The eventual success of FRELIMO in its guerilla war against the Portuguese owed much to the early leadership of Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane (1920-69), who took the lead in founding FRELIMO and at his death left the party in control of substantial liberated zones. In 1961 Mondlane resigned as a research officer in the UN Department of Trustee- ship after revisiting Mozambique and finding nothing had changed. He became a lecturer at Syracuse University in America, a post which gave him time in 1961-2 to make contacts with existing and separate Mozambican political movements in exile.

In June 1962 in Dar- es-Salaam, Tanzania, three exiled parties merged to form FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique), and Mondlane accepted the presidency. FRELIMO's preparations for war lasted two years, and included the training of officers in Algeria and of guerillas in a training camp at Bagamoyo, Tanzania, and at the Mozambique Institute, a secondary school in Dar-es- Salaam. During this period the crushing by the Portuguese of dock strikes in Lourenco Marques, Beira and Nacala emphasized the failure of localized and unarmed protest and the need for wider and armed action.

The war of liberation - the military phase of the Mozambican revolution - began in September 1964. The Portuguese were aware of FRELIMO's preparations in Tanzania. They expected FRELIMO to concentrate on hit-and-run raids from the sanctuary of Tanzania; therefore they built up large forces along the bank of the River Ruvuma which forms much of the border between Mozambique and Tanzania. FRELIMO, however, had prepared not for harassing action but for a full-scale people's war against the Portuguese Armed Forces.

FRELIMO opened the war by guerilla actions deep inside Mozambique, simultaneously in several places. In September attacks were made on administrative and military posts in Cabo Delgado province; in November FRELIMO's operations were extended to Niassa, like Cabo Delgado in the north-east, and to the north-western districts of Zambezia and Tete. The effect of this early military strategy was to give FRELIMO a good start in its eleven-year war of liberation. Mondlane himself summed up the strategy of FRELIMO's initial offensive:

Facing action in four provinces at once, the Portuguese army was not in a position to mount offensive expeditions without leaving other vital positions undermanned. As a result, FRELIMO was able to consolidate its Strategic position in Niassa and Cabo Delgado, which had been the objectives of the first phase of the war. The units operating in Zambezia and Tete were then withdrawn and provisionally regrouped in Niassa and Cabo Delgado, to increase the offensive capacity of FRELIMO and to ensure that the gains made in these provinces would be maintained and a firm interior base for political and military action established. The Portuguese, on the other hand, could not withdraw their forces from Tete and Zambezia, as in doing so they would run the risk of facing a new offensive in these areas. In this way the enemy was compelled to keep large forces immobilized, while all FRELIMO forces could be used in action.

Thus FRELIMO was able to consolidate its position in the north-east. Having done this, it was able to reopen the Tete front in the north-west in March 1968.

The success of these first operations enabled FRELIMO to intensify recruitment and improve its organization. In September 1964 there were only 250 trained and equipped men, operating in small units of 10 to 15 men each. At first FRELIMO's tactics were necessarily largely confined to ambushing Portuguese administrators and troops. But from the middle of 1965 FRELIMO was able to deploy units of company strength and felt strong enough to commit between 65 and 150 men to a single engagement. In 1966 FRELIMO began to operate at battalion strength and to attack Portuguese bases. The air force base at Mueda was seriously damaged in the first assault. Forty -five bases were attacked by the end of 1967; a few were destroyed completely and most were seriously damaged. In 1967 FRELIMO had 8000 men under arms, not counting trained recruits not yet armed and the people's militias in liberated villages. The Portuguese were forced correspondingly to increase their forces from 35 000 in 1964 to 65 000 by the end of 1967.

However, only a small proportion of them could be used in combat. Over half were deployed to protect towns, economic interests, lines of communication and 'protected villages'. Most of the rest were stationed in Niassa and Cabo Delgado but many of these were pinned down defending bases and strategic points. Few Portuguese troops could be used in 'search and destroy' operations against guerilla bases and liberated zones.

What other factors, apart from FRELIMO's strategy and growing combat strength, assisted the independence fighters?

Niassa, Cabo Delgado and Tete were ideal for guerilla warfare: heavily wooded, providing good cover, with narrow footpaths where columns could be ambushed. In such conditions Portuguese heavy equipment like air-craft and armoured vehicles were of little use. FRELIMO forces were fighting on their own ground among people who supported them.

The people were a constant source of information and supply to FRELIMO; though it is important to stress that as far as possible FRELIMO cultivated its own food to relieve the population of some of the burden of supporting it. Therefore, unlike the Portuguese, FRELIMO had no vulnerable supply lines to Defend. The people supported FRELIMO because of the changes in their conditions in the liberated zones. FRELIMO also obtained ample arms supplies from communist countries. These last two points need further examination.

