguese customs and language, did have rights, but there were only 30,089 assimilados among Angola's four million blacks in 1950. The assimilado category was ended. Nevertheless, these changes did not bring equality to Africa. The electoral laws limited the right to vote to only those people who could read and write Portuguese. In 1965 only 5 percent of black Angolans qualified to vote; in 1969 only 1 percent of blacks in Mozambique voted. Only an insignificant percentage of Africans had the educational qualifications to participate in colonial government.

THE MOVEMENTS FOR INDEPENDENCE

The Portuguese treatment of people of color led to the formation of several organizations that sought independence for Portugal's African colonies. Liga Africana, founded in 1919, joined black and Mulatto students to work for the freedom of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. It was short-lived. African liberation movements did not flourish until the 1960s.

In Angola, armed resistance began in 1960. Rioting broke out among farmers in Malanje province over low crop prices that had been set by the government. About seven thousand protesters were killed in clashes with police. The Bakongo, along with the Ovimbundu and Kimbundu, form the major indigenous ethnic groups in Angola. The Bakongo took the lead in pushing for autonomy, with the Ovimbundu more closely aligned with white employers, while the Kimbundu were resented by other groups for their control of the job market in the ports. In 1960 the police arrested an assimilado, Agostinho Neto, who led the Kimbundu-based Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). His arrest set off riots in Luanda. In an unrelated development, the Bakongo, led by the Union of the Peoples of Northern Angola (later the National Liberation Front in Angola or FNLA) under Holden Roberto, rose up in rebellion in 1960 with almost twenty thousand Bakongo killed. In 1961 hundreds of blacks in Luanda protested police brutality by storming the prisons and freeing political prisoners along with ordinary criminals. The city's whites responded by killing hundreds of unarmed blacks. This last event marks the official beginning of Angola's war of liberation. Subsequently, ethnic conflicts damaged the cause of Angolan independence. In 1966 Jonas Savimbi, an Ovimbundu, created the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) to counter the ethnic exclusiveness of FNLA.

In Mozambique, armed resistance began in 1964. However, there were several wildcat strikes by African workers in Mozambican ports in the 1950s followed in 1960 by a massive protest by farmers angry about low prices set by government-controlled marketing boards. The assimilados led the rebellion. In 1962 they formed the Liberation Front of Mozambique (Frelimo) under Eduardo Mondlane. Frelimo relied upon guerilla tactics. In response, the Portuguese moved many Africans and Page 47 Creoles into resettlement camps where they could not assist Frelimo.

In São Tomé and Príncipe, the Batepá Massacre of 1953 led to the death of several hundred African workers in fighting with Portuguese authorities. In the late 1950s, a small group of São Tomeans formed the Movement for the Liberation of São Tomé and Príncipe (MLSTP). Meanwhile, in Guinea-Bissau, the pan-Africanist Amilcar Cabral joined several others in 1956 to form the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). Guerilla fighting began in earnest in 1962.

The efforts to suppress rebellions in its African colonies put too much stress on the government of Portugal and its dictator, Marcelo Caetano. With the government nearly bankrupt, he was overthrown in April 1974. Among the first decisions made by the leftist coup leaders was to rid Portugal of its overseas possessions as quickly as possible. The decolonization process in the aftermath of the April 1974 revolution in Portugal produced dramatic results, particularly in Angola and Mozambique. Most of the Portuguese population suddenly fled from these countries. The movement happened more rapidly and dramatically in the case of Angola because of the armed clashes among liberation movements with the support of foreign armies. Both the MPLA in Angola and the Frelimo in Mozambique (and, to a lesser extent, the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde and the MLSTP in São Tomé and Príncipe) encouraged this exodus, under the assumption that most of the settler communities would react against further moves toward the creation of a socialist state, redistribution of wealth, or a centrally planned economy. These radical policies only strengthened the settler communities' feelings against the installation of a black government. In Mozambique, when about 180,000 of the 200,000 Portuguese in the country fled, they spitefully destroyed much of the country's infrastructure before they left.

The PAIGC declared the independence of Guinea-Bissau on September 24, 1973. Guinea-Bissau would be wracked by civil war until the end of the century. On June 25, 1975, Portugal formally surrendered power in Mozambique. While the country had fewer internal ethnic conflicts than Angola, it also faced danger in the form of white-dominated neighboring Rhodesia. Many former Portuguese colonists from Mozambique now living in Rhodesia supported the terrorist Mozambique National Resistance (Renamo). Fighting between Frelimo and Renamo shook Mozambique until a 1992 peace settlement. SãoTomé and Príncipe achieved independence on July 12, 1975. The country subsequently enjoyed peace, democracy, and multiparty elections. Angola achieved formal independence on November 11, 1975. The FNLA had largely collapsed with the MPLA in control of most of the country. UNITA retreated to rural areas in southern and central Angola. Ethnic conflicts continued to ravage the country into the next century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boxer, Charles Ralph. 1963. Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415-1825. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Brüne, Stefan, Joachim Betz, and Winrich Kühne, eds. 1994. Africa and Europe: Relations of Two Continents in Transition. Münster, Germany: Lit.

Duffy, James. 1968. Portuguese Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ferreira, Eduardo de Sousa. 1974. Portuguese Colonialism in >Africa: The End of an Era. Paris: Unesco Press.

Macqueen, Norrie. 1997. The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire. London: Longman.

Newitt, Malyn. 1981. Portugal in Africa: The Last Hundred Years. London: Longman.

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Page 43 Portugal is noted as the first modern European country to have large numbers of black slaves. As one of the major sea powers of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, Portugal also shipped and sold large numbers of African slaves to other parts of the world.

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Portugal: Colonies and Empire

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Slavery and slave ownership played an important role in most areas of the Portuguese overseas empire, from its beginnings in the fifteenth century to the official abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the nineteenth century. On the economic level slaves were sources of profit and labor; on the social level they helped to define the owners' social status, prestige, and power.

Some Portuguese outposts and colonies focused primarily on export and reexport of slaves. The crown trading outposts in West Africa, the settlers of Cape Verde Islands, and the Portuguese traders in Kongo and Angola supplied the Atlantic slave trade, whereas Mozambique exported slaves throughout the Indian Ocean, Southeastasia, and East Asia and to Brazil in the nineteenth century. Most slaves were obtained through trade, except for those coming from Portuguese holdings in North Africa, who were often prisoners of war or victims of Portuguese raids. The same was true, to some degree, of slaves acquired in West Central Africa.

The export and reexport of slaves created elaborate infrastructures and a demand for services that involved not only Portuguese expatriates but also a complex network of Luso-African and African agents and independent traders, who themselves used slaves. The labor demands created by the necessity to transport, house, and feed the transiting slaves on the one hand, and to cater to the needs of the colonial settlers and trading personnel on the other, resulted in the rapid growth of resident slave populations in all slave-exporting outposts. Slaves came to outnumber free residents by a factor of ten and more, except in the North African locations, where the chronic hostilities demanded the prevalence of a free soldiery of Portuguese origin.

Portuguese insular societies in the African Atlantic region, particularly the main islands of the Cape Verde archipelago and São Tomé and Príncipe, became dependent on slaves from the very beginning, in terms of both the domestic economy and the export trade. São Tomé, in addition to its supplier role in the Atlantic slave trade, became a heavy consumer of slave labor in the sixteenth century because of its booming sugar plantations. In the seventeenth century, competition from Brazilian sugar undermined the São Tomé economy but not its dependence on slavery.

Unlike the islands in the tropical African Atlantic, the temperate Madeiras and Azores did not develop a lasting dependence on slavery. The slave population of the Azores was insignificant and derived primarily from the Canaries and North Africa. The Madeiras also showed a pronounced preference for slaves from these two nearby areas, although Madeira, during its sugar boom in the late fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth century, imported slaves from sub-Saharan Africa as well. Madeira's sugar production was exceptional for the period in that it did not rely heavily on slave labor. Most Madeiran slaves were employed in urban settings as domestic servants. As in Portugal, slave ownership declined in Madeira in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in favor of wage labor.

The most important slave-importing parts of the Portuguese overseas empire were Brazil and the Asian outposts. Of the two areas, Brazil was by far the more significant player as a result of the essential productive role slaves played in its plantation and mining economy. While enslaved native people filled some of the labor needs of Portuguese settlers in Brazil until 1570 or so, the massively growing sugar plantations--and in the eighteenth century the gold and diamond mines of the interior--created a voracious demand for imported slave labor, drawn largely from Angola. Brazil absorbed more than 40 percent of the ten million African slaves who crossed the Atlantic in the four centuries of the slave trade's duration and 60 percent in the nineteenth century, when it was the main American purchaser of slaves. African slaves were the defining factor in the demographic makeup of colonial Brazil, and slavery was one of the key institutions that shaped it.

In the Indian Ocean basin slaves were important both as a commodity in Luso-Asian trade and as a source of labor in Portuguese outposts. The Portuguese temporarily stationed or permanently settled in Asia possessed large numbers of slaves. The households of the rich and powerful were served by hundreds of slaves, and even the moderately well-off could afford to own dozens of Africans and Asians. These slaves performed primarily domestic and social tasks, and their backgrounds showed much greater racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity than in other parts of the Portuguese seaborne empire.

Slavery played three distinct but interconnected roles in the Portuguese overseas empire: it was a significant source of commercial profits, a key source of labor, and one of the sources of social power. Where the three functions were closely integrated, slavery proved to be very enduring--this was particularly true in West Central Africa and Brazil. The acquisition, transport, and employment of slaves continued to provide one of the principal links among Portugal's far-flung colonial territories until well into the nineteenth century. Even after the abolition of most slaving in the 1850s, there remained a pervasive sense of Portuguese cultural--if not also racial--superiority. In the modern Portuguese empire wealth and power remained largely in the hands of the heirs of the masters. Slavery and slave trade thus left a deep-rooted legacy.

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Slavery and slave ownership played an important role in most areas of the Portuguese overseas empire, from its beginnings in the fifteenth century to the official abolition of slavery and the slave trade in the nineteenth century. On the economic level slaves were sources of profit and labor; on the social level they helped to define the owners' social status, prestige, and power.

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Reagan Administrations

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Following a military coup in Portugal in April 1974, the ruling junta agreed to grant independence to Angola, a Portuguese colony. Three anti-Portuguese movements had been vying for power in the southwest African nation: the Marxist Popular Liberation Movement of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola or MPLA), led by Antonio Agostinho Neto; the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola or FNLA), headed by Holden Roberto; and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola or UNITA), founded by Jonas Savimbi. Different foreign powers supported each movement. The Soviets and Cubans backed the MPLA, while the Americans, South Africans, Chinese, and Zaireans supported the FNLA and, to a lesser extent, UNITA. When Angola became independent on 11 November 1975, the country was divided among the three movements, with the MPLA controlling the capital, Luanda.

The United States refused to recognize the MPLA government, although many African leaders did. Congress passed the Clark Amendment (1975), which prohibited the Ford administration from arming any faction in Angola. President Jimmy Carter continued Gerald R. Ford's policy of not recognizing the MPLA government, but distanced himself from active support of the FNLA-UNITA anti-MPLA front. Carter, who emphasized human rights in his foreign policy, was uncomfortable with the support UNITA received from the apartheid regime in South Africa. President Ronald Reagan's administration renewed U.S. involvement in Angola. The major reason for this move was the presence of about twenty thousand Cuban troops, who were fighting with the MPLA against UNITA. In 1985 the administration persuaded Congress to repeal the Clark Amendment, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began to supply UNITA with large quantities of advanced weaponry. In 1986 Reagan received Savimbi in the White House, treating him like a head of state.

