In an essay written a number of years ago in ROAPE issue no. 127 – and entitled ‘Mozambique, not then but now’ – I explored that country’s lived tension between ‘would-be socialism’ and ‘elite betrayal’, and I draw on that text in the initial paragraphs here in order to set the stage for what follows.1 Thus, in that ROAPE article, I quoted favourably Norrie McQueen’s strong assertion that the initial plans of Portugal’s ‘guerrilla enemies’ did offer ‘a clear alternative to the cynical manipulation of ethnicity and the neo-colonial complaisance of the kleptocratic elites who increasingly defined African governance in the 1970s and 1980s’. In sum, ‘Whatever their fate, the projects of the post-independence regimes of lusophone Africa were probably the most principled and decent ever proposed for the continent. They have not been superseded in this regard and seem unlikely to be’ (McQueen 1997, 236–237).
This seemed to me, as I also argued in ROAPE, to have been especially true of the new Mozambique during its first heroic decade of independence. Equally dramatic, however, has been the reversal of direction that has taken place in the country since that time. For what had been more recently witnessed to, in Alice Dinerman’s words (2006, 19–20), was nothing less than a ‘rapid unraveling of the Mozambican revolution’, with the result that Mozambique, ‘once considered a virtually peerless pioneer in forging a socialist pathway in Africa, … now enjoys an equally exceptional, if dialectically opposed, status: today the country is, in the eyes of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, a flagship of neoliberal principles’ (Ibid.).
In fact, it is difficult to now avoid Dinerman’s ultimate conclusion that,
predictably, many of the leading government and party officials rank among the primary beneficiaries of the new political and economic dispensation. Those who enthusiastically promised that Mozambique would turn into a graveyard of capitalism are now the leading advocates of, and avid accumulators in, capitalism’s recent, full-blown resurrection. (Dinerman 2006, p. 20)
the election of Guebuza [as the new President in 2004, and for a second term thereafter], holder of an expansive business network and one of the richest men in Mozambique, hardly signals that Frelimo will attempt to run on anything but a globalist, neoliberal agenda – regardless of the abject poverty suffered by most of its electorate. (Bauer and Taylor 2005, p. 134 –135)
Unfortunately, such a sombre conclusion has seemed to many observers to be an all too accurate snapshot of Frelimo’s power elite and its now quite questionable national project. And, equally unfortunately, it remains so. Indeed, the present essay reflects my own perplexity with respect to the dramatic collapse (as pinpointed by Dinerman) of Frelimo’s socialist ideals and by the movement’s attendant curtailing of any very substantial democratic empowerment of popular forces in the country. Of course, as I have reviewed this record, I have also been shaken by the role that assassinations – notably the brutal removal of such friends and personal heroes of mine as Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel from the flow of history-making – have had in shaping this outcome; hence my attempt to give such assassinations a more central focus here.
In addition I have been deeply disturbed by a fresh reminder from my own recent research of the key role that the practice of the execution of its critics – often carried out by Frelimo itself – was seen to be warranted by Frelimo leaders as a part of the movement’s goal of consolidating its own power (see Section III below). And there was not only the fact of executions but also the deep veil of secrecy deployed by the political elite of Frelimo to mask its own high-handed practices. Indeed, this latter dimension was at least equally unsettling … and a further measure of the self-righteous vanguardism that had come, ineluctably, to swallow the movement. I regret that I have not given this matter sufficient attention in my previous writing on Mozambique; it is a silence that I attempt to correct here.2 In consequence, this essay also constitutes a reflection on the weight and significance, within the broader turmoil of political change, of both assassinations and executions as events on which too little theoretical and substantive concern has been focused and concerning which too little scholarly debate has taken place.3 Thus this essay is also an attempt to help rectify the weakness in our collective work in this respect.
