When representatives of Frelimo and Renamo signed a peace accord in Rome in 1992, the world breathed a sigh of relief. The war that had raged across Mozambique for 16 years had included all the vicious intrigue of Africa’s “old” civil wars, as well as the horrific, mediacaptivating violence characteristic of the continent’s “new” civil wars. “Old” civil wars—typically those that ended before the fall of the Berlin Wall—could be classified as “ideological” or based on fundamental political and economic divisions.




 “New” civil wars, on the other hand, seem to be motivated by personal greed and local, ethnic, or factional hatreds without much ideological varnish. These wars often feature atrocities gratuitously inflicted on noncombatants. The civil war that wracked Mozambique was one of massacres and mutilations—horrific and widely publicized—that showed in awful terms how civilians can suffer when caught between warring parties. Forced recruitment was the main mode of maintaining the conflict (Frelimo’s official organs called its policy “conscription” while describing Renamo’s practices as “abduction”). 


Large numbers of civilians were injured, raped, and killed; roads, schools, health centers, and local infrastructure were ravaged across the country. After its 1975 guerrilla triumph over Portuguese colonialism, the new Frelimo government had set out to transform the social, political, and economic life of Mozambicans, particularly peasants. These changes were dramatic and unexpected for many in rural areas: Traditional leaders were forced to give way to newly minted “party secretaries,” subsistence agriculture to collective farming, and traditional settlement patterns to state-mandated communal villages intended to facilitate the delivery of health care and education. 


Frelimo openly touted these measures as part of an avowed “Marxist-Leninist agenda,” cultivating close relations with the Soviet bloc and opening its borders to other liberation movements, particularly those challenging the white-run regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa. Moreover, belief in this new agenda was made mandatory. Political freedoms were curtailed. Oppositionists, soldiers and civilians alike, found themselves carted off to “reeducation” camps.


 Frelimo, claiming the legitimacy of a victorious army of national liberation, embarked on this program without bothering to obtain popular consent. But the unity forged in order to throw off foreign rule masked profound internal divisions that had wracked the pro-independence forces since the inception of their struggle in 1962. Eduardo Mondlane, Frelimo’s founder, had sought to bring together a number of independentliberation movements with distinct geographic and ethnic bases. 


These groups included the Mozambique National Democratic Union, the Mozambique National Independence Union, and the Mozambique African National Union (MANU). Mondlane saw a united front, with its pooled resources and coordinated military efforts, as the key to victory. But the groups that coalesced to form Frelimo all brought leaders with ambitions of their own, and their coalition would remain fragile. A controversy during Frelimo’s first year in existence was a portent. 


Two former MANU officials, expelled from the Front after complaining that they had not been elected to the new Central Committee, charged that Frelimo was a southern-dominated scheme to use young Makonde men from northern Mozambique as foot soldiers without giving them a proportionate say in the party leadership. Such tensions would only grow worse as more educated young southerners continued to flee to Tanzania to join the liberation movement. The 1960s would see constant power struggles, with cries of “southern bias” rising again and again. After Frelimo’s Second Congress in 1968, the leadership struggles within the organization came to a head.


 A parcel bomb killed Mondlane in early 1969. His death generated a series of charges and countercharges among the leadership factions. Although Frelimo blamed the Portuguese at the time, it is now widely admitted that Mondlane was a victim of leadership infighting within the anticolonial movement. Power shifted to a Presidential Council composed of Uria Simango, Marcelino dos Santos, and Samora Machel. But the alliance was unsteady and Simango, also accused of assisting in the assassination, lashed out at dos Santos and Machel, publicly criticizing the leadership and internal structure of the movement.


 President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania tried to reconcile the factions, but failed. Simango was ejected from the Presidential Council and Samora Machel consolidated his control. In the period that followed, the new Frelimo leadership intensified the military campaign and sharpened its political agenda, advocating state socialism as the path to development. Many interpreted this shift as a sign of the growing dominance of southern intellectuals in the movement’s leadership. 


Discontented members, hailing largely from the center and the north, left Frelimo to join splinter groups based in Kampala, Uganda, and Lusaka, Zambia. By the time that Frelimo came to power in 1975, these regional splits had hardened, foreshadowing the domestic disputes that would grow in intensity after independence. Key leaders from central and northern Mozambique, among them some of Frelimo’s founders, had gone over to opposition movements. This left the southerners in charge—even though the south had not been a major theater in the war—and feeling free to press their aim of bringing socialism to an independent Mozambique.


The measures that the postindependence government took to move toward this goal worsened rather than eased the lot of peasants nationwide, while efforts to consolidate political rule were equally destructive. Viewing tight control as essential to building socialism, the government suppressed all political activity outside of Frelimo and persecuted anyone accused of having “benefited” from the old colonial regime. 


Marked out for special harassment were members of Frelimo splinter groups and veterans of service in Portuguese-colonial military and police ranks, including many from northern and central Mozambique, where Portuguese recruitment and conscription had been heaviest. Many such Mozambicans found themselves forced into reeducation camps or simply jailed outright. Given the heavy representation of northern and central Mozambicans in the opposition groups, the repression inevitably took on a regional cast that fed the flames of national division. 


To make matters worse, during the independence struggle the Portuguese had forced many northern and central Mozambicans to resettle in protected villages and exposed them to extensive propaganda about Frelimo’s “southern bias.” Most people in these regions had no direct contact with Frelimo until the very end of the independence war.