In the liberated zones FRELIMO led the people in the task of social, economic and cultural liberation, in the creation of new structures geared to the development needs of the country. Having liberated themselves from Portuguese political control by driving away the Portuguese political presence, the people of the zones were keen to build new institutions rather than Africanize the existing colonial ones. As Mondlane summed it up:

in the liberated zones, the various systems of exploitation have been abolished, the heavy taxes have gone, the repressive administration has been destroyed; the people are free to cultivate their land as they need to, campaigns against illiteracy have been started, schools and health services have been established, and the people are involved in political debate, in making their own decisions.5

The changes had given the people, Mondlane wrote, 'that much more reason to fight'. At first, there were severe shortages of food, clothes, soap and matches in the liberated zones. In some areas the peasants withdrew their support from the liberation, and some even migrated. However, by 1966 the worst shortages had been overcome, and a new Mozambique was beginning to take shape. Agriculture was reorganized into producer co-operatives, to avoid economic exploitation of the peasantry by any privileged group. Forced cultivation of cash crops under the Portuguese was replaced by the production of basic food crops and a surplus for FRELIMO troops. However the army cultivated some of its own food. More land was cultivated than under the Portuguese. In education the emphasis was on building and running primary schools alongside an adult literacy programme.

Accounting typing and radio work (for military operations) were key elements in post-primary education. Among the health programmes was mass vaccination against smallpox. The role of women in society was revolutionized. Women were active in running popular militias and many guerilla units were composed of women, who also played a major part in mobilizing the population, a process illuminated by Mondlane:

When a women's unit first visits a village which is not yet sufficiently involved with FRELIMO, the sight of armed women who get up and talk in front of a large audience causes great amazement, even incredulity; when the villagers are convinced that the soldiers in front of them really are women, the effect on the astonished men is often so forceful that the rush of recruits is very much greater than the army can cope with or than the area can afford to lose.6

FRELIMO did its best to weaken ethnicism by mingling people from different areas in the same unit. The cultural revolution in the liberated zones - the fostering of traditional V songs and dances of various ethnic groups in the schools and camps - also helped to develop a national trans-ethnic consciousness among the people. The famous Makonde sculpture began to revive traditional forms, though pursuing new themes. In the political field, FRELIMO initiated a one-party democracy, with full-scale political discussion and debate at all levels from village meetings up to the FRELIMO Central Committee.

FRELIMO cells in each of a number of villages or localities elected district councils which in turn elected provincial councils which elected Congress which elected the Central Committee. There was no elitism in FRELIMO. The 'people's committees* from village to national level were able to transform the liberated zones into powerful bases of mass participation.

Therefore, the revolution in the liberated zones began to create new values among the people. Mondlane was only half joking when he remarked, shortly before his death, that it would be almost a pity if the Mozambicans were to defeat the Portuguese too quickly, since so much was being learned in the course of the struggle.7

The arms used by FRELIMO were mainly Russian, Czech and Chinese. The West's lack of help to FRELIMO drove the party in time away from its original non-aligned stance to a pro-communist policy. As Mondlane put the matter in an interview in the London newspaper The Observer (29 January 1967): 'We would dearly love to use American, British and Belgian weapons as well, but unfortunately these are not available to us - only to the Portuguese.' To the allegation that FRELIMO was anti-Western because it depended so largely on communist help, Mondlane replied forcefully:

What are we supposed to do if, apart from the Africans, only the Communists will train and arm us? It apparently was all right for the West to arm itself with the Communists against the Fascists [in the Second World War] but, when we are denied Western aid, we are expected to do without Communist aid as well; We need the support of China and Russia because they are sympathetic to us and have no connections with the Portuguese.

The attitude of the Catholic Church in Mozambique also helped to push FRELIMO ? towards the communists in ideology. The Church, apart from an individual bishop and a few priests, consistently supported the colonial order, condemned FRELIMO 'terrorism' and excused Portuguese violence as "law and order'. The average Mozambican was threatened with excommunication and hell if he supported FRELIMO. Unsurprisingly, FRELIMO forces sometimes destroyed churches and mission stations. Since independence the FRELIMO government has persecuted the Church - a regrettable but understandable course of action.

In the early years of the war up to 1968, FRELIMO had to overcome the problem of internal divisions and face competition from a rival politico-guerilla movement. An influential minority in FRELIMO saw the armed struggle not as a people's revolution to transform society and its values but a bargaining counter or lever to force a compromise, political solution out of the Portuguese. Prominent in this group were FRELIMO's Vice- President, the Reverend Uria Simango, and Lazaro Kavandame. Members of this group tended to be elitist, ethnicist and self-serving economically, Kavandame later went over to the Portuguese. The majority of the guerilla cadres, like Samora Machel. and most political leaders, including Mondlane, opposed any political compromise and intended to fight on for a completely transformed non-authoritarian, non-elitist, non-ethnic and socialist society. The militant majority won a clear victory at the FRELIMO Congress held in Niassa in July 1968.