Of course, it is not hard to explain, structurally, the social realities that have ‘overdetermined’ and negated any more positive outcomes in Mozambique, realities that permit of a Marxist analysis of the demise of ‘Mozambican socialism’ itself. Certainly the country’s inheritance from colonial domination was weak, reflected in the paucity of trained indigenous personnel and in an economic dependence that pulled the country strongly towards subordination to global dictate despite some efforts to resist it. There was also, in this first period, the ongoing regional war that weakened Mozambique and defined it as a principal target of destructive incursions by white-dominated Rhodesia and South Africa and also of the long drawn-out campaign of terror waged so callously and destructively by those countries’ then-sponsored ward, the Renamo counter-revolutionary movement. Finally, and despite Frelimo’s often benign intentions, there were the movement’s own sins once in power, sins of vanguardist high-handedness and impatience, and of the over-simplification of societal complexities and challenges … as well as, underlying all this and in the longer run, a Fanonist-style crystallisation of privileged class formation around the largely undemocratic successor state and economic structures that Frelimo cadres now came to inhabit. Self-evidently, these latter weaknesses created enormous additional obstacles of their own – as they did elsewhere – to any further leftward progress.
Indeed, this has proven to be the case wherever in the world the myth of a necessary ‘vanguardism’ has been confused (often quite wilfully, it would seem) with a correctly perceived and essential need for ‘leadership’; for the truth is that, as a global phenomenon, vanguardism has almost inevitably degenerated (virtually everywhere it has been exemplified) into the spectacle of the political elite then nominating itself for such a role ‘in perpetuity’. And it is this, in turn, that has reinforced precisely the ‘high-handedness’, ‘impatience’, and ‘over-simplification of societal complexities and challenges’ referred to above. The fact is that the only cure for such proto-authoritarianism – even if it has been adopted in the name of some supposed ‘higher cause’ of mass liberation and/or of some claimed socialist goal – is effective democratic structures that are crafted to hold leaders to popular account. The difficult dialectic of socialist politics thus stands revealed. Leadership is necessary (good leadership can certainly problem-solve, educate and enlighten). But it must be linked to a simultaneous process, namely the creation of unequivocally democratic institutions, designed to empower ‘the masses’ further to understand and to act upon their own class interests. For only in that way might they hope to defend themselves against such ‘leadership’ if and when the latter begins to present itself as some ‘absolutely necessary’ vanguard, and to then privilege itself overbearingly within the political equation … as it has almost invariably been tempted to do. Of course, the paradoxical outcome, one that can truly deserve the label of ‘democratic leadership’, is always a work in progress, an ongoing effort to keep both the terms ‘democratic’ and ‘leadership’ in play; neither naïve spontaneism and shallow populism on the one hand nor some smug vanguardism on the other will meet the need for sustained political creativity here!
1. . Of heroes … and assassinations
Where does a more honest and responsible set of leaders fit into this complex equation then? For here is another important theme in recent African history, a theme that must complement our focus on the persistence of neo-colonial economic structures and their cultural resonance and on the foundations of global economic control upon which imperialism has been able to build its continuing shaping of southern African economies in the ‘post-liberation’ period. Thus, a significant variable shaping the direction of change has been the realm of willed intentionality, the shaping of both intention and hope in such a positive and grounded manner as to make the objective possibilities of change actual … as individuals and classes choose to avail themselves of the structural opportunities offered them by history – a theme explored more deeply in my discussion elsewhere of Ernst Bloch’s important work on the politics of ‘hope’ (Saul Forthcoming a, Ch. 1, Section C). But note as well the flip side of this historical coin. For equally possible can be the removal of hope, including, not least, the physical removal – by the tactic of assassination as deployed by enemies of progressive purpose – of the tangible human stimuli of hope: the very leadership cadres who might seek to build and exemplify radical hope … and encourage others to do the same.