The rise of Mikhail Gorbachev to power in Russia in 1985 and the relaxation of the Cold War led the United States to support a package deal for southwest Africa: Cuban troops would be withdrawn from Angola in exchange for a removal of South African soldiers and the granting of independence to Namibia. Withdrawal of foreign troops from Angola began in 1989; Namibia became independent in 1990; and the United States recognized the MPLA in 1993, after that government, now led by Jose Eduardo dos Santos (Neto had died in September 1979), won an internationally monitored election in September 1992.

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The 1974 coup in Portugal also led to the independence, on 25 June 1975, of another Portuguese colony, Mozambique. The government of this newly independent state was formed by leaders of the Left-leaning Mozambique Liberation Front (Frente da Libertação de Moçambique or FRELIMO), headed by Samora Moisés Machel. Prior to and after independence, FRELIMO was engaged in a bitter fight with the right-wing movement Mozambique National Resistance Movement (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana or RENAMO), which was supported by the apartheid regime of South Africa and the white minority administration of Ian Smith of Rhodesia. The United States recognized the FRELIMO government and even provided economic assistance, but in 1977 Congress stopped the aid program, accusing FRELIMO of violating human rights in its fight against RENAMO. Mozambique turned to the Soviet Union for economic and military support, as relations with the United States deteriorated. The United States, worried about Soviet and Cuban inroads in Angola, and fearful of further expansion of Soviet influence on the continent, began, indirectly, to support RENAMO in its war against FRELIMO. In 1985, when the Clark Amendment, which prohibited U.S. military aid to the Angolan factions, was repealed, some in Congress tried to have the administration increase its involvement in Mozambique as well. By that time, however, the Reagan administration was already working on improving relations with the Mozambique government, leading Congress, in April 1984, to lift the 1977 embargo on aid to Mozambique.

Viewpoint: Yes. Reagan administration policies in Angola and Mozambique successfully blocked the spread of communism in southern Africa

In January 1981, when Ronald Reagan assumed the U.S. presidency, the noncommunist world faced many challenges in its attempts to resist communist expansionism. This situation was especially true in the Third World, where the Soviet Union and its allies intervened in local and internal conflicts to promote Marxist, or at least anti-Western and anti-American, political movements. Africa was fertile ground for Soviet attempts at aggrandizement. Growing civil strife across the continent created discernible opportunities for Soviet diplomacy, and by the mid 1970s thousands of Soviet military advisers, tens of thousands of Cuban combat troops, and tremendous amounts of military and economic aid were pouring into Africa.

The situation in the former Portuguese colonies in southern Africa was especially tense. Having been granted their independence from Lisbon in 1974, both Angola and Mozambique were divided by factional conflicts aggravated by Cold War tensions. In 1975 U.S. aid to Jonas Savimbi's anticommunist National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola or UNITA) had enabled him to maintain viable resistance to the pro-Soviet communist government of his country. Aid to anti-Soviet forces in Mozambique was also under serious consideration. Before more decisive steps in promoting noncommunist resistance could be taken, existing U.S. policies had to overcome serious domestic challenges. Many proponents of détente, a policy of relaxed diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, argued that resisting communist expansion in the Third World endangered this arrangement, while others feared that a continued pattern of economic aid would lead to the commitment of U.S. troops far from home in another Vietnam-like war. Just as Congress had cut funding to the beleaguered government of South Vietnam after the United States withdrew from that country in 1973, so too did it pass the Clark Amendment (1975) to cut funding to Savimbi's anticommunist movement in Angola.

Reagan was firmly resolved to reverse the advance of international communism. Indeed, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (December 1979) had already spelled out the diplomatic intentions of Moscow clearly to policymakers of the Carter administration, and fewer of them placed stock in détente as a viable option. The second round of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) signed in the summer of 1979 remained unratified by the U.S. Senate. Over the course of 1980, Carter initiated a defense buildup that increased military spending and emphasized earlier administration decisions to reinforce American conventional and strategic forces around the world. The administration initiated what turned out to be long-term U.S. support for the Islamic resistance fighters (mujahideen) in Afghanistan.

Reagan determined to follow these measures, but found himself constrained in the implementation of "roll back" policies against the expansion of the Soviet Union. Although Carter had dramatically increased military spending during his last years in office, the U.S. military remained relatively weak compared to what it had been. Reagan appointed his close friend and political associate Caspar W. Weinberger, known for his administrative efficiency, as secretary of defense to facilitate the reconstruction of U.S. conventional forces and raise morale in the armed forces. Despite Reagan's bullishly anticommunist

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rhetoric and publicly stated view of the Vietnam War as "a noble cause," many within the military and foreign-affairs establishment were still plagued with fears that large-scale American involvement overseas would engineer another expensive, wasteful, and ultimately futile conflict such as the one in Vietnam, especially because of the poor state of the military.

For these reasons the Reagan administration waged its war with communism through a variety of means designed to be effective, yet fiscally and militarily prudent. As the conventional military was recovering in quantitative and qualitative terms, Reagan placed greater emphasis on relatively less expensive nuclear deterrence. By 1983 the administration had realized plans of the Carter administration to deploy Pershing II cruise missiles in Western Europe, and in March of that year Reagan announced that the United States would develop a space-based antiballistic missile defense system, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Through diplomatic channels the administration tried hard to break off or minimize the détente-era commercial relationships from which the Soviet Union had benefited economically and technologically. Dissident movements in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union also received American support.

When it came to mounting resistance to Soviet expansion in the Third World, however, the Reagan administration initiated support to noncommunist governments and resistance movements in what were called "low-intensity conflicts" (LICs). While it avoided direct commitments of U.S. troops, a combination of financial support and American-led covert operations enabled many anticommunist movements to fight against Soviet-supported governments and organizations, as well as to challenge the ability of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) to remain competitive as a superpower. Though ultimately successful in rolling back communist influence in the Third World, while condemning the Soviet Union to economic ruin on a wide and impressive scale, Reagan's policies suffered from serious domestic criticism and political opposition. A major scandal, the Iran-Contra affair, resulted from attempts by administration officials to find legal means of skirting congressionally imposed restrictions on American aid to the "contra" resistance fighters in Nicaragua.

When the Reagan administration formulated policy for Angola and Mozambique, political opposition became more pronounced. Earlier American involvement in Angola, in particular, prejudiced many legislators against either the renewal of aid to Savimbi or an extension of U.S. involvement in Mozambique. Despite repeated administration requests, Congress refused to repeal the Clark Amendment, which had outlawed aid to Savimbi, until late 1985. In the meantime, Reagan's commitment to fighting communism in Angola never flagged, and the president made repeated positive references to Page 4 the rebel cause. Rather than violate congressional restrictions, the administration funneled a great deal of support to the rebel leader through South Africa, which at times intervened directly in the conflict. In addition to direct support they were already receiving from Johannesburg, Angolan rebels now received U.S. supplies and funding that was in a purely technical sense intended for the South African army. Additional financial support to Savimbi was garnered through the close relationship of the Reagan administration with Saudi Arabia. In addition to matching U.S. funding to the mujahideen in Afghanistan, the Saudi monarchy willingly agreed to contribute funds to UNITA.

By the time the Clark Amendment was repealed, the situation in Angola had changed dramatically. Through indirect U.S. support and direct aid from its allies, Savimbi's forces had become a credible political force. After direct U.S. military aid was reinstated in November of 1985, Savimbi became still stronger and forced the communist sponsors of the Angolan regime to commit even greater resources for its defense. In broader geopolitical terms, Soviet power was on the wane and Premier Mikhail Gorbachev began to pursue policies designed to reduce the external security requirements and military expenditures of Moscow. In 1986 Gorbachev first began talking about withdrawing from Afghanistan. For Angola this development was especially important because Soviet economic support for Fidel Castro's regime in Cuba began to decline, and the ability of Havana to maintain its presence in Africa came into serious question even as Castro insisted that it needed to be larger. By December 1988, as the U.S. administration came to favor better relations with the declining U.S.S.R., Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester A. Crocker successfully negotiated a quid pro quo over Angola that established a schedule for the withdrawal of Cuban and South African troops from the country by 1991 and laid the groundwork for an agreement between Washington and Moscow to cut aid to their respective partisans after the Cubans were gone. Although the coalition government that Savimbi, acting on American encouragement, entered into ultimately degenerated into a renewed civil war, the Soviet and Cuban influence disappeared altogether. Had the Reagan administration ignored Savimbi's movement or allowed it to be crushed, it is conceivable that neither the negotiation of Cuban withdrawal nor the increased drain on the resources of the communist world would have been achieved.

An examination of the case of Mozambique, much more subtle than that of Angola, reveals a highly nuanced and well-considered policy-making process that also enjoyed ultimate success. Despite many critiques that suggest the Reagan administration haphazardly labeled any government or political movement interested in social or political reform as a stooge of Soviet imperialism, Reagan's approach to Mozambique reveals that this was not necessarily the truth of the matter. While the Marxist movements against which the Reagan doctrine was applied had rather clear connections to the communist world, there were several cases where the administration pursued improved relations with communist governments when it was in its interest to do so.

The development of the U.S. relationship with China in the early 1980s is an excellent case in point, for the visit of Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to the United States in 1982 presaged a period of favorable relations between the two countries that built on Richard M. Nixon's idea, stillborn in the détente era, of bringing communist China into a strategic relationship based on mutual antagonism toward the Soviet Union. The situation in Mozambique was not at all dissimilar. Although the postindependence government had fallen into the hands of the nominally Marxist president Samora Moisés Machel, there was evidence that his regime was not especially close to Moscow.

Reagan administration officials believed that the security of southeast Africa could best be ensured not by toppling Machel through an American-supported guerrilla struggle but by cultivating him diplomatically. It was also significant that apart from the relatively weak South African-supported Mozambique National Resistance (Resistência Nacional Moçamhicana or RENAMO) there was no other substantial anti-government resistance movement of any consequence operating within Mozambique. From a strategic perspective, both the ambivalence of Machel's regime toward the Soviet Union and its relative internal stability (compared with countries such as Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Angola, which were all consumed by open civil conflict) precluded any serious commitment of troops from the Soviet Union or Cuba, though Machel's government did receive some aid from the Soviets.

Reagan's strategy in this case was to gravitate Mozambique toward the United States by settling the internal conflict. Although members of the right wing of the Reagan administration continued to call as late as 1987 for a low-intensity conflict against Mozambique, no such activity was taken directly or indirectly by the United States, and Mozambique posed no threat to U.S. security interests in Africa. Partly in response to American diplomatic encouragement, South

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U.S. POLICY IN MOZAMBIQUE

At a 24 June 1987 session of a U.S. Senate subcommittee, chaired by Senator Paul M. Simon (D-lliinois), Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester A. Crocker spoke about U.S. policy in Mozambique:

No country in southern Africa has worked more consistently than Mozambique with the United States to further the cause of peace and stability in southern Africa. Farther afield, Mozambique no longer votes with the USSR in the United Nations on such international questions of overriding importance to Moscow as Afghanistan and Kampuchea. In short, Mozambique has over the past 5 years evolved a more independent, nonaligned foreign policy course that has distanced it from Moscow....

Our skepticism about RENAMO has sometimes been incorrectly portrayed as U.S. Government advocacy of a military solution to Mozambique's problems. I welcome the opportunity to refute this myth and reaffirm our consistent conviction, in Mozambique as elsewhere in southern Africa, that military conflict cannot solve political problems. Mozambique's pressing human and economic problems cannot be solved as long as the devastation of civil strife continues. It is the policy of the United States to use whatever influence is available to us, as we do everywhere in the region, to encourage an end to hostilities and peaceful solution of conflicts.

