While splits within the liberation movement and coercive postindependence social and economic policies created a base of domestic discontent, the emergence of Renamo cannot be understood without understanding the geopolitical situation of Mozambique during the Cold War. When Frelimo came to power in 1975, Mozambique was bordered by two white-settler regimes, both of which faced internal challenges from nationalist guerrillas. 



Rhodesia was facing an armed threat from the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), whose guerrilla army had been operating from Mozambique since the early 1970s. In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) launched a campaign to unseat the apartheid regime through domestic acts of terrorism perpetrated by armed cadres trained across the border in “friendly” or “front-line” countries. Frelimo offered safe haven to all African liberation movements, including the ANC and ZANU.


 Rhodesia took these acts as a declaration of war, and Renamo grew out of the Rhodesian effort to mount a counterthrust. The Rhodesian military and security establishment recruited discontented Mozambicans based in Rhodesia, including colonial-army veterans and ex-Frelimo guerrillas who had lost out in the factional struggles of the 1960s. Later, to swell the ranks, the Rhodesian army and its Mozambican subsidiaries targeted areas of discontent within Mozambique. They raided reeducation camps and prisons, releasing unjustly imprisoned Mozambicans and offering them a chance at revenge.


 Although its domestic support was at first shallow and its funding wholly foreign, the new Mozambican insurgency was filled with hungry recruits spoiling to topple Frelimo’s postindependence government. With its key military and political bases in central and northern Mozambique, Renamo also resurrected claims of Frelimo’s “southern bias” in order to rally the support of peasants throughout the countryside. South Africa stepped in as the major financial backer of Renamo after Ian Smith’s Rhodesia became Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.


 The South Africans encouraged the insurgents to expand their internal operations and their social base. In addition, right-wing backers in Europe and the United States assisted Renamo in developing a clear political agenda, advocating a capitalist approach to development and a transition to multiparty democracy. By late 1984, Renamo was operating in every province of Mozambique and had grown eightfold, from 2,500 to nearly 20,000 soldiers. Nor was Renamo’s growth purely the result of foreign money and logistical support. 


Owing to substantial research completed after the war, the once-prominent view that Mozambique’s civil war was simply a South African–backed destabilization campaign has given way to a more complex picture in which the local dynamics of the war, and local support for Renamo, also emerged from Frelimo’s socialist ideology and highhanded efforts to make peasants change their customary ways. 


Renamo’s appeals fell on ready ears at least in part because Mozambique’s peasant majority was reeling from the disastrous effects of Frelimo’s failed socialist agricultural policies and nationalization campaigns. Further, Frelimo was overthrowing traditional village leaders and sending in party cadres to enforce a program of social transformation that became more coercive and increasingly dictated by state-security concerns as the 1980s wore on.