The fact is that assassination has shaped the continent’s recent history in ways that are impossible to measure, although even the strictest of those who emphasise structural determinations over other explanations must surely pause to give some autonomous weight to this factor. One thinks in this regard:
of the killing of Amilcar Cabral by the Portuguese (on 20 January 1973 in Conakry) at a crucial stage of his movement’s (the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde [PAIGC]’s) development of a struggle against Portuguese rule in Guinea–Bissau;
of the disappearance in October 1965 (this ‘disappearance’ explained, much later, by uncovering the fact of his murder by Moroccan agents and French police4) of Morocco’s Mehdi Ben Barka, head of his country’s left-wing National Union of Popular Forces and secretary of the Tricontinental Conference;
of the horrific slaying of the Congo’s elected progressive prime minister Patrice Lumumba on 17 January 1961;5
of the assassinations of the leftist figure Pio Pinto in Kenya on 24 February 1965 and of such exemplary and left-leaning South African activists as Steve Biko (12 September 1977), Ruth First in Maputo (17 August 1982), and Chris Hani (10 April 1993);
of the removal, in Nigeria, of Ken Saro-Wiwa, environmental activist and firm non-violent critic of General Sani Abacha’s military dictatorship, who was judged by a special military tribunal and hanged, quasi-judicially, by Abacha’s government;
and of the elimination of Thomas Sankara whose notably progressive presidency of Burkina Faso was ended on 15 October 1987, when he was physically erased in the course of a coup organised by his former colleague Blaise Compaoré.
Who can say where the insight of these and other such cadres – and of the movements that they had inspired and could have helped to sustain – would have taken their respective countries and the continent as a whole … had they lived? Meanwhile, Mozambique itself was, as we discuss below, also to suffer particularly grievously from the scourge of assassination, the movement’s first two presidents, Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel, having been assassinated – so the best evidence would suggest – by those who would seek to deflect the process of revolutionary consolidation in Mozambique. In short, posing questions as to the ‘what ifs’ of history is a particularly tempting pastime for the historian of Mozambique.
But is it a worthwhile preoccupation? Obviously, this sort of daydreaming can open up a mug’s game of mere speculation. Nonetheless, it can also underscore significant realities that, from time to time, have prompted important theoretical discussion, and haunted historians – and not least Marxist-oriented historians – over many years. After all, the assassinations we have mentioned occurred because their perpetrators assumed that the removal from history of the individual so targeted would make a genuine difference to the overall outcome of a situation in play than might otherwise have been expected. In the theoretical literature on such matters this has often been seen as linked to the question of the possible role played by the ‘hero in history’ or, less dramatically, as the question of the role of the ‘individual’ in history. Such a discussion has been most clearly associated with, with, among other writers, the works of Thomas Carlyle in the nineteenth century, Georgi Plekhanov at the very dawn of the twentieth century, Sidney Hook in the mid twentieth century, and Leonid Grinin in the first years of the present century (the items referred to here are Carlyle 1966 [1841], Plekhanov 1940 [1898]; Hook 1943; Grinin 2010). Nonetheless, I was intrigued to come across a recent reference to an Australian workshop – held in March 2019 at that country’s National Centre of Biography – featuring, centrally, a paper prepared by Rhys Williams entitled ‘From Carlyle to Plekhanov: the role of the individual in history’. Indeed, the workshop’s formal announcement explains,
The role of the individual in history has always been a concern for historians and biographers. [But] do individuals shape events or do events shape individuals[?] This workshop examines this old problem through the ideas of Thomas Carlyle and Georgi Plekhanov, the two historians who probably have most influenced our understanding of the individual in history. Carlyle developed, effectively, the best modern example of the ‘Great Man [sic] theory of history’ – in Heroes and hero worship [1841]. And Plekhanov nurtured, effectively, the best Marxist thinking on the role of the individual in history – in his On the role of the individual in history (1898). These two thinkers, in their opposing stances, continue to shape the way historians understand and deal with the issue. Key questions to be explored in this workshop include: What is the relationship between the individual and history? What is the relationship between the individual and society? Can the individual change the course of history? Can the individual break from history? Is history really the ‘biography of Great Men?’6
Consider then some of the main protagonists mentioned above. Thus Carlyle, an eloquent Scottish writer in the nineteenth century, did see history as being made, literally and centrally, by ‘Great Men’ [sic] – in particular by kings and noblemen. But the truth was that society was already in considerable flux even as Carlyle wrote, driven as it was by the further development of capitalism on the one hand and by the voicing of more urgent demands ‘from below’ on the other. The notion of an expanded universe of potential socio-political agency had, therefore, to be much more carefully considered … with, by the end of the nineteenth century, Marxism having emerged as a serious contender in the historiography sweepstakes. True, by then Carlyle’s position was still so visible and so contradictory to Marxism’s emphasis on the importance of larger structural determinants at play in defining outcomes that in his own seminal text Plekhanov challenged Carlyle quite specifically … while also spelling out the case for a history much more deeply grounded by social-structural concerns and by such broad realities as those linked to the mode and relations of production, to the telling impact of capitalism’s emergence and to the class determinations of social struggles that it gave rise to. Plekhanov did demonstrate some awareness of the role of individual within the social equation, of course, but found ‘the individual’ to be a frail reed indeed within such a readily described context of overdetermination by socio-economic structure and the realities of class (see again the section on Ernst Bloch and ‘hope’ in Saul Forthcoming a, Ch. 1, Section C).
