Happy birthday, Mozambique: 25 June will mark 30 years since Mozambique became an independent nation. It is hoped that the recently-elected President Armando Guebuza will be able to continue the notable economic recovery that obtained at the turn of the century.
Geographically and economically overshadowed by South Africa, the country of Mozambique is the size of Britain and France put together. Its 1,250 mile-long seaboard along the Indian Ocean extends from South Africa's province of Natal to Tanzania, from where FRELIMO carried its armed struggle against the centuries-old Portuguese colonial rule. Through the vagaries of history the capital was only moved from the northern offshore Island of Mozambique, after which the whole country was named, to Lourenco Marques, in 1907.It was renamed Maputo 69 years later in 1976, after the river which flows into the bay on which the city stands. The change of location from the extreme north to the south was due to the proximity of the landlocked Transvaal's gold-rich area of the Rand (now Gauteng) soon after the Anglo-Boer war, when Victorian Britain completed the conquest of Southern Africa. That explains why the handsome capital Maputo is, somewhat incongruously, placed far nearer the metropolitan area of Johannesburg and Pretoria than it is from the massive Mozambican provinces north of Beira, the country's second port town.
Between them both Maputo's and Beira's well developed ports and railways provide the outlets to the sea for the hinterland extending from the Transvaal to the border of the Congo, and also incorporating Swaziland, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi; in total, a landlocked mineral-rich area bigger than Western Europe. Soon after independence, Maputo took over from Dar as Saalam, Tanzania, the honourable duty of housing many of the leading activists of both the ANC and the resistance against Ian Smith's UDI regime in the then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
Modern Mozambique has some other singular distinctions. Apart from its membership of the African Union, it is also simultaneously a member of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries--which includes Brazil and Angola--as well as the British Commonwealth in which, incidentally, it is the only country not meeting the previous requirement of having been a former British colony or having English as its official language.
The admission of Mozambique into the Commonwealth was regarded as evidence of British diplomatic success in the 1990s--a success more recently marred by the stand taken against President Mugabe--who enjoyed Mozambique's hospitality during the struggle for Zimbabwe's liberation. Statistically, in the first years of the 21st century, Mozambique was widely acknowledged to be the country with the fastest rate of development in Africa, if not the world.
This was due to external investments and cooperation with post-apartheid South Africa, highlighted by the modernisation of the motorway to Maputo and the integration of a large stretch of Mozambique's land along the border into the world famous Kruger National Park, an area larger than neighbouring Swaziland, or say the state of Israel, which looms so large on television and other international media.
Increased electricity produced by the huge Portuguese-built and managed Cabora Bassa Dam as well as since 2004 the natural gas piped by the South African company, Sasol, from fields in the south of the country at Pande and Temane, further greatly swelled Mozambique's revenues. New investments such as the Mozal aluminium smelter near Maputo have added to the country's earnings. The coal reserves at Moatize, near Tete, estimated to be the biggest in the world, might finally be exploited by Indian investors after the restoration of the war-damaged Sena railway to Beira, while a new major venture is on the cards for a titanium project at Moma, in Nampula province.
Even at the earlier stages of expansion or installation, investments are already having a major impact on the country's economy. Occasional allegations that such a trend might be an omen of a novel regional South African "sub-imperialism", should be dismissed by recalling that, in the same way that the US and the EU include bigger and richer super-states or nation members, as well as smaller and poorer ones, the phenomenon is consistent with both the integrationist ideals and aims of continental unity. Needless to say, modern Mozambique also shares the criticism that its post-colonial development, after the initial Marxist aspirations, is totally dominated by the liberal capitalist tenets of free enterprise and consumerism. This has translated into the depressing situation whereby the vast majority of the 18 million rural and even urban Mozambicans, in contrast with the rampant consumerist styles of a minority in Maputo, still lives in poverty.