The rival movement to FRELIMO was COREMO (Revolutionary Committee of Mozambique), which broke away from FRELIMO in mid-1965 because of FRELIMO's growing socialist alignment. COREMO guerillas began to infiltrate from Zambia into Tete, an area which FRELIMO had abandoned in 1965 and would not re-enter until 1968. COREMO had only 300 men and concentrated on building up a secret underground political organization ready for a later mass uprising. It made no effort to set up bases in liberated areas and gained little support, and its organization collapsed in Tele when FRELIMO returned to the region. Paradoxically the split helped rather than hindered FRELIMO, by revealing its more effective theory and practice, which enabled it to emerge as the unchallenged leader of the struggle and inheritor of Portuguese rule.

The assassination of Mondlane in Dar-es-Salaam on 3 February 1969 by a parcel bomb posted from Western Europe, presumably by PIDE, failed in any way to weaken- FRELIMO any more than the assassination of Cabral was to weaken the PAIGC. Mondlane had left a firmly established democratic structure. He was replaced by a three-man presidential committee, which had to work with a forty-member central committee which operated usually by consensus and sometimes by a majority vote, by cipher open or secret ballot. In 1970 Samora Machel, the son of a peasant, a former medical dresser, and commander of FRELIMO's army, was elected sole President. Under Machel's leadership, FRELIMO fought on to victory.

In 1970 and 1971 the Portuguese made two offensives into Niassa and Cabo Delgado, using vast numbers of troops and material. Qn both occasions FRELIMO drove them back south of the Zambesi. The Portuguese held on, however, to isolated bases and towns north of the river. In the Zambesi valley the Portuguese began to resettle villagers in ,. strategic hamlets (fortified villages) in an attempt to isolate them from the guerillas. Under the ruthless direction of General Kaulza d'Arriaga the Portuguese stepped up terror tactics against civilians who showed any sympathy for FRELIMO.

The worst atrocity was the massacre by Portuguese troops of about 400 African civilians at Wiriyamu in December 1972. But this time the Portuguese were receiving help from the forces of the Smith regime in Zimbabwe and from South Africa. From 1972 ZANU guerillas had begun to operate from FRELIMO's liberated areas in launching attacks into Zimbabwe, if FRELIMO and ZANU troops often fought side by side against the Portuguese, Rhodesian and South African forces. In spite of external aid to the Portuguese, FRELIMO continued to chalk up military successes. In 1972 there were successful attacks on Portuguese airfields:

at Mueda in the north where 19 planes were destroyed and at Chingozi near Tete town where 17 were put out of action. In the same year FRELIMO raided the Cabora Bassa Dam complex, then under construction. South African troops defended the dam itself, but FRELIMO managed to destroy roads and transmission lines and two Portuguese military posts nearby. By now FRELIMO was intensifying its Tete operations, using bases in Zambia. In September 1972 military operations were opened in Manica and Sofala provinces.

By the time of the Lisbon coup, FRELIMO could fairly claim to have liberated a quarter of the country, and to have set up alternative government in the liberated areas, II had won a broad measure of rural support in the northern half of the country. It was expanding its military operations in the Zambesi valley in the centre of the country. The reluctant Portuguese conscript army was suffering from increasingly worsening morale. It was only a matter of time before FRELIMO began to make inroads south of the Zambesi, a prospect which provoked the South African government to consider seriously rile seizure of Lourenco Marques (Maputo), a step it would have been allowed to take by a desperate Lisbon government.

Joaquim Chissano, president of Mozambique since 1986, strengthened the nation by developing international relations and moving from a Marxist economy to a market-based economy.

 

The Lisbon coup in February 1974 saved Maputo for FRELIMO arid for Mozambique. The new Portuguese government held talks with FRELIMO and an agreement was reached in September; a provisional government of Portuguese and FRELIMO ministers would supervise a nine-month transition to independence on 25 June 1975, when FRELIMO would take over completely. The transitional period was marked by mass FRELIMO rallies in Beira. Maputo and other major towns to spread FRELIMO's policies, the establishment of FRELIMO committees in hitherto Portuguese-held areas of the country, an abortive white-led coup in which Simango was involved, a mass exodus of whites, whose numbers fell from 230 000 to 80 000 (and to 24 000 after the nationalization measures announced at independence) and widespread sabotage by the departing settlers of abandoned machinery and vehicles. FRELIMO faced a daunting task of economic reconstruction at independence; but the liberation war had given the party extensive experience in practical democracy and administration based on mass participation -perhaps a better preparation for independence than the mere Africanizing of colonial structures. The big question mark was whether FRELIMO's democratic institutions would try to apply Marxist-Leninist principles or a more pragmatic form of socialism.

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