Enter, stage right, Sidney Hook, who took dead aim at Plekhanov’s approach a half century later – finding real room for the Hero’s role in history (indeed, the book by Hook most often referred to in this connection is entitled, precisely, The hero in history). True, Hook was also fully aware of the necessary tension he evoked in his volume’s subtitle: A study in limitation and possibility! As he wrote in Chapter 6, ‘The framework of heroic action’,
Whenever we are in position to assert that an event-making man [sic] had had a decisive influence on a historical period, we are not abandoning the belief in causal connection or embracing the belief in absolute contingency. What we are asserting is that in such situations the great man is a relatively independent historical influence – independent of the conditions that determine the alternatives – and that on these occasions the influence of all other relevant factors is of subordinate weight in enabling us to understand or predict which one of the possible alternatives will be actualized. In such situations we also should be able to say, and to present the grounds for saying, that if the great man had not existed, the course of events in essential respects would in all likelihood have taken a different turn … [Indeed,] the fact that [we] can offer grounds for believing what the historical record would be like, if some person had not existed, or if some event had not transpired, indicates that in the realm of history, as in the realm of nature, pure contingency does not hold sway. Contingent events in history are of tremendous importance, but the evidence of their importance is possible only because not all events are contingent. [In fact] the whole answer to our inquiry depends upon the legitimacy of our asking and answering – as indeed every competent historian does ask and answer – what would have happened if this event had not happened or that man had not lived or this alternative had not been taken. (Hook 1943, Ch. 6, emphases in original)
True, Hook did have a chequered intellectual/political career of his own throughout his long life.7 Nonetheless, his book took the tension inherent in the above-cited subtitle very seriously, that is, the tension between ‘limitation’ and ‘possibility’. As Grinin summarises the point,
Hook’s book was a noticeable step forward in the solution of Great Man influence on historical development and [is] by far the most profound work on the issue in question. Hook convincingly and at times rather figuratively states a number of important propositions that allow [one] to avoid extremes to a certain extent. In particular, in Chapter 6, he notes that, on the one hand, an individual’s activity in fact is limited by the environmental circumstances and the society’s character, and, on the other hand, where there appear alternatives in the society’s development [wherein] the role of the individual increases dramatically up to the point when it becomes an independent force. (Grinin 2010)
Hook was seeking, precisely, to identify the space wherein principled leadership, at once ‘heroic’ and progressive, could operate creatively … and expect to make a difference (see for example his account of Lenin’s role in Russia in his chapter 10, ‘The Russian Revolution: a test-case’). Note, too, his especially interesting chapter 7, entitled, provocatively, ‘“If” in history’.8 Here as elsewhere in his book he does point to the existence of a number of potential moments of creative possibility where individuals have had a significant role to play, although he acknowledges that any such argument is to be embarked upon cautiously and circumspectly. In addition, in his own strong and boldly exhaustive paper, Grinin also investigates a number of theoretical tensions that hover around such a juxtaposition of ‘the individual’ and ‘history’ … including, not least, the ‘what if’ question itself.