The United States has in the past, when circumstances were propitious for doing so, promoted contact between the Government of Mozambique and RENAMO. For example, we did so in connection with negotiations between them that followed the conclusion of the Nkomati Accord between Mozambique and South Africa. Should further opportunities arise for us to play a similar role in ending hostilities between the government and the insurgents in Mozambique, we will not hesitate to undertake that role. We must, nonetheless, realize that Mozambicans themselves must be the primary architects of a peaceful future for their country....

The fate of Mozambique is a critical issue for all of independent southern Africa and for U.S. interests in that key region. Even a quick look at a map of the region indicates why this is so. The road, rail, and pipeline corridors through Mozambique represent virtually the only transport egress for southern African countries that is not dominated by South Africa. All the independent countries of southern Africa, including democratic Botswana and staunchly pro-Western Malawi and Zaire have a vital stake in keeping those transport links open and in preventing the regional instability that would surely follow their closure by violent means. Mozambique is thus the key policy question by which southern Africans judge the intentions of the United States and other foreign countries toward the region.

Because of Mozambique's key position, the success of our efforts to promote peace and stability in southern Africa depend importantly on how we handle the critical issue of relations with that embattled country. The policy of the Reagan administration has helped to bolster a conscious decision by the Government of Mozambique to reduce its dependence on Moscow and a move toward genuine nonalignment and improved relations with the West. In doing so, we have reduced Soviet influence in southern Africa and advanced prospects for regional peace and stability. This successful course has the support of our Allies and our African partners and had placed the Soviets squarely on the defensive.

Source: "U.S. Policy Toward Mozambique," U.S. Department of State, American Foreign Policy: Current Documents 1987 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), pp. 652-653.

Africa and Mozambique concluded the Nkotami Accord (March 1984), which provided for an end to South African support for RENAMO in exchange for the expulsion of exiled African National Congress (ANC) militants who were operating from Mozambique. Although the two countries continued to distrust one another, particularly after Machel's death in a mysterious plane crash over South African territory in October 1986, the declining fortunes of Soviet imperialism in any case reduced the internal situation in Mozambique to a civil conflict untouched by Cold War antagonism.

In both Angola and Mozambique the Reagan administration pursued the correct policies. Indirect support to Savimbi's forces, replacing direct aid that had been cut off in 1976 by a Vietnam-traumatized Congress, Page 6 enabled him to pose a credible challenge to communist expansion in southern Africa and to tie down Cuban and Soviet resources that could have been deployed elsewhere or husbanded to alleviate domestic economic problems. Despite renewed Cuban attempts to prop up the Marxist Angolan government after direct U.S. aid was resumed in 1985, Savimbi's military successes, impossible without this assistance, gave him the leverage he needed to force his opponents to negotiate and compel the Cubans to leave his country. In Mozambique the more subtle strategy of using diplomatic means to encourage a settlement of its internal conflict and bring an end to South African intervention succeeded in keeping Machel's government away from the Soviet Union. By resisting the recommendation of some of his advisers to support RENAMO, either directly or through South Africa, Reagan deftly avoided the unnecessary alienation of a regime that could be won over through other means. Toward both countries the right policy was adopted.

-PAUL DU QUENOY, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

Viewpoint: No. Reagan policies in Angola and Mozambique prolonged internecine warfare and helped South Africa maintain its apartheid-based regime

Reagan administration policies toward the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique reflected the general policy of the United States in the 1980s: to win without betting. Both African countries had fought long and fratricidal wars of independence-which came less because of the success of the rebels themselves than as a consequence of a rebellion in Portugal. The new government in Portugal promptly abandoned the struggle for empire and left its former territories to their own devices. In Mozambique that meant a debilitating low-grade struggle for power between the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frente da Libertação de Moçambique or FRELIMO) and Mozambique National Resistance (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana or RENAMO). To describe them in "tribal" terms is tempting but incomplete. In addition to the ethnic differences between them, the first incorporated an official Marxist/Leninist ideology that gained it minimal support from the Soviet bloc; the second tended to be against anything FRELIMO was for and drew corresponding assistance from white South Africa.

The new government in Angola was formed by the Marxist Popular Liberation Movement of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola or MPLA), in principle at least a multiethnic party with a Marxist/Leninist cast. There the "outsiders" were the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola or FNLA) and National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola or UNITA). Both were regional/ethnic organizations with strong anticommunist rhetoric that during the 1970s earned them significant assistance from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and from a South Africa increasingly concerned with establishing a security zone on its northern frontier. The MPLA was correspondingly able to draw on increasing amounts of military and economic aid from the Soviet Union and Cuba, the latter state even committing ground forces in support of its cause. It scarcely required advanced credentials in international relations to conclude that neither Angola nor Mozambique were promising venues for external involvement. In 1976 the U.S. Senate passed legislation outlawing any funding for Angola; RENAMO never succeeded in attracting significant U.S. attention, even on the far anticommunist right.

There matters more or less stood when the administration of Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981. Its particular concern was less with Angola and Mozambique than with stabilizing the security of a South Africa whose preservation was defined as a major U.S. strategic interest. That policy, it must be emphasized, did not mean approving existing patterns of race relations. Apartheid, however, represented in good part the white South African response to a legitimate external threat. Angola, the Reagan administration argument went, was for practical purposes a client of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) and Cuba. Let Cuba withdraw from Angola, and South Africa would be in position to abandon its occupation of Namibia, a strategic glacis the Pretoria government had defined as indispensable to its security under current circumstances. Domestic changes could be left until later.

Mozambique escaped the worst consequences of the Reagan years. RENAMO never developed a strong enough American lobby to get its own aid programs. If anything, Reagan's administration tilted a bit in the direction of FRELIMO in the mid 1980s-again not enough to commit enough resources to destabilize a slowly emerging domestic balance

Things were different further west. The U.S. policy shift was welcome both in South Africa and to UNITA, whose leader, Jonas Savimbi, had spent years canvassing American conservatives for support. The fighting in southern Angola and Page 7 northern Namibia had never really stopped. In the early 1980s it escalated sharply, with UNITA troops backed by small, high-tech South African forces gaining significant local successes.

UNITA was never strong enough to conquer enough of Angola to form even a shadow government. South Africa had a vested interest in seeing that UNITA never became that strong: its alliance with Savimbi was recognized on both sides as a marriage of immediate convenience. Then in December 1983 South Africa launched an independent operation to capture the Angolan capital of Luanda and dispose entirely of an MPLA that seemed increasingly vulnerable. The Soviet Union, kept informed of troop movements by its space satellites, responded decisively: an invasion would lead to a direct confrontation with Cuban forces and a fresh influx of Soviet arms and equipment.

The South African government had marketed its Angolan conflict as "war on the cheap." No significant domestic support existed for an all-out engagement with Fidel Castro's mechanized forces. UNITA soldiers were not up to it; South African expeditionary forces were configured for war on an altogether more modest scale. South Africa backed down as the United States in 1984 brokered talks that led to unilateral South African withdrawal from Angolan territory.

The Cubans, however, remained. The Reagan administration was unwilling, especially with a presidential election coming up, to engage itself in mediating a more comprehensive settlement. Nor, on the other side of the issue, was it willing to restrain South Africa from resuming the conflict, albeit on a smaller scale, within a year. By now, however, the war was becoming increasingly brutal-a fact Savimbi managed to camouflage sufficiently for Reagan to convince Congress to repeal the ban on military aid to Angola. However, UNITA, and not the legitimate government, benefited from the new legislation. MPLA struck back, invading UNITA-controlled territory in 1987 in the largest-scale fighting of the war to date. Savimbi's men held-just barely, with the aid of South African ground and air forces and supplies of American Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. UNITA and South Africa agreed on the necessity of counterattack. At the end of the year the allies drove for the MPLA stronghold of Cuito Canavale. They were met by more than fifty thousand Cubans, whose well-planned and neatly timed flank march cut South African supply lines and forced them to retreat.

By that time the status of South Africa as an international pariah was becoming embarrassing even to the Reagan administration, which was willing enough to twist Pretoria's arm to obtain a cease-fire. That proved unnecessary as South Africa was already cutting its losses. So was Castro. Apart from the increasing casualties suffered by his expeditionary force for a cause anything but popular in Cuba, the U.S.S.R. was no longer as generous as it once had been with direct and indirect subsidies. In December 1988 an agreement, signed in New York, provided for a series of phased withdrawals to take South Africa out of Namibia in 1989 and remove the Cubans from Angola by May 1991.

Both parties met their deadlines. That did not mean an end to U.S. involvement. Reagan's successor, George Bush, continued to provide UNITA with enough military aid to keep the war going, though on a reduced scale, until the middle of the decade. The Cold War was long over; a fundamental change of government in South Africa rendered the regional conflict moot; and the Angolan cease-fire of 1994 left another African burnout case, a "failed state" whose failure owed much to itself, much to its immediate neighbors- and much to a United States that did little or nothing to manage the behavior of its ostensible clients. Instead the United States committed just enough resources and influence during the Reagan years to sustain a broken-backed war, then relegated southern Africa to its historic place in U.S. diplomatic priorities-on the bottom.

DENNIS SHOWALTER, COLORADO COLLEGE

References

Chester A. Crocker, High Noon in Southern Africa: Making Peace in a Rough Neighborhood (New York: Norton, 1992);

Raymond L. Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1994);

Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999);

Zaki Laïdi, The Superpowers and Africa: The Constraints of a Rivalry, 1960-1990, translated by Patricia Baudoin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990);

George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years As Secretary of State (New York: Scribners, 1993);

Richard C. Thornton, The Nixon-Kissinger Years: Reshaping America's Foreign Policy (New York: Paragon House, 1989).

Source Citation

Gale Document Number: GALE|CX2876600010

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Africa: Were the Reagan Administration Policies in Angola and Mozambique Effective?

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Page 1 Following a military coup in Portugal in April 1974, the ruling junta agreed to grant independence to Angola, a Portuguese colony.

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Consolidation of Portuguese control

By the 1880s the Portuguese controlled trade and collected tribute in coastal enclaves from Ibo in the north to Lourenço Marques in the south, but their ability to control events outside those areas was quite limited; that situation, however, was about to change. Increasingly, as neighbours of the Gaza state were raided periodically for refusing to pay tribute, they began to ally themselves with the Portuguese, which the Portuguese both encouraged and exploited. In the 1890s a coalition of Portuguese troops and African armies marched against the state. When the Gaza leadership was finally defeated in 1897, southern Mozambique passed into Portuguese control. Two decades later the Portuguese, who had mounted dozens of military campaigns by that time, directly controlled the Barue of central Mozambique, the African Portuguese of the Zambezi and Maganja da Costa prazos, the Yao of Mataka, the northern Makua chiefdoms, and the northern coastal sheikhdoms of Angoche.

Trade in ivory, gold, slaves, rubber, oilseeds, and a broad range of European goods continued throughout the 19th century. However, European economic interest and influence in the region changed rapidly by mid-century in response to developments in both Africa and Europe. African labour was needed on the sugar plantations and at South African ports and mines after diamonds (at Kimberley in the 1860s) and gold (at Witwatersrand in the 1880s) were discovered. Because of the need for labour, Europeans were determined to gain greater control over tracts of land and their inhabitants at the expense of African leadership. The combined struggle for access to mineral-bearing lands and the labour force to work them fueled the so-called "scramble" in Southern Africa.

Portugal claimed a swath of territory from present-day Mozambique to Angola. Although the Germans, whose territory bordered Mozambique to the north, accepted the Portuguese claims-establishing Mozambique's northern boundary- British claims to the region contradicted those of Portugal, leading to prolonged negotiations. However, the Portuguese crown was heavily in debt to British financiers, and the small country was no match for Britain's military; in 1891 Portugal was forced to accept Britain's definition of Mozambique's western and southern boundaries.