The once legalised colonialist compulsion to work, ostensibly abolished by the Salazar regime in 1961 at the outbreak of the African liberation wars, seems to have only evolved into the "freedom of being poor". This was denied to the so-called "natives" by Portuguese colonial rule, under which work was compulsory, at least until 1961 and too late to avoid the outbreak of the liberation wars. In these conflicts, such was the power of isolation and deception that the Portuguese army ended up by having a majority (53% in 1973) of black soldiers and junior officers. But before passing harsh judgements, one has to bear in mind the background of circumstances in the decades before and after independence.
Historically, the common cause of Portuguese democracy and the liberating end of the far-flung colonial empire were developed during the Cold War between 1947 and 1990. This period was, paradoxically, both the best and the worst of times for African emancipation. The clash of ideologies and superpower rivalry between the capitalist US and the communist Soviet Union, despite the opposite principles and strategic interests, converged in favouring the end of old style colonialism. But once both Portugal and its far flung "overseas provinces" were liberated in the wake of the Lisbon military coup of April 1974, they all became targets for intrusion and diplomatic manipulation. Portugal, with the alternative of integration in the then European Economic Community (EEC) now the EU, managed to recover stability and attain parliamentary democracy. In fact, on the way to admission into the EEC in 1986, the Portuguese attained levels of prosperity unprecedented during Dr Salazar's regime. In Guinea-Bissau, peace was re-established, despite inter-party conflicts still unresolved. But in Mozambique and Angola, too close to apartheid South Africa--then claiming to be the last bastion of Western values in Southern Africa--the situation was dramatically different. For a start, even the liberation wars in Mozambique and Angola seemed to be more based on class than on race divisions.
By a macabre political coincidence, General Delgado, the exiled Portuguese leader, was assassinated in 1965 by the very same PIDE (the colonialist Salazar regime's secret police) who sent in 1969 the parcel bomb that killed FRELIMO's founder Eduardo Mondlane in his office in Dar es Salaam. Incidentally, the agent was neither black nor white but a Goa-Indian Portuguese Empire loyalist who fled to, and died in, apartheid South Africa.
Soon after independence in oil-rich Angola, particularly the war between the MPLA regime and UNITA, was to become far bloodier and longer than the war of liberation from Portuguese rule. Newly-independent Mozambique had to bear both the sacrifice of hosting the anti-Smith and anti-apartheid freedom fighters and its own "civil and ethnic" war between FRELIMO and RENAMO, much less devastating than that in Angola, but equally dramatically untimely and negative. Thus if you allow for a more realistic chronology, both Angola and Mozambique could be said to have been re-born, as it were, only after the end of apartheid, and the ensuing end of the long wars by proxy in the area during the 1960s.
The young President Joachim Chissano led the country, and even corrected some of the miscalculations of his predecessor Samora Machel, through these difficult times. The qualities of his leadership were also evidenced in his recent presidency of the African Union. With my past, but deeper than most people know, my involvement in the common Portuguese and African liberation struggles and through a personal friendship with Eduardo Mondlane, which Maputo's brilliant university is honourably named after, I can honestly say that Chissano was a continuador (follower and advocate of FRELIMO's ideology) and worthy successor. I share in the hope that the recently-elected President Armando Guebuza, a veteran FRELIMO hardliner, might be able to continue the notable economic recovery that obtained at the turn of the century without reawakening old antagonisms.
Thirty years and many tribulations after independence in 1975, Mozambique's main assets remain its physical beauty and clear skies, natural resources, its people and its future.
One of the unintended outcomes of comparative underdevelopment is that like most of Africa, Mozambique has an immense reserve of resources. It may be able to avoid the errors of the modern greed that now threaten the global environment. Many happy returns of the day--June 25--which I still celebrate knowing that past sacrifices were not in vain. The AU should be as proud of Mozambique as Mozambique is of the ideals of the AU.
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| Author: | de Figueiredo, Antonio |
|---|---|
| Publication: | New African |
| Geographic Code: | 6MOZA |
| Date: | Jun 1, 2005 |
| Words: | 1458 |
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