2. . Assassinations: Mozambique and Eduardo Mondlane
Needless to say, we must take similar care as we approach the ‘what ifs’ of Mozambican history. Few countries have paid such a high price for the tactic of assassination, deployed as a scorched-earth means of its enemies’ resistance to change, as has Mozambique. Thus, as noted above, the movement’s first two highly regarded presidents, Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel, were both, it seems reasonably clear, assassinated by the enemies of their country’s freedom: in Mondlane’s case by the Portuguese defence apparatus and in Machel’s case by South Africa’s apartheid state itself. The precise impact upon the future of Mozambique of the physical removal of such ‘heroes in history’ is extremely difficult to determine, however. We have already alluded to a range of structural and historical factors that played a role in overdetermining outcomes in Mozambique. But precisely what weight can we attach, simultaneously, to the presence and absence of particular ‘heroes’ within such a tangle of determinations; this is, as noted above, one of the many problems that must qualify any single-mindedly structural explanation. In fact, Marxists (like me) – for such is the pull upon us of our own preferred emphasis on structures that are formidably determinant – must be particularly wary of methodological overkill here.
The fact is that such ‘heroes’ have often made a real and tangible difference in defining the nature and (relative) success of the liberation struggle as led by Frelimo; moreover, the snuffing out of their candles of consciousness and commitment certainly weakened the forward thrust of any radical project that the Frelimo movement had in mind. Mondlane, for example, was a towering figure, a Mozambican who had escaped the socio-economic prison of colonial Mozambique, had done undergraduate studies in South Africa (from which country he was expelled by the apartheid government in 1949) and in Portugal (Anonymous 1972). With the help of American missionaries, he had then proceeded to the United States and Oberlin College for his BA; subsequently he took up graduate work at Northwestern where he earned a doctorate in Anthropology. He then worked for the United Nations’ Trusteeship Commission (including assignments in several parts of Africa) and even visited Mozambique towards the end of his UN days. He concluded his American stay (by then he was seeking the freedom to undertake the kind of Mozambique-related political work that his UN appointment barred him from) by accepting an appointment at Syracuse University. It was from there that he returned to Africa to participate in the founding and consolidation of Frelimo.9
Indeed, Mondlane was the one figure who could command the attention of the three pre-existing exile nationalist movements – the National Democratic Union of Mozambique (UDEMANO), the Mozambican African National Union (MANU), and the National African Movement of Independent Mozambique (UNAMI) – scattered geographically around the region, as well as other young activists (he had himself been a founding funding organiser of the National Union of Mozambique Students [UNEMO], which indeed had on one occasion led to his arrest by the Portuguese authorities). Slowly but surely, he and others began to bring many members of these diverse groups together under a shared banner. Not easy work, as George Roberts had reminded us in identifying the maze of cross-currents (global, intra-Tanzanian and intra-Mozambican, ethnic, racial and ideological) that tore across Dar es Salaam in the 1960s (Roberts 2017). And yet, as Herb Shore also adds in noting that Frelimo’s unity was crucial, Mondlane and his immediate colleagues ‘avoided the imposition of rigid dogma and hierarchy, and constantly allowed for the interplay of conflicting views and positions’ (Shore 1983, xxvii)! Was this an anticipation of what politics under Mondlane’s leadership might have looked like had the latter lived to see Mozambique through to independence?
Of course, it is also the case that such tensions may eventually have played a significant role in Mondlane’s own assassination. Nonetheless, by the time of his death he had succeeded in overseeing the building of a movement that was strong and united enough to mount an effective military challenge to the Portuguese. In addition, and in large part because of Mondlane’s own credibility, Frelimo found support for itself within the Organisation of African Unity and, in particular, from Julius Nyerere (who had become a close friend of Mondlane’s); indeed, it was Nyerere who granted Frelimo guerrillas a just-across-the-border rear base from which to enter Mozambique in order to engage their colonial enemy. And this Frelimo’s in-country guerrilla presence played, in turn, a crucial role not only in rallying Mozambique’s African population but also in undermining the self-confidence and commitment of large numbers in the Portuguese army itself. Small wonder, then, that Mondlane was a particularly important target of those Portuguese army ultras who preferred to fight to the end.