Portugal had little hope of developing the entire region on its own, and so it turned to its familiar colonial strategy of leasing large tracts of land to private companies. Chartered companies were granted the privilege of exploiting the lands and peoples of specific areas in exchange for an obligation to develop agriculture, communications, social services, and trade. The Mozambique Company, the Niassa Company, and the Zambezia Company were all established in this manner in the 1890s. Any economic development and investment in infrastructure was related directly to company interests and usually undertaken at African expense. Sugar, copra, and sisal plantations depending largely on conscripted labour and railways linking Beira with the British South Africa Company territory and British Nyasaland to the west and northwest were all developed and built at a high cost to the African workforce.

The Portuguese government eventually terminated the charters of the major concession companies, bringing all of Mozambique under direct Portuguese rule. Between the 1890s and the 1930s, Portuguese rule in Mozambique was characterized by the exploitation of African people and resources by private parties, whether they were foreign company shareholders or colonial bureaucrats and settlers. The most egregious colonial abuses-forced labour, forced crop cultivation, high taxes, low wages, confiscation of the most promising lands-occurred regardless of which group of Europeans was in control.

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Mozambique - Mozambique - Colonial Mozambique: By the 1880s the Portuguese controlled trade and collected tribute in coastal enclaves from Ibo in the north to Lourenço Marques in the south, but their ability to control events outside those areas was quite limited; that situation, however, was about to change.

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Allen Isaacman Colonial Mozambique an Inside View The Life History of Ra Honwana* Social scientists groping with the impulse to write history from the bottom up have turned increasingly to autobiography In doing so they have explicitly challenged the assumption held by most students of auto biography that this genre belongs exclusively to men of letters Recent work by feminist scholars and analysts of working-class culture have challenged this assumption on the ground that it uncritically reproduces the prevailing gender and class biases in the literature Passerini fthcg. Maynes fthcg. Samuel 1981 Vincent 1981 According to Maynes fthcg. 4) feminist scholar and social historian autobiographies can emerge from variety of impulse and follow variety of models and are not just the literary expression of the Similarly personal narratives written by the colonized are both an invaluable form of intellectual discourse and an important source of social history Until recently however this genre has not figured prominently in African historiography except in the more traditional mode depicting the lives of the great and the powerful To be sure there are works such as An Ill-Fated People Vambe 1972 and The Autobiography of an Unknown South African Nokgatle 1971 which testify to the hope dignity and struggle of the oppressed but they are few in number Although autobiography as genre has not figured prominently in African historiography the void has been partially filled by recent work in the field of life history Life histories are oral narratives which represent an extensive record of life told to and recorded by another who then edits and writes the life as though it were auto-

would like to thank Susan Geiger Barbara Isaacman Barbara Laslett Jeanne Penvenne Charles Pike George Roberts Anton Rosenthal Salim Wanambisi and Paulo Zucula for the valuable criticism which they made of an earlier draft of this article Penvenne also provided important insights and data derived from her own research Thanks also to David Cohen Bogu mi Jewsiewicki and Phillip Porter for providing valuable bibliographical information

Cahiers tudes africaines îä XX II 1- 1988 pp S9 88

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Colonial Mozambique, an Inside View : The Life History of Raúl Honwana - Persée

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Allen Isaacman Colonial Mozambique an Inside View The Life History of Ra Honwana* Social scientists groping with the impulse to write history from the bottom up have turned increasingly to autobiography In doing so they have explicitly challenged the assumption held by most students of auto biography that this genre belongs exclusively to men of letters Recent work by feminist scholars and analysts of working-class culture have challenged this assumption on the ground that it uncritically reproduces the prevailing gender and class biases in the literature Passerini fthcg.

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Journal Information

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Colonialism, Socialism and Destabilization in Mozambique on JSTOR

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Page 179

THE CONFLICT

Mozambique was a colony of Portugal for more than two hundred years. Following Mozambique's independence from Portugal in the early 1970s, the white minority governments of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and South Africa, began to fund and direct a campaign to destabilize Mozambique. Brutal warfare and massive destruction of the infrastructure left Mozambique impoverished.

Political

Rhodesia and South Africa did not want successful black governments in neighboring states, because it undermined their claim that Africans could not govern themselves.

FRELIMO turned to the Soviet Union for funding following independence, declaring itself to be a socialist organization.

Some Western nations, including the Untied States, provided funding for the South African-sponsored RENAMO, as a way of fighting the socialist FRELIMO.

M odern Mozambique has been shaped by many forces, chief among these being its thirty-year war. The war began in 1962 and ended in 1992. Aspects of the conflict continue to impact Mozambique. Throughout the country, more than ten million antipersonnel mines make it risky to farm the large, fertile tracts of land. The mines continue to kill and maim long after the battles of the Cold War have ended. In addition, man-made famine, resulting in thousands of deaths, is a very recent memory. The foreign-sponsored "civil war" is officially over, but its effects linger on the Mozambican people, who struggle to move beyond the violent past and carve out a future.

H ISTORICAL B ACKGROUND

Colonial Rule

Portugal was Africa's longest-standing European colonial power. Prior to their arrival on the continent, Arab princes had established minor colonial empires along East Africa's coast stretching from Mogadishu in Somalia, down to Sofala in Mozambique. When Vasco da Gama circumnavigated Africa on his way to India (1497-98), he was surprised to discover well-ordered Swahili towns with merchants who regularly held fairs to secure gold and ivory from African kings in the interior. Chinese and Arab ships filled these ports, and merchants from India were common visitors. Portugal supplanted the Arabs and established its rule over this lucrative trade in order to use African gold and ivory to buy spices in Goa, India, which they then sold in Europe.

Muslims invaded Spain and Portugal in 700 A. D. They ruled these areas until the early 1400s, when Portugal attacked the Muslims both in Page 180 Europe and in Africa to regain control of its territory. The Portuguese were aware of Christian African kingdoms known as the Lost Kingdom of Prestor John. They circumnavigated Africa to find these kingdoms, enlisting the support of African Christian allies and attacking the Muslims from the rear, as well as through frontal assaults in Europe. The conquest yielded an additional benefit of a shorter trade route to the spices of India and the Far East. Thus, Portugal replaced Mozambique's Arab and Swahili Muslim merchants as local powers.

Portugal established a base at the city of Sofala, Mozambique, as early as 1506. Portugal ruled Mozambique from its Indian Ocean stronghold in Goa, India, until 1752, when it finally set up a Mozambican administration. Portuguese adventurers known as sertanejos, or backwoodsmen, explored the African interior. The sertanejos made contact with the powerful African emperor known as Munhumutapa, who controlled the gold mines in the interior. They befriended him and helped him subdue his enemies. The king of Portugal was subsequently granted land by the Munhumutapa, which was leased to Portuguese settlers for three generations at a time. The leaseholder had rights over the labor of the Africans living on the land as well. The prazero, or leaseholder, was obligated to defend the king's land and to do so, he developed a slave army. Slave soldiers were known as chikunda. They protected mines and trade routes under the command of their Portuguese master.

The Africans produced the food that they consumed; the prazos only produced what was needed, while siphoning resources. No internal market for agriculture developed, since developing large agricultural plantations made no sense without lucrative markets. The prazeros made money by waging war against African chiefs. The prazos captured and sold so many Africans that, eventually, gold mines were forced to shut down for lack of labor. Even military functions were often contracted out to enterprising African chiefs.

The prazeros operated like African chiefs, often marrying local women and creating mestico, mulatto or mixed black and white, children, who inherited their leases. The king of Portugal tried to halt the Africanization of his subjects by decreeing that females of the family would inherit all property exclusively, on condition that they marry a white male. Few white Portuguese males took up the offers of these rich mestico donas, mistresses. Thus, most prazeros ignored the king and married into other prazero families or sought mates from Goa in India. The Europeans became Africanized, though the prazero was meant to introduce Portuguese blood, culture, and values into Mozambique's interior.

Portuguese colonialism produced little economic development. Instead, great emphasis was placed on teaching Africans to speak Portuguese and on converting them to Catholicism. Many Mozambicans converted to Roman Catholicism during the colonial era, yet only thirty percent of Mozambique's population in the late 1990s were Christian; ten percent were Muslim, and sixty percent continued to follow indigenous religions. Portugal defended its colonial legacy by arguing that its policies toward Africans were liberal and enlightened. Portugal claimed that any African who learned its language, accepted its religion, and earned academic degrees would be accepted as an equal of the Portuguese. Africans who thought like, Page 181 behaved like, talked like, and shared Portuguese values and beliefs were known as assimilados. Lack of money, however, often kept Africans from attending schools to learn how to assimilate. Most Africans considered the Portuguese policy a sham or a hoax.

Not surprisingly therefore, at the time of independence in 1975, ninety-five percent of Mozambique's African population was illiterate. There was one black doctor in the entire country, and in a nation that depended on agriculture-an estimated eighty-four percent of Mozambicans are farmers-there was only one black agronomist. More damaging to Portugal's colonial record of African uplift is the fact that out of four thousand university students only forty were African at independence. Most airports, telephone lines, roads, dams, ports, and power lines supported export-oriented industries that primarily profited the tiny Portuguese minority who ruled Mozambique. Not a single railroad or road linked north and south Mozambique. Roads ran east and west and took people and goods from the interior to the sea and then to Portugal or to formerly white-ruled South Africa. No effort was make to link the country internally and to foster national development.

Anti-Colonial Unrest

Anti-colonial unrest began in the 1950s with peaceful protest. After World War II Portugal became a staunch member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual defense organization of Western European nations. Portugal gained membership in NATO despite its being ruled by a fascist government that brutally oppressed both the people of Portugal and the people in Portugal's colonies, including Mozambique. The country tried to hold on to its colonies throughout the 1960s, even after Britain and France granted independence to most of their former African colonies. Peaceful protests and petitions for independence were repeatedly ignored. Mozambique's African nationalists decided that they had to fight for freedom. Failure of peaceful challenge, not ideology, led patriots to launch guerrilla warfare in the 1960s.

Most of the leaders of the independence movement in Mozambique were assimilados. White liberals worked closely with both assimilados and many mestico Mozambicans who looked forward to independence. African resistance in Mozambique was unified, unlike in Angola where three African movements fought one another for control of the government. When unarmed farmers protested Portugal's African agricultural policies they were murdered in cold blood at Mueda in June 1960. Such atrocities were not reported in the international press, but they occurred with increasing frequency. This Portuguese "culture of violence" radicalized young Mozambican Africans. One member of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) was reported by Eduardo Mondlane in The Struggle for Mozambique as saying: "I saw how the colonialists massacred the people at Mueda. That was when I lost my uncle. Our people were unarmed when they began to shoot them. I was determined to never again be unarmed in the face of Portuguese violence."

Portugal's International and State Police (PIDE) infiltrated and destroyed all of the African independence organizations that formed inside of Mozambique between 1940 and 1960. As a result, most of the prominent leaders of Mozambique's independence movements lived outside of the country during the 1960s. Eduardo Mondlane lived in the United States and married an American wife before he and his wife moved to Tanzania. He headed FRELIMO from Tanzania's capital, Dar es Salaam, until a rival faction of FRELIMO killed him with a letter bomb supplied by PIDE. The current president of Mozambique, Joachim Chissano, worked and studied in the United States, as well as in eastern and western Europe. Likewise, Mozambique's first president after independence, Samora Machel, lived in colonial capitals and neighboring independent African nations while struggling to liberate his country.

The Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO)

Mozambique's African émigré population supported independence across Africa throughout the 1960s. Most of Mozambique's exiles were intellectuals who talked of an independent Mozambique. Julius Nyerere of Tanzania gave the émigrés money, housing, arms, training, intelligence support, and encouragement. Nyerere and Mondlane encouraged the three largest Mozambican independence movements to unite, forming FRELIMO in 1962. Within FRELIMO there was considerable debate about objectives and tactics. Mondlane fought to make the movement multiracial, while others wanted a purely African movement. The success with armed struggle in Guinea-Bissau led to a debate over armed struggle versus peaceful change, and incidents such as the massacre at Muede tipped the balance in favor of armed struggle. Some FRELIMO leaders wanted a capitalist independent nation, while others favored socialism. With Mondlane's assassination in 1969 Page 182
and the rise of Samora Machel, FRELIMO committed itself to socialism.

On September 25, 1964, armed struggle exploded at Chai in northern Mozambique, when FRELIMO attacked an isolated Portuguese garrison. Portugal quickly rounded up and arrested over 1,500 FRELIMO insurgents in southern Mozambique, almost destroying the organization. At the same time, Portugal was fighting wars in Guinea-Bissau and Angola. FRELIMO took advantage of Portugal's thinly spread forces to launch attacks on Portuguese forces.

Portugal exploited the fact that most of FRELIMO's leadership was mestico originating in the south, turned the Makua and Makonde ethnic groups there against FRELIMO. Such divide-and-conquer Page 183 tactics worked extremely well. A civil conflict, instigated by PIDE, broke out among Africans, and FRELIMO appeared weak in 1968 and 1970. To win over the African population, FRELIMO soft-peddled its socialist ideology and stopped criticizing African beliefs in witchcraft and other traditional practices; in the past these beliefs would have condemned Africans in FRELIMO-controlled zones to rigorous "re-education" programs. This new approach helped FRELIMO win over African peasants, many of whom FRELIMO's leaders considered to be superstitious and backward. FRELIMO even began to recruit witch-doctors as military commanders because many peasants had faith in the traditional healers and were willing to follow them.

Portugal responded by creating aldeamentos, or protected villages. Africans were rounded up and forced to move into fortified villages guarded by Portuguese soldiers. These villages were designed to stifle FRELIMO recruiting efforts, permit Portugal to provide social and other services to peasants inexpensively, and establish a defense perimeter around Portuguese-controlled areas. Portugal placed sixty thousand soldiers in the field to fight against ten thousand FRELIMO fighters. Of these soldiers, forty thousand were African troops under the command of white and assimilado officers. FRELIMO troops fought a hit-and-run war. They attacked Portuguese troops and African self-defense units. When large rockets, provided by the Soviet Union, were available FRELIMO used these to attack large Portuguese military bases and Portuguese-controlled towns.

FRELIMO pushed its troops further south, eventually threatening Vila Pery District and the white settlers south of the Zambezi. The war came close to Beira and major population centers. Portuguese troops were so thinly spread that they lost their effectiveness and FRELIMO stepped up attacks. They used sympathetic Africans to infiltrate farms, factories, and government installations. Portugal overreacted by destroying peasant villages and forcing people to move into aldeamentos. This led to a dramatic growth in FRELIMO membership in areas that previously had been indifferent.

Independence

The African guerrilla war put enough pressure on Portugal to contribute to the Carnation Revolution (1974-75). Many soldiers in the Portuguese army discovered that the African guerrillas were not demons, terrorists, or villains, but freedom-loving patriots and the Portuguese returned home and struggled against the rulers of Portugal, such as President António de Oliveira Salazar and his successor Marcello Caetano. The soldiers overthrew what they viewed as a common enemy and granted their African "fellow sufferers" their freedom. The guerrilla war was an important catalyst which made independence possible.

The European Community was another factor that contributed to Mozambique's independence. By 1970 Portugal had earned associate status membership in the European organization and was progressing toward full membership. Young Portuguese began directing their ambitions of economic development toward Europe. Youth began to view Portugal's colonies as failed enterprises that should be jettisoned. Moreover, full membership in the European Community demanded that Portugal divest itself of its colonies by granting them independence. High tariff barriers and protected colonial markets were not compatible with membership in the European Community. The vision of Portugal's leader, António de Oliveira Salazar, of an international Portuguese nation in which the colonies became states, died as Portugal integrated its economy with Western industrial nations.

Mozambique was granted independence on June 25, 1975, and Samora Moises Machel became its first president. Machel established a single party state ruled by FRELIMO. Machel was a pragmatist: He adopted socialism to please his patron, Julius Nyerere, of Tanzania. Nyerere had armed, trained, and supported Mozambique's fighters when few had faith in their ability to win their freedom. Machel's socialism also symbolized opposition to the continuation of colonial policy. In addition, Machel believed that to build and maintain modern institutions, such as schools, hospitals, banks, and corporations, that were needed to improve the lives of Mozambique's majority, the government needed to adopt socialism. The reality was that Machel needed money and the West would not fund Mozambique's development. By claiming to be a socialist he hoped to secure this money from the Eastern Bloc. The Eastern Bloc was the group of communist countries allied with the Soviet Union at that time. The Eastern Bloc's military support and the armaments it supplied delighted Machel, but he was disappointed that so little was offered for economic development.

Machel once observed that Britain sent members of its upper and middle classes to settle in and improve many of its colonies and thus British colonies thrived and flourished. These colonists were generally well educated, enterprising, and understood how to build successful businesses. By contrast, Portugal sent its lowest classes to Africa. Page 184 These Europeans often could not read and write themselves, so they did not see why Africans needed education. Moreover, they took not only top jobs, but also semi-skilled and even unskilled jobs, leaving only the lowest types of work for Africans. They were ignorant, wasteful, and often corrupt. Failing to understand or appreciate notions such as efficiency and forward planning, they left a terrible legacy for Mozambique's African majority. Mozambicans were bitter and discontent for good reason. Portugal offered them little beyond back-breaking, underpaid, under-appreciated work that resembled slavery. The African tradition of cadonga, or buying and selling on the thriving black market, was, and remains, a means of creating a second economy that met their needs and allowed them to express their entrepreneurial skills, despite being denied opportunities to become capitalists in the official economy.

Civil War (1972-92)

The second war was a Mozambican version of the Cold War, when the ideological conflict between Western nations and the Soviet Union led to conflict throughout the world. In Africa the Cold War was costly and deadly, as millions died in defense of ideologies that few truly understood. What Mozambicans really wanted was the right to determine their own futures and free themselves from the worst forms of exploitation. Instead, they found themselves ensnared in armies, fighting deadly, dirty "proxy wars." In the United States, Europe, and the former Soviet Union confrontation led to blustering and threats. In Africa and elsewhere, confrontation led to death, destruction of vital infrastructure, and suffering.

Apartheid-legalized racial segregation and separation-was the policy used by an Afrikaner white minority to dominate both the South African English and the African majority. The apartheid regime of South Africa clung to power. It feared that allowing an African regime to thrive next door in Mozambique would undermine its argument that Africans were incapable of self-rule. The Afrikaners therefore attempted to thwart African independence along their borders. When they failed to stop Mozambique's majority from gaining independence, they resorted to a deliberate policy of destabilization to discredit the regime. The main instrument of destabilization was the Mozambique National Resistance (RENAMO).

RENAMO was first created by Ian Smith's white minority rulers in Southern Rhodesia. Robert Mugabe and African freedom fighters used liberated areas within Mozambique as staging grounds for attacks against Ian Smith's white minority regime. Southern Rhodesia's army believed that its best defense was to divide Africans, create internal disputes, suspicion and doubt, destroy their confidence and African unity, and create a civil war that would turn Africans against each other. The Africans overwhelming numerical majority would thus be neutralized and cease to be a threat to continued minority rule in Rhodesia and South Africa. The key to this "dirty little war" was to turn the African peasants against the freedom fighters. After all, it was the peasants who made guerrilla warfare successful by feeding, housing, hiding, and sympathizing with freedom fighters.

In Mozambique, white Rhodesian army intelligence officers-like the Portuguese before them-discovered that FRELIMO sought to modernize agriculture in liberated zones. FRELIMO attacked selected aspects of traditional African culture that they felt kept Africans from advancing. They labeled traditional healers witch-doctors and ridiculed their practices. Many healers were so shamed that they went into hiding for long periods. Anthropologist Christian Gefray argued that FRELIMO alienated other peasants by forcing them to abandon traditional family homesteads and move miles away to live and work on state-owned collective farms. As the war became more violent these state farms were targeted and, therefore, often unsafe. RENAMO recruited among such disaffected peasants. As the civil war grew worse peasant living standards fell and RENAMO's recruitment rose.

The Rhodesian army recruited and trained this discontented, but influential, element. Rhodesia's chief intelligence officer, Ken Flower, claims that he created RENAMO to punish Mozambique for supporting Zimbabwean liberation forces. Zimbabwe was the name given to Southern Rhodesia after its independence. Flower hoped that RENAMO would force FRELIMO to cut off support for Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe. The preferred technique was sabotage. Flower's goal, stated in Martin and Johnson's Destructive Engagement: Southern Africa at War, was,

to disrupt the population and disrupt the economy which really comes under sabotage, to come back with decent recruits at that stage and hit FRELIMO bases they came across. And if they came across ZANLA [Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army] they were to take them on.

From the beginning RENAMO was thus a creation of white and black mercenaries. It was not a movement indigenous to Mozambique, and it lacked an ideology or purpose other than to frustrate Page 185 the legitimate aspirations of black Africans. The leader of RENAMO, Afonso Dhlakama, sanctioned atrocities as a way of undermining the community. RENAMO would sweep through villages, killing the mature men and women and capturing young boys and girls. The children were forced to kill or they would face beatings, starvation, or even execution-they fought to stay alive. These child soldiers became tools of Dhlakama. Drugs were freely distributed to the child troops. Boy soldiers as young as twelve were recruited by force, then made to commit atrocities against their own families. Young girls were sexually exploited. RENAMO leaders used misleading information and outright disinformation to manipulate the children.

RENAMO decimated the country and its people by burning cooperative farms, destroying bridges and railway lines, killing educated doctors and teachers who worked with FRELIMO, and destroying schools, hospitals, and any institution that would advance Mozambicans. Factories were burned to the ground. No attempt was made by RENAMO to build a single bridge, school, hospital, or factory. Its Rhodesian and South African masters wanted to show Mozambican peasants that FRELIMO could neither protect them nor provide needed services. When Robert Mugabe won the war against Ian Smith for Rhodesian (now Zimbabwean) independence, white Rhodesian intelligence officers turned RENAMO over to BOSS, South Africa's intelligence service; the South African Defense Force and its Military Intelligence Department (MID) took over arms supplies and training for RENAMO in 1980. Right-wing elements in the United States and the United Kingdom also provided funding for RENAMO because they did not like FRELIMO's socialist stance and the fact that the Soviet Union financed FRELIMO.

Emboldened by Ronald Reagan's election to president in the United States, RENAMO attacked Nelson Mandela's African National Congress (ANC) offices in Mozambique. Such raids failed to weaken support for FRELIMO or the ANC. With South African and U.S. support, RENAMO's fighting forces grew from one thousand to eight thousand. Since FRELIMO needed railroads to export products and earn money from trade, RENAMO destroyed them. RENAMO destroyed eighteen hundred schools, preventing more than three hundred thousand children from receiving a basic education. RENAMO destroyed one out of every four hospitals and clinics. It looted and vandalized, and forcibly recruited Africans to serve as porters to carry their loot to safe havens in Malawi.

Dhlakama is from the Ndau ethnic group, near Zimbabwe's border. In this area of Mozambique RENAMO was strong and set up "areas of control" where peasants were forcibly resettled to safe areas around RENAMO military bases. Peasants farmed their traditional family homesteads, but they were expected to feed RENAMO troops without compensation. Though Ndau was the language used widely by all tribes in this zone and many of RENAMO's most loyal foot soldiers were Ndau, RENAMO was not a tribal organization. Its leaders came from many different Mozambican ethnic Page 186 groups. RENAMO did not make appeals to new recruits based on ethnic loyalty or identification, rather it offered new recruits opportunities to rob, loot, and make themselves wealthy.

