A hospital aide who became Mozambique's first president
Samora Machel began his working life as a hospital aide in Lourenco Marques, protesting that Black nurses earned less than white colleagues for identical work. Warned that Portugal's political police were watching him, he slipped across the border, joined a guerrilla movement and, within about fifteen years, proclaimed his country's independence.
Born in 1933 in a farming village in Gaza Province, Machel grew up under a colonial system that classed his father as a native, forced him to grow cotton and paid him less for his crops than white farmers. His father still prospered, owning four ploughs and 400 cattle by 1940. Machel attended mission schools, never finished secondary education, and trained in nursing from 1954 while studying at night. One of his brothers died in a South African mining accident.
His escape route to FRELIMO's base in Dar es Salaam ran through Swaziland, South Africa and Botswana, where, by one account, a senior ANC official bumped a recruit off a plane to Tanzania to make room for him. Trained in Algeria, Machel ran FRELIMO's Kongwa camp and, after the independence war began in September 1964, made his name in the harsh eastern reaches of Niassa. He took command of the army in 1966 and, after the founder Eduardo Mondlane was killed in 1969, became FRELIMO's president in 1970.
His best-known move was strategic. When Portuguese general Kaulza de Arriaga launched Operation Gordian Knot, the largest offensive of Portugal's colonial wars, against the far north, Machel shifted pressure west to Tete, where the Cahora Bassa dam was rising. Portugal ringed the dam with three layers of defence, thinning troops elsewhere, and in 1972 FRELIMO crossed the Zambezi and pushed south.
After Lisbon's government fell in April 1974, Machel refused a ceasefire until independence was guaranteed, dismissing a referendum by comparing it to asking a rebelling slave whether he wanted freedom. The Lusaka agreement set independence for 25 June 1975. Machel then built a one-party socialist state, nationalising land, health and education within weeks and rented housing in 1976. He died in a 1986 plane crash that killed 34 people.
Source: Samora Machel
