The African hero in Mozambican history: on assassinations and executions – Part II

John S. Saul

Review of African Political Economy, 2020, vol. 47, issue 164, 335-345

Abstract: Part I of ‘The African hero in Mozambican history’, published in issue 163, launched a discussion of the possible role of the individual in African history … both in general terms and in terms of understanding more precisely the implications of the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane for the further development of Mozambique. Now, in Part II, this essay similarly considers (in subsection 3) the assassination of Mondlane’s successor as leader of Frelimo (and the man who would later become the first president of a liberated Mozambique), Samora Machel. It remains focused on the broad theme of death and its impact on the history of Mozambique in subsection 4 that follows. But it now does so by reflecting upon the possible import of ‘execution as a mode of governance’, and specifically by re-examining Frelimo’s secret executions, sometime in the first decade of Mozambican independence, of Uriah Simango, his wife and a number of his colleagues, a group that had come to form the movement’s internal opposition when in exile in Tanzania in the 1960s. It suggests that these extremely secretive executions can best be seen as negative outcomes of the self-righteous vanguardism that has come to haunt Frelimo in power up to the present. Part II then concludes (in subsection 5) by examining a further series of deaths: the wave of mafia-style killings that, in this century (and beginning with the assassination of crusading journalist Carlos Cardoso in 2000), has come to be called ‘Mozambique’s quiet assassination epidemic’. How best, finally, to interpret such an unsavoury recent phenomenon as this grisly ‘epidemic’?

Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1080/03056244.2020.1792119

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