RECENT HISTORY AND THE FUTURE

President Samora Machel and FRELIMO launched a diplomatic initiative. Machel visited British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and Thatcher introduced Machel to U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Reagan was impressed with Machel and subsequently ordered the United States to oppose right-wing efforts within South Africa to overthrow the Mozambican leader. Mozambique, therefore, became an exception to Reagan's "constructive engagement" policy that normally supported the white minority apartheid regime then in power in South Africa and its efforts to influence politics in its surrounding area. Machel and South Africa signed the Nkomati Accord in 1984. Machel pledged to oust ANC militants from Mozambique, and South Africa promised to stop arming, training, and funding RENAMO and destabilizing Mozambique.

Right-wing South African soldiers, however, never intended to honor this agreement. They disagreed with the soft line taken by moderate South African diplomats. Documents uncovered in a raid on Casa Banana revealed what P.W. van der West-huizen, head of MID for the South African military, was reported by James Ciment in Angola and Mozambique: Postcononial Wars in Southern Africa to have told Dhlakama, "We, the military, will continue to give them [RENAMO] support without the consent of our politicians in a massive way so they can win the war." Machel was hoodwinked and humiliated. Nyerere of Tanzania and other African presidents were angry and significantly increased military aid and training to FRELIMO.

Thousands of Tanzanian troops appeared in Mozambique to defend transportation corridors and support FRELIMO. The United States dropped its ban on bilateral aid to helped Machel, who was able to reschedule Mozambique's debt. The United States and the International Monetary Fund made Mozambique adhere to strict regulations. Its currency was devalued and efforts to make consumer goods available in the countryside were curtailed. Peasants wanted more consumer goods in return for producing more crops for consumption and export. As production rose, FRELIMO collected more taxes, which it used to step up military efforts against RENAMO. By 1990 Mozambique was the world's poorest country with a per capita income of only US$80. In comparison, Somalia's per capita income was nearly twice as much. Aid programs that flooded Mozambique with free food undermined peasant farmers and reduced the country's sovereignty by making it dependent on foreign aid. In the midst of the chaos, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), especially aid organizations, moved into Mozambique to help. The NGOs hired the best and brightest people away from FRELIMO by offering higher salaries. Some analysts claimed that Western NGOs were "re-colonizing" Mozambique.

President Machel was killed in a mysterious plane crash in 1986. Joachim Chissano became president and he adhered closely to World Bank and IMF guidelines for Mozambique, resulting in Mozambique achieving the world's highest economic growth rate. On October 4, 1992, President Chissano, the head of FRELIMO, and Afonso Dhlakama, leader of RENAMO, signed a peace accord in Rome, Italy. The treaty was enforced by more than twenty thousand U.N. troops, who insured that all weapons were surrendered to the United Nations, and all armed groups were disbanded within six months. United Nations troops left Mozambique in January of 1995. The country became a model economic state until devastating floods in the late 1990s destroyed years of progress.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Hilary. Mozambique: A War Against the People. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Chan, Stephen, and Moises Vanancio. War and Peace in Mozambique. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

Ciment, James. Angola and Mozambique: Postcononial Wars in Southern Africa. New York: Facts On File, 1997.

Finnegan, W. A Complicated War: the Harrowing of Mozambique. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1992.

Hall, Margaret, and Tom Young. Confronting Leviathan: Mozambique Since Independence. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1997.

Hume, Cameron. Ending Mozambique's War: The Role of Mediation and Good Offices. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1994.

Huntington, Samuel. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

Martin, D. and P. Johnson, eds. Destructive Engagement: Southern Africa at War. Harare, Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe Publishing House, 1986.

Minter, William. Apartheid's Contras: An Inquiry Into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique. London: Zed Books, 1994.

Page 187

Mondlane, Eduardo. The Struggle for Mozambique. New York: Penguin, 1969.

Nelson, Harold D., ed. Mozambique: A Country Study. Washington, D.C.: Foreign Area Studies. American University, 1984.

Nordstrom, Carolyn. A Different Kind of War Story. Philadelphia, Penn.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

Ramsay, F. Jeffress. Global Studies: Africa. Sluice Dock, N.Y.: Dushkin-McGraw Hill, 1997.

Shawcross, William. Deliver Us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and A World of Endless Conflict. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000

Vines, Alex. RENAMO: Terrorism in Mozambique. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1991.

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Mozambique: Independence and a Dirty War

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Page 179 Mozambique was a colony of Portugal for more than two hundred years. Following Mozambique's independence from Portugal in the early 1970s, the white minority governments of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and South Africa, began to fund and direct a campaign to destabilize Mozambique. Brutal warfare and massive destruction of the infrastructure left Mozambique impoverished.

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Mozambique Gains Independence from Portugal: June 25, 1975

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Key Facts

Global Context

Africa

Angola gains its independence from Portugal in 1975. The Angolan Civil War (1975-2002) begins almost immediately.

Asia and Oceania

In 1975 The Chinese People's Liberation Army attack the Hui, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group. The resulting massacre decimates the community, leaving over one thousand dead.

Central and South America

Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA; National Intelligence Directorate), the Chilean secret police, launches Operation Colombo in 1975. The secret operation targets political dissidents and is alleged to have led to more than one hundred assassinations.

Europe

In 1975 the first G6 Summit takes place with France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States in attendance. Only the richest nations are given a seat at this table, a criticism that dogs the group.

Middle East

The Lebanese Civil War (1975-1991) begins in 1975. The conflict leaves over one hundred thousand people dead.

North America

The Weather Underground Organization (WUO), a radical group bent on overthrowing the U.S. government, bombs the U.S. State Department in 1975. The group claims the bombing is a response to the growing conflict in Vietnam.

Key Figures

Political Leaders

Samora Machel (1933-1986), Mozambican revolutionary and president of Mozambique.

Background

Mozambique, located on the southeastern African coast, is rich in arable land and natural resources. The region was colonized by the Portuguese in 1500; over the next few centuries, the Portuguese would compete with Arab traders for dominance and eventually emerge victorious. The colonial Portuguese period was brutal for the indigenous black population. Africans were not permitted to own land or receive education, and their role in the colony was often to serve as laborers.

By the mid-twentieth century, Mozambique was administered by large, private companies that exploited the indigenous people. Forced labor-obtained through coercive means such as taxation, intimidation, and physical abuse-remained a common practice in Portuguese colonies until well into the twentieth century. Workers were sent to work in South African mines or on the vast tobacco plantations of Rhodesia. Few resources were put into projects that might have benefited the local population, such as education, health, or infrastructural improvements. It was during this time that the people of Mozambique began to revolt against colonial rule. By 1960 as many former colonies of France, Britain, and Belgium were achieving independence, a nationalist movement arose in Mozambique as well.

Portugal opposed the independence of its colonies and cracked down on nationalist movements. Africans caught discussing politics or suspected of being opposed to Portuguese rule were arrested and sent to prison camps. On June 16, 1960, the massacre of peaceful protesters in Mueda drew nationwide attention. The killings bolstered resistance and convinced many that the only way to gain liberation was though armed conflict.

In 1962 the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO; Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) was founded in Tanzania. (It was common for resistance groups to operate out of neighboring Tanzania, a country sympathetic to their nationalist cause.) FRELIMO was a union of three separate resistance groups: the Mozambican African National Union (MANU), the National Democratic Union of Mozambique (UDENAMO), and the National African Union of Independent Mozambique (UNAMI). FRELIMO was unusual in that its disparate units managed to set aside the political and ethnic loyalties and regional differences that plagued so many other African liberation groups. Another aspect that differentiated the movement from its counterparts in Africa was its insistence on Mozambican women's liberation not just from colonial oppression, but from traditional male oppression as well.

FRELIMO also differed from many African liberation groups in that they did not seek to replace the white colonial political elite with a black political elite, because, by concentrating wealth and political power in the hands of a few elite blacks, the concerns of the laborer majority would be left largely unaddressed. Instead, FRELIMO wanted a people's revolution that removed the exploiting class regardless of race. FRELIMO counted blacks, whites, mixed-race persons, and Indians among its members and supporters. However, the ultimate goal was the liberation of the black laboring class. The principles of FRELIMO mirrored Marxism. However, Samora Machel (1933-1986), one of the more vocal of the group's founders, noted that Marxism arose organically in Mozambique, as a logical consequence of its self-interest, and was not an ideology forced upon it, or selected by academics on the nation's behalf. It was a true people's movement.

The Event

On September 25, 1964, after two years of training their guerrilla forces, FRELIMO launched the Mozambican War of Independence (1964-1974). They started with an attack on a Portuguese administrative post in the north of the country, near Mueda, where the massacre had occurred in 1960. From the onset, FRELIMO established what they called "liberated zones" in the territories they won and promoted literacy and the education of the masses.

Over the course of ten years, FRELIMO victories demoralized the Portuguese forces, despite an almost five-to-one ratio of trained fighting forces in favor of the Portuguese. White elites began to flee Mozambique en masse, taking with them all the assets they could and destroying what they could not. By 1974 more than forty thousand Portuguese had fled. FRELIMO expanded the liberated zones southwards and soon began to encroach on white-populated southern towns.

The success of FRELIMO was marred, however, by division in the group. One side wanted to preserve the political hierarchy established by the Portuguese, replacing whites with black leaders. They saw armed conflict as a means to an end. The other side, consisting of Machel and his followers in FRELIMO, viewed the fighting as the beginning of a new and just society free from hierarchy and capitalist exploitation. They favored eradication of capitalism, in keeping with the Marxist tenets that this group embraced. The enemy, as Machel saw it, was not any one race, nationality, or religion, but the system that exploited the people regardless of who was in power. The opposing group within FRELIMO responded by organizing the assassination of FRELIMO president Eduardo Mondlane (1920-1969) with the help of Portuguese officials. Machel was made president of FRELIMO in 1970.

Meanwhile, FRELIMO continued its advance, moving on white southern settlements. The Portuguese adopted a scorched earth policy in retaliation, using its armed forces assisted by white vigilantes to indiscriminately massacre the indigenous population. Meanwhile, black workers proclaimed a general strike, effectively bringing Mozambique to a standstill. In June 1970, in response to steady gains by FRELIMO, the Portuguese began a counteroffensive. They attacked FRELIMO camps and tried to cut off routes from Tanzania, which the insurgents, from bases within Tanzania, had been using to infiltrate the country.

Two years later, in 1972, FRELIMO launched a large-scale attack in Tete Province, which was countered by the Portuguese, but throughout 1973 and 1974 FRELIMO continued to gather strength. Meanwhile, in Portugal opposition was growing to the war, which was considered very costly. On April 24, 1974, the right-wing dictatorship that had ruled Portugal since 1933 was overthrown in a military coup d'état led by young army officers who wanted to establish a multiparty democracy in their country. Portugal's new president, army general António de Spínola (1910-1996), immediately sought a cease-fire with the armed liberation movements operating in Portuguese colonies.

Negotiations began, and in September the Lusaka Accord was signed, under which the government of Mozambique would be handed over to FRELIMO. This formally brought an end to the Mozambican War of Independence. On June 25, 1975, Mozambique proclaimed its independence from Portugal. FRELIMO served as the nation's governing body, and Machel became the president.

Global Impact

Machel and FRELIMO attempted to restructure the government in line with Marxist ideology. They eliminated chieftaincies, a move that lost them tremendous support and cooperation from the populace. Dissidents were installed in reeducation camps, which quickly earned reputations as torture sites. FRELIMO also ordered the forced relocation of rural populations. This was a way of radically transforming and modernizing the country in accordance with socialist principles. But this policy, under which people were placed in resettlement villages and operated state-run collective farms, succeeded only in cutting off the rural population from their traditional way of life. The effect was to erode popular support for FRELIMO and lay the foundations for a new insurgency.