True, there are some complications to the story of Mondlane’s actual murder, even if, importantly, the Tanzanian police were able to trace the assembly of the bomb that killed him to Lourenço Marques and to the Portuguese themselves; the latter is in fact a credible attribution that most observers now accept. Just how the package containing the bomb – the package that Mondlane opened – found its way through the Frelimo internal mail system is less clear, however, with this suggesting that other hands, within Frelimo itself, were also at work in making the murder plot a successful one. Here, as one of my correspondents noted,
Silverio Nungu was blamed, but nobody else was ever named, or brought to justice in independent Mozambique, although I think some people had a pretty good idea of who they were. I think the silence was for internal political reasons. So such loose ends as there are now deeply buried. (Personal communication)
But we must also ask here just what Mondlane had to offer that made him such a marked man for the Portuguese. Certainly his organisational capacity and political savvy warranted Lisbon’s special attention in its war to shore up its imperial presence in Mozambique. In addition, his political line had come to crystallise around an ever more radical economic approach. As he put the point:
I am now convinced that FRELIMO has a clearer political line than ever before … The common basis that we had when we formed FRELIMO was hatred of colonialism and the belief in the necessity to destroy the colonial structure and to establish a new social structure. But what type of social structure, what type of organization we would have, no-one knew. No, some did know, some did have ideas, but they had rather theoretical notions that were themselves transformed in the struggle.
Now, however, there is a qualitative transformation in thinking that has emerged during the past six years which permit me to conclude that at present FRELIMO is much more socialist, revolutionary and progressive than ever and that the line, the tendency, is now more arid more in the direction of socialism of the Marxist Leninist variety. Why? Because the conditions of life in Mozambique, the type of enemy which we have, does not give us any other alternative. I do think, without compromising FRELIMO which still has not made an official announcement declaring itself Marxist-Leninist, I can say that FRELIMO is inclining itself more and more in this direction because the conditions in which we struggle and work demand it. (Mondlane, interview)10
Indeed, as Mondlane argued in the same interview, it would be ‘impossible to create a capitalist Mozambique’ because ‘it would be ridiculous for the people to struggle to destroy the economic structure of the enemy and then reconstitute it in such a way as to serve the enemy.’
But what about another question of contemporary resonance: ‘Mondlane: the democrat?’ The implications for the future of such a question is perhaps no less speculative than the question ‘Mondlane: the socialist?’ but both questions provoke thoughts about what night have been the possible future of a post-independence Mozambique under Mondlane’s leadership. Would Mondlane not also have said that ‘It would be impossible to create an undemocratic Mozambique’? In retrospect it might be argued that, insofar as Mozambique’s future lay in Frelimo’s own hands at the moment of independence, the most fundamental flaw in its project was precisely its broader weaknesses in the sphere of democratic theory and practice. True, it was not that Frelimo, in the post-Mondlane years, ignored this issue altogether. Indeed, the Frelimo leadership revelled in the fact that a great deal of its military success had come from listening to and working with the people on the ground as the movement advanced its armed struggle. Moreover, one of its most dramatic policy initiatives in the very first days of its holding power was the attempt to deepen the populace’s own sense of fundamental empowerment through the establishment of the grupos dinamizadores (literally local ‘dynamising groups’ deployed for purposes of political mobilisation) in urban neighbourhoods, rural villages and in workplaces. However, the messiness of such democratic processes-in-the-making did not greatly appeal to those used to the military orderliness of Nachingwea camp. It proved all too easy for Frelimo leaders, in their arrogance of power (albeit often, at least in the early days of power, with the very best of intentions and with full commitment to the ‘popular cause’) to convince themselves that they knew best, and knew, absolutely, what was required. Moreover, this was an organisational trajectory that, very soon, the adoption of official ‘Marxism-Leninism’ – with its stern Stalinist rationale for vanguardism and its firm sense of the Party’s historical certainty – could only reinforce.
