TRANSCRIPT: SONG FOR SAMORA
Meanwhile in Mozambique itself, they used to speak about the Renamo bandits, the relics of the collaborators with the Portuguese. Renamo, the national resistance movement in Mozambique, had been set up by Ian Smith when he was the Prime Minister of racist Rhodesia, and it included remnants of the Portuguese army – black Mozambicans who’d fought against independence and felt more loyal to Portugal and their Portuguese commanders than they did to the Frelimo government. And they came in from Rhodesia, they were quite well-trained, they were given mines, landmines, everywhere, everywhere… and began to have quite a big impact in Mozambique.
When Rhodesia became independent and became a democratic state in 1980, then that support for Renamo vanished, but South Africa took over. And the South African military were heavily involved and there‘s lots of evidence to prove that. More than just training. It was pretty clear that South African commandos were operating together with Renamo forces.
So, it became quite formidable. And often they behaved in an extremely cruel way, not respecting the laws of war at all. But they had the backing of racist South Africa – technical backing – and they were able to mobilise in terms of many mistakes that Frelimo were making in terms of their agricultural policy, their rural policy and so on. So, it became a bitter civil war.
And the war was just beginning to spread right through the country. And we couldn't basically leave Maputo anymore. We couldn't even go to Bilene, which was like 20km away, a lovely seaside resort. We heard terrible stories of child soldiers being recruited, 11-12-13 year old kids, to carry a gun and to fight against their own family. There were hundreds of thousands of refugees crossing the border into Tanzania, into Malawi, just to escape, and a huge amount of displacement internally. Somehow the nation was being brutalised.
1984. Suddenly there’s an announcement at Nkomati, very close to the border between South Africa and Mozambique. And P.W Botha is there and Samora Machel is there and they sign the Nkomati Accord. It came as a bolt from the blue. They announce to the world that South Africa will stop supporting Renamo and Frelimo will stop supporting the ANC. Big, big, big, flourish. And it hits us! We’re taken by surprise. I was called in by Luís Bernardo Honwana, who’s I think in the cabinet in Mozambique. And he said, ‘Albie, these are hard times for the ANC, keep your heads down.’ It was a warning not to aggravate the situation. And we kept telling them, ‘You can't trust Pretoria, they will renege. They’ll sign and they will renege.’
And Samora Machel calls for a huge march through the streets of Maputo, claiming it's a victory, it’s a victory, they’re defending the Mozambican revolution. And we can understand that the squeeze is on Mozambique. It's not only people were being killed. The economy was being throttled. South Africa organised it that countries in southern Africa that used to use the railway to Maputo harbour diverted. They stopped ships from coming in. There was a kind of economic blockade. The squeeze was economic, and it was also the war was brutal. It was costing so many lives in the country and people were being blown up and losing their legs, and we could understand.
You know the lights would go off, the electricity. We were convinced it was South African commandos doing that. And it wasn't just you didn't have electricity for a couple of hours, it would be days on end, and it meant the pumps in the garages weren’t working so you couldn't use your car. It meant you couldn't even print the ration cards that we had for petrol. Everything slowed down. At that stage I'm living with Lucia, she had a lovely apartment on the 11<sup>th</sup> floor in a building. And I could use my portion of my wages in foreign exchange to buy a canister of gas. So we didn’t have electricity but at least we could have gas for lighting and gas for cooking. But I’d have to carry it up eleven flights, in the dark, counting to make quite sure that I stopped at the 11th floor. These things just became like daily routine.
And now ANC’s being thrown out and I heard stories that when our people left, they went to the airport singing freedom songs, ‘We’ll be back, we’ll be back, we’ll be...’ in a defiant way. The Nkomati Accord produced a lot of anger in the ranks of the ANC. And then we heard a rather extraordinary story that when Joe Slovo was expelled, Samora Machel cried. Joe had given up his seat in a plane from then-Bechuanaland to Samora Machel. So it was very, very close. Joe’s wife Ruth First had been blown up and killed. And now Samora is the one signing the decree that in effect expelled Joe Slovo and we were told that Samora Machel cried. But nevertheless, he proclaimed it as a victory.
A couple of years pass. I get a phone call – please come into work urgently, 7 o’clock. Normally we would start at 7:30. And I come into work. And the Minister of Justice, Dauto, tells us – his face is absolutely bleak – he says, ‘Samora Machel’s plane was brought down.’ And we are stunned, we are stunned. I remember at the time, a week before the plane came down, Rob Davies and Alpheus Manghezi and I – we’d been allowed to stay on in Mozambique because we weren’t there as ANC functionaries. They were working in the Centre for African Studies at the university; I was doing research for the Ministry of Justice, so we could stay on. We would meet with Jacob Zuma, who was the Chief Representative of the ANC in Maputo once a week, just to report on the political situation. And he’d send the report to Oliver Tambo in Lusaka. And Rob had noticed… he was listening to the propaganda broadcast from South Africa, I think 7:15 every morning. And until then, he said, the line of these broadcasts consistently had been: we must save Samora Machel from the clutches of the Soviet Union. And suddenly, he said, the line has changed completely, saying Samora Machel is the enemy of South Africa, participating in the total onslaught against South Africa and we must break his back. And a week later the plane crashes.
It was really a city in mourning. And people were crying… they were crying, they were weeping. The idea of Samora brought down dead. And we have long ceremonies, people – long lines of people seeing Samora’s body lying up in the town hall. There was a wonderful children's dance group that had been set up by a Chilean in exile – a ballerina from Chile, fleeing from Pinochet. And the children in that dance group put on a performance. It was called Canção para Samora, Song for Samora, using the first 7 minutes of Mozart’s Requiem. When I hear that music today, I get… I get gooseflesh. And one of the dancers was Samora’s daughter. It was such a beautiful expression in a profoundly cultural way, their love for Samora Machel.
We were in a state of turmoil in Maputo. And then the news came around that the body of one of Samora Machel's interpreters was going to be buried very, very quickly in terms of Muslim culture. So, we all rushed to the cemetery. There was a very extraordinary moment when the body was on a litter, it was being carried and everybody joined in, and women joined in. And some of the Muslim people there were saying, ‘No, no, that's against our culture and tradition.’ Others were saying, ‘No, this is the revolution, we join in, woman are equal.’ It was a kind of turbulent and uncomfortable and… and complicated moment. Everything was complicated. Our emotions were distraught in every way and somehow this symbolised that… that sense of confusion and anger that we had.
We were totally convinced that that plane was brought down. And evidence came out after a while that there’d been a beacon, a false beacon. That should have been proof enough. In addition, the South African authorities lied. They said that the pilot, the Soviet pilot, the Russian pilot had alcohol in his blood. He didn't have any alcohol in his blood. And they covered up the whole thing. There might have been some connivance from the Mozambican side. To my mind there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever that plane was brought down.
And it was a devastating blow for