The new FRELIMO government inherited a failing economy, already devastated by the war, but which floundered further as skilled laborers fled the new and untested regime. Foreigners were hesitant to invest money in the country, and Mozambique was flanked by neighbors (like Rhodesia and South Africa) who were fighting their own nationalist uprisings. These nations did not want to cooperate with the new black government of Mozambique lest they bolster the very nationalism they were trying to quash within their own borders. In fact, both South Africa and Rhodesia joined forces to undermine the Mozambican government. In addition, a series of droughts decimated Mozambique's food supply.

FRELIMO did receive assistance from the Soviet Union and China, their Communist allies during the war for independence. After independence, a war took place between the ruling FRELIMO and Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (RENAMO; Mozambican National Resistance), an anti-Communist organization created in 1975 and funded by South Africa and Rhodesia. The ensuing Mozambican Civil War (1977-1992) left over one million dead and thousands maimed and mutilated. Adding to the carnage, fighting between Rhodesia's white government and the Zimbabwean resistance movement frequently spilled over into Mozambique, and the Rhodesian army did not make any distinction between nationalist guerillas and the Mozambican civilians who might have harbored them. RENAMO destroyed schools, hospitals, and roads, depriving Mozambique of much needed capital for its faltering economy. Both sides were guilty of impressing civilians into their service, but RENAMO went one step further, enslaving children into their regiments.

The civil war moved closer to an end with the Nkomati Accord in 1984. This non-aggression agreement called for Mozambique to sever ties with the African National Congress who were fighting against South Africa's white minority rule. In exchange, South Africa would stop funding RENAMO. Machel signed the agreement, but both sides only partially honored the pact, and fighting continued until 1992. By then, Mozambique's president Joaquim Chissano (1932-), one of the original founders of FRELIMO, had begun edging away from Marxism.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, support for Marxism collapsed in Mozambique. This made possible the 1992 peace negotiations that took place in Rome and moved Mozambique from a one-party system to a multi party system. RENAMO was integrated into the political system as a legally recognized political party and participated in the first elections in 1994. FRELIMO won the elections and completely shed its Marxist roots.

Source Citation

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Mozambique Gains Independence from Portugal: June 25, 1975

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Angola gains its independence from Portugal in 1975. The Angolan Civil War (1975-2002) begins almost immediately. In 1975 The Chinese People's Liberation Army attack the Hui, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group. The resulting massacre decimates the community, leaving over one thousand dead.

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1. What forms of imperialism was your country involved with? (2 slides)

2. What were the causes? Effects? (6 slides)

3. What were the benefits and detriments of imperialism to the country? (6 slides)

4. How has this shaped the country today? Are there still issues prevalent today? (6 slides)

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Early Mozambique

After 100 AD Bantu speaking people arrived in what is now Mozambique. They lived by farming and they made iron tools. They were organized into small kingdoms. By the 9th century, Arab merchants arrived at the coast of Mozambique. For centuries afterward, there was trade between Africans and Arabs.

Then in 1498 the Portuguese sailor Vasco Da Gama landed at Ilha de Mocambique on his way to India. In 1511 A Portuguese called Antonio Fernandes explored the interior of Mozambique. During the 16th century, the Portuguese established trading posts along the coast of Mozambique. They also took over some of the lands and divided it into large estates called prazos. However, for centuries Portugal only had very limited control over Mozambique.

The situation changed in the late 19th century when Europeans carved up Africa between them. In 1891 Britain and Portugal signed a treaty. The British recognized the borders of Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique). A network of railways was built in Mozambique but nothing was done for the native people.

Modern Mozambique

In the 1950s and early 1960s the situation in Africa changed and many African countries became independent. In 1962 the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) was founded. However, the Portuguese were determined to hang on to their colonies in Africa.

In 1964 Frelimo began an armed struggle. The war went on for 10 years with the Portuguese gradually losing ground. Finally, on 25 June, 1975 Mozambique became an independent nation.

However the new government in Mozambique adopted Socialist policies which left Mozambique impoverished. Worse, from 1977 Mozambique was riven by civil war. An anti-Communist organization called Renamo fought the government for 15 years.

However, by 1989 Frelimo had given up its Socialist policies and in 1990 they published a new constitution. Then in 1992, a peace agreement was made with Renamo. In 1994 elections were held. Mozambique recovered from the war and today it is developing rapidly.

Mozambique experienced further setbacks in 2000 and 2001 when it suffered severe floods. Then in 2002, it suffered a severe drought. Yet Mozambique soon recovered. Mozambique is still a poor country but the economy is growing steadily. Mozambique has great potential for tourism. In 2020 the population of Mozambique was 31 million.

Last Revised 2020

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF MOZAMBIQUE - Local Histories

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By Tim Lambert Early Mozambique After 100 AD Bantu speaking people arrived in what is now Mozambique. They lived by farming and they made iron tools. They were organized into small kingdoms. By the 9th century, Arab merchants arrived at the coast of Mozambique. For centuries afterward, there was trade between Africans and Arabs.

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Civil War

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The Mozambican Civil War was a 15-year conflict that occurred between May 30, 1977 and October 4, 1992 in the southern African country of Mozambique. Although ostensibly an internal civil war, the conflict was in fact a proxy war between the Soviet Union which backed the Mozambican government and the United States which supported the insurgents. The war occurred two years after Mozambique officially gained its independence from Portugal. The main belligerents were the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) led by President Samora Machel which controlled the central government and the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO) led by André Matsangaissa. It was estimated that one million people died during a 15-year conflict in a country which in 1990 had a population of 14 million.

The background of the war goes back to 1976 when troops from white minority-controlled Rhodesia entered Mozambique to carry out operations against the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) which had bases in Mozambican territory. The Rhodesian troops freed André Matsangaissa, an ex-FRELIMO official who had been arrested and imprisoned. Matsangaissa joined RENAMO which was formed in 1975 in opposition to FRELIMO and quickly rose to become its leader. When Matsangaissa was killed in 1979 after an unsuccessful attack on a Mozambican regional Centre, Afonso Dhlakama became the new leader of RENAMO.

FRELIMO was strongest in the cities and major towns of Mozambique during much of the civil war while RENAMO operated mainly in the countryside. It continued the fight against the Mozambique central government even after the white minority regime in Rhodesia was replaced by Robert Mugabe who renamed the country Zimbabwe. Mugabe and his government now supported FRELIMO but RENAMO gained the support of Kenya and South Africa.

RENAMO carried out raids on towns and occasionally smaller cities. To gain more troops it recruited civilians into its army-including child solders-after mass abductions. RENAMO also had imposed a system it called Gamdira whereby villagers were required to produce food, transport goods and ammunition, and village women were forced to be sex slaves.

As the war continued both sides began using brutal tactics including land mines. RENAMO however attempted to stall the economy and destroy confidence in the central government by mining roads, schools, and health centers.

The war continued into the 1980s with FRELIMO losing most of Mozambique's territory although keeping control in the urban areas. FRELIMO got support and aid from the Soviet Union, France, and the United Kingdom while RENAMO got its aid from South Africa, Kenya, and covertly from the United States.

On October 19, 1986, President Samora Machel died when his plane crashed near South Africa's border. It was unclear how and why the plane crashed or whether RENAMO or even South Africa was responsible. Joaquim Alberto Chissano succeeded Machel as president of the country where, because of the nine-year conflict, hundreds of thousands of Mozambicans were dying from famine which was caused by both FRELIMO and RENAMO.

By 1990 neither side seemed to be winning the war. Developments outside Mozambique, however, would soon bring an end to the fighting. By 1990 South Africa was moving toward a black majority-controlled nation and the Soviet Union had fallen. FRELIMO and RENAMO were losing their major supporters and arms suppliers. In 1990, Mozambique adopted a new constitution that included multiparty elections. In 1992, a peace accord was signed in Rome, Italy which allowed UN peacekeepers to enter the country. Their presence effectively ended the war. In 1994, the first free elections were held in the country. Despite FRELIMO winning the majority, a portion of the population voted for RENAMO candidates. The political rivalry continues but the military conflict is over.

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The Mozambican Civil War was a 15-year conflict that occurred between May 30, 1977 and October 4, 1992 in the southern African country of Mozambique. Although ostensibly an internal civil war, the conflict was in fact a proxy war between the Soviet Union which backed the Mozambican government and the ...

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In September 1968 Salazar was incapacitated by a stroke. President Tomás invited Marcello Caetano, one of the architects of the New State, to form a government, but Salazar was never informed of this transition. On July 27, 1970, he died. Although Caetano was more worldly and less reserved than his predecessor, he proved unable to reverse the tide of Portugal's African wars, to alleviate the economic woes of 1973-74, or to avert revolution.

Portugal since 1974

Two developments galvanized the movement that was shortly to topple the dictatorship. The first occurred in mid-1973, when career army officers became alienated by a government measure commissioning militia officers for service in the colonial wars. The second incitement was the publication in February 1974 of the book Portugal e o futuro ("Portugal and the Future") by the colonial war hero General António de Spínola, who argued that the wars in Africa could not be settled by force of arms and advocated negotiated autonomy for the colonies and an alternative to Caetano's leadership. Some 200 to 300 officers calling themselves the Armed Forces Movement (Movimento das Forças Armadas; MFA), led by Francisco da Costa Gomes and other officers, planned and implemented the coup of April 25, 1974, which came to be known as the Revolution of the Carnations.

The revolution encountered little resistance from the dictatorship's remaining loyalists and won initial support from an urban middle class vexed by economic and political uncertainty. The transition to a functioning, consolidating, pluralist Portuguese democracy mirrored, though in a nonviolent way, the political course of the French Revolution: an early moderate-conservative phase (May 1974-March 1975) followed by a middle radical-leftist phase (March-late November 1975) and a final moderate reaction (late November 1975-June 1976).

After exiling Caetano and Tomás, a subgroup of the MFA calling itself the Junta of National Salvation filled the political vacuum, installing Spínola as president and commencing negotiation with the African nationalist movements. Independence was granted to Portuguese Guinea (as Guinea-Bissau) almost immediately after the revolution. The new regime abolished such instruments of repression as censorship, the paramilitary forces, and the secret police. Spínola, who opposed rapid independence for the colonies without free referendums, resigned in September 1974, launched a countercoup attempt that failed (March 1975), and fled into exile.

By this time, radical MFA elements and their leftist civilian allies in the Portuguese Communist Party and other Marxist-Leninist groups had won virtual control over the government in Lisbon, sections of the armed forces, and the media. The MFA itself was restructured and a Council of the Revolution installed with the support of six political parties. An election for a national assembly in April 1975 drew 92 percent of eligible voters, a record in western European history. The decolonization of the Cape Verde Islands and Mozambique was effected in July 1975. Portugal's remaining African territories achieved independence later the same year, thus ending a colonial involvement in Africa that had begun in 1415. However, in Angola full-scale, internationalized civil war followed Portugal's departure, and Indonesia forcibly annexed briefly independent East Timor, controlling the territory until 1999.

Political and social instability prevailed through most of 1975. More than half a million people fled to Portugal from the former African colonies, adding a refugee problem to the already volatile domestic situation; some 30 persons died in incidents of public violence, new political parties proliferated, and strikes were widespread. In 1975 the government also decided to nationalize banking, transport, heavy industries, and the media. In the Alentejo in southern Portugal, farmworkers expropriated latifundia and established communal farming. On November 25, 1975, moderate military elements crushed a radical leftist coup in the army and restored order.