Thus, opposition was sometimes merely crushed (as we will see below) and mass organisations (the Organisation of Mozambican Women [Urdang 1989], the trade unions and the like) created ostensibly as mechanisms of popular empowerment all too quickly became more like transmission belts for delivery of the party line. Critical debate that should have been the lifeblood of a revolutionary process all but dried up within a stale and predictable media milieu (although there were signal exceptions). ‘Tradition’ (seen to have its negative side in spheres like gender relations and exaggerated deference to old-style authority), religious conservatism, and ethnic and regional sensitivities became, as examples of obscurantismo, only so many negative constraints to be overridden from on high, rather than being viewed as the deep-seated social realities they were, there to be worked upon politically, balancing leadership against mass initiatives, in much more nuanced and open-ended ways. At its most grotesque this tendency was revealed in the ‘solution’ – a way to relieve problems of urban overcrowding, it was said – that became ‘Operacao Produçao’. Here – this forced removal of ‘excess’ and unemployed populations out of the cities and to more rural sites, in 1983 – was a prime example of the kind of raw tactics of intended transformation that, in their negative impact, would ultimately provide hostages to Renamo and also help to rot out much of the high moral purpose that had originally inspired Frelimo.
This is not to be wise after the event. Writing in a ‘Forward’ to the second edition of Mondlane’s book, The struggle for Mozambique, in 1983, I had already evoked such thoughts, seeing them as being as relevant to contemplating the then still (somewhat) open future of Mozambican socialism, as they may now be to writing an epitaph for Frelimo’s entire left experiment (Saul 1983). I then noted that a number of ‘danger signs’ that threatened the vigour of the emancipatory process that Frelimo professed to value were quite visible, including considerable ‘inertia in facilitating mass action and self organization by the workers and peasants’; in ‘the over-valuing of top-down interventions and administrative solutions’; and in the adoption of an ‘official Marxism’ whose ‘sterile definitions’ could only serve ‘to deaden Marx’s emancipatory message’. Such tendencies seemed to me to cut against the profoundly democratic thrust both of Mondlane’s book and of his political proclivities more generally. As I then wrote, Mondlane’s own socialist, even ‘Marxist-Leninist’, premises (as expressed in an interview given to Aquino de Bragança and previously cited) remain ‘framed [in] his book, by [an] insistence that Frelimo’s political project cannot exist outside of or above the Mozambican people itself’; indeed, as I added, ‘as long as the [democratic] sensibility that had informed Mondlane’s book remains at the center of Frelimo’s practice, there is a strong likelihood that the country’s goals will be achieved’ (Ibid., xi)!
Once again, we cannot say for certain what would have become of this, Mondlane’s own democratic sensibility, in the ‘real world’ to come.11 It is certainly true that the pressures that sprang from the kinds of regional conflagration, institutional disorder and economic difficulty that his successors had to face merely complemented the temptations of power and privilege that ensnared so many of them. What is sure is that his immediate successors in the Frelimo leadership did not manifest nearly enough of this democratic sensibility in their socialist years (or more recently for that matter), as a number of the old militants from that period have confessed quite ruefully to me in some of my interviews over the years. Of course, it is difficult to isolate this one factor, the lack of democratic sensibility, from all the other relevant and at least equally ‘determining’ variables. Nonetheless, the costs of the absence of such a sensibility were probably quite high. What then if Mondlane had been permitted to live? As suggested above, he just might have made a real difference in facilitating the consolidation of a much more genuinely democratic Mozambique, one to build a more open future upon.
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TO BE CONTINUED: Part II of this essay, to be found in the next issue of ROAPE , will focus first (in subsection 3) on the second of the devastating assassinations that have hit the leadership of Frelimo over the years, that of Mozambique’s first president, Samora Machel. It will thus continue the discussion begun in this essay’s first part, but it will then, in subsection 4, expand its survey of ‘death and development’ in Mozambique by exploring the shadowy executions in Mozambique by Frelimo itself of other senior political figures, not least Frelimo’s former vice-president (a position he held in Tanzania in the days of exile) Uriah Simango. Part II will then conclude (in subsection 5) with a consideration of the wave of more recent assassinations – seen by some to constitute a ‘quiet assassination epidemic’ – that has occurred in Mozambique.