The 1976 constitution and subsequent reforms

In April 1976 the Constituent Assembly approved a new constitution, which committed Portugal to socialism. Parliamentary elections held on April 25 produced no single majority party; the Socialists, the Popular Democrats (centre-right), the Social Democratic Centre Party (conservative), and the Communist Party (founded 1921) made the strongest showings, and the Socialist leader, Mário Soares, formed a minority government. In June, General António Ramalho Eanes, who had been instrumental in preventing a radical leftist military coup in November 1975, won more than three-fifths of the valid votes cast in the presidential election.

Soares's minority government resigned in December 1977, primarily because it was unable to enact an effective austerity program. A number of volatile coalition governments followed, until in 1980, in the general election scheduled by the constitution, a centre-right coalition, the Democratic Alliance (Alianca Democrática), swept into power. The new government swiftly moved to revise the character of the 1976 constitution. The Assembly of the Republic approved a series of reforms that included reducing the powers of the president and abolishing the Council of the Revolution, which had been given the power to determine the constitutionality of laws and gave the military effective veto power over legislation. These constitutional reforms completed Portugal's transition to full civilian rule. Both government policy and public sentiment, as reflected in numerous elections and polls, favoured reprivatization of the largely nationalized economy, a de-emphasis on communal agriculture, and entry into the European Economic Community (EEC; later succeeded by the European Union [EU]) as soon as possible.

The alliance faltered in 1982, propelling the country into yet another crisis. President Eanes called an early general election for April 1983, and the Socialists, led by Soares, scored an inconclusive victory. Because Portugal urgently needed a stable, broadly based government to tackle its severe economic problems, Soares formed a coalition government with the Social Democrats (formerly the Popular Democrats). It successfully implemented an 18-month emergency program and a four-year modernization plan in its quest for admission to the EEC.

The coalition, though precarious, lasted until June 13, 1985. It survived several internal crises caused predominantly by a division within the Social Democrats between a left wing favouring the coalition and a right wing that opposed the coalition's economic policies. In May 1985 Aníbal Cavaco Silva, leader of the right wing, became head of the party. Almost immediately, Cavaco Silva questioned the viability of the coalition, voicing doubts especially on the subjects of labour and agrarian reform.

This crisis, which ended the coalition in June, had been intensified by nationwide strikes in the industrial and transport sectors led by communist unions and by demonstrations by parties on both the left and the right of the political spectrum calling for an end to the coalition government. Soares resigned, and in October 1985 the Social Democrats, campaigning on a platform advocating a free-market economy, became the largest single party in the Assembly of the Republic and were able to form a minority government with Cavaco Silva as prime minister. Portugal was admitted to the EEC on January 1, 1986, and on February 16 Soares became the country's first civilian president in 60 years. The parliamentary elections of 1987 marked another milestone as Cavaco Silva's Social Democrats won the first clear majority in the Assembly since the 1974 revolution. A renewal of this mandate four years later provided the continuity necessary for carrying out reforms.

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Portugal - Portugal - The New State after Salazar: In September 1968 Salazar was incapacitated by a stroke. President Tomás invited Marcello Caetano, one of the architects of the New State, to form a government, but Salazar was never informed of this transition. On July 27, 1970, he died.

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LONDON (Reuters) - Heavily indebted Mozambique has been battling for years to recover from a debt crisis and Monday's agreement with Eurobond creditors marks another step on the way.

In 2016, the southern African nation admitted to $1.2 billion of previously undisclosed lending, much of which was supposed to be spent on a tuna fishing fleet.

The disclosure prompted the International Monetary Fund and foreign donors to cut off support, triggering a currency collapse and a default on the country's sovereign debt.

One of the poorest countries in the world, Mozambique saw its currency lose a third of its value over the course of 2016, the year it defaulted. The currency has lost more than 60% over the past decade.

Growth rates have tumbled from around 7% between 2010 and 2015 to nearly half that. Earlier this year, cyclone Idai killed more than 1,000 people in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, devastating farms, disrupting transport and hitting growth prospects.

However, the discovery nearly a decade ago of substantial offshore gas reserves has spurred hopes the country could become a major exporter of liquefied natural gas - so far the only likely long-term solution to its financial problems.

The IMF expects growth could approach double digits in the late 2020s, once the LNG project kicks in.

Following is a summary of what is known about Mozambique's debt:

TOTAL EXTERNAL DEBT - $14.78 BILLION

Mozambique's total external debt ballooned to $14.78 billion in 2019, according to the IMF. That's a near 30% jump in the past two years.

The country's debt-to-GDP ratios have shot up in recent years. Currently at 113%, the ratio stood at less than 54% in 2013. Not much relief is expected before revenues from its big gas projects come on stream in 2023. By 2022, S&P Global estimates the ratio will fall only to 107%.

COMMERCIAL DEBT - $1.9 billion

Eurobonds - Mozambique is restructuring a eurobond it sold in March 2016 and on which it has $727 million outstanding.

That bond was the result of a restructuring of an $850 million facility, issued by state-run tuna-fishing company Ematum in 2013. Those notes - dubbed "tuna bonds" - were supposed to finance a tuna fleet and fishing infrastructure, but much of the cash was later designated for maritime security and reallocated to the defense budget.

The tuna notes were restructured in spring 2016 into an English-law sovereign Eurobond maturing in 2023. Within weeks Mozambique's hidden lending emerged, international lenders pulled out and Maputo faced another default which the government is trying to cure in the latest restructuring.

As part of the overhaul, Mozambique proposes to issue $900 million of new, amortizing sovereign bonds maturing in 2031. The bonds come with an interest rate of 5% up to September 2023 and 9% thereafter until maturity. The proposal also includes up to $40 million in cash payments.

ProIndicus - the state-owned firm, owned by the defense and interior ministries and state security service, borrowed $622 million for maritime security projects in a loan arranged by Swiss lender Credit Suisse .

Mozambique Asset Management (MAM) - the state-owned company took out a $535 million loan arranged by Russian state bank VTB, to build shipyards in Maputo and the northern city of Pemba. The shipyards have not materialized.

All of Mozambique's commercial debt has been earmarked for restructuring. Yet it is unclear how much progress has been made on the MAM and ProIndicus loans. The IMF said in May restructuring discussions between VTB and Maputo were in the final stretch.

VTB CEO Andrey Kostin said in early September that Mozambique must restructure the loan by year-end or face the prospect of defaulting on it.

Mozambique's Attorney-General has filed a lawsuit in the UK to nullify the government guarantee to the loan contracted by ProIndicus with Credit Suisse.

KNOWN BILATERAL & CONCESSIONAL DEBT

By the end of 2017 - the latest data available - Mozambique's external concessional debt stood at $8.063 billion, or 67% of its total external debt burden at the time, according to the World Bank.

Credits from World Bank arms such as the IBRD and IDA amounted to $2.8 billion while the use of IMF credit stood at $343 million at that time, the lender added.

The remaining $4.9 billion would be made up of loans from multilateral institutions such as the African Development Bank.

The country is also in arrears to five official non-Paris Club creditors, owing Libya, Iraq, Angola, Poland and Bulgaria a total of $94 million.

Mozambique also owes Brazil - a member of the Paris Club of wealthy nations - nearly $23 million in respect of a $125 million guaranteed borrowing.

Mozambique told Eurobond creditors in August it was currently discussing possible restructuring solutions with these creditors, though added there was no agreed timeline for such

WHICH LEAVES NEARLY $5 BILLION OUTSTANDING...

Analysts and investors speculated that foreign governments such as China - which has invested in many African countries in projects in the infrastructure and commodities sector - could make up a good chunk of the remainder.

Some lending would be linked to large infrastructure projects, such as the 3km-long Maputo bridge - the longest suspension bridge on the continent - built by China Road and Bridge and financed chiefly through loans from China's Exim Bank. Russia is also active in the country, according to analysts.

Moscow and Beijing prefer not to publish overseas aid and investment figures.

SOURCES: International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Mozambique Finance Ministry, Kroll, Exotix/Tellimer

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Factbox: Mozambique debt crisis - What does the country owe, and to whom?

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LONDON (Reuters) - Heavily indebted Mozambique has been battling for years to recover from a debt crisis and Monday's agreement with Eurobond creditors marks another step on the way. In 2016, the southern African nation admitted to $1.2 billion of previously undisclosed lending, much of which was supposed to be spent on a tuna fishing fleet.

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Language data for Mozambique - Translators without Borders

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Open-source language data and maps about languages spoken in Mozambique can improve how we communicate with communities in crisis.

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Consolidation of Portuguese control

By the 1880s the Portuguese controlled trade and collected tribute in coastal enclaves from Ibo in the north to Lourenço Marques in the south, but their ability to control events outside those areas was quite limited; that situation, however, was about to change. Increasingly, as neighbours of the Gaza state were raided periodically for refusing to pay tribute, they began to ally themselves with the Portuguese, which the Portuguese both encouraged and exploited. In the 1890s a coalition of Portuguese troops and African armies marched against the state. When the Gaza leadership was finally defeated in 1897, southern Mozambique passed into Portuguese control. Two decades later the Portuguese, who had mounted dozens of military campaigns by that time, directly controlled the Barue of central Mozambique, the African Portuguese of the Zambezi and Maganja da Costa prazos, the Yao of Mataka, the northern Makua chiefdoms, and the northern coastal sheikhdoms of Angoche.

Trade in ivory, gold, slaves, rubber, oilseeds, and a broad range of European goods continued throughout the 19th century. However, European economic interest and influence in the region changed rapidly by mid-century in response to developments in both Africa and Europe. African labour was needed on the sugar plantations and at South African ports and mines after diamonds (at Kimberley in the 1860s) and gold (at Witwatersrand in the 1880s) were discovered. Because of the need for labour, Europeans were determined to gain greater control over tracts of land and their inhabitants at the expense of African leadership. The combined struggle for access to mineral-bearing lands and the labour force to work them fueled the so-called "scramble" in Southern Africa.

Portugal claimed a swath of territory from present-day Mozambique to Angola. Although the Germans, whose territory bordered Mozambique to the north, accepted the Portuguese claims-establishing Mozambique's northern boundary- British claims to the region contradicted those of Portugal, leading to prolonged negotiations. However, the Portuguese crown was heavily in debt to British financiers, and the small country was no match for Britain's military; in 1891 Portugal was forced to accept Britain's definition of Mozambique's western and southern boundaries.

Portugal had little hope of developing the entire region on its own, and so it turned to its familiar colonial strategy of leasing large tracts of land to private companies. Chartered companies were granted the privilege of exploiting the lands and peoples of specific areas in exchange for an obligation to develop agriculture, communications, social services, and trade. The Mozambique Company, the Niassa Company, and the Zambezia Company were all established in this manner in the 1890s. Any economic development and investment in infrastructure was related directly to company interests and usually undertaken at African expense. Sugar, copra, and sisal plantations depending largely on conscripted labour and railways linking Beira with the British South Africa Company territory and British Nyasaland to the west and northwest were all developed and built at a high cost to the African workforce.

The Portuguese government eventually terminated the charters of the major concession companies, bringing all of Mozambique under direct Portuguese rule. Between the 1890s and the 1930s, Portuguese rule in Mozambique was characterized by the exploitation of African people and resources by private parties, whether they were foreign company shareholders or colonial bureaucrats and settlers. The most egregious colonial abuses-forced labour, forced crop cultivation, high taxes, low wages, confiscation of the most promising lands-occurred regardless of which group of Europeans was in control.

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Mozambique - Mozambique - Colonial Mozambique: By the 1880s the Portuguese controlled trade and collected tribute in coastal enclaves from Ibo in the north to Lourenço Marques in the south, but their ability to control events outside those areas was quite limited; that situation, however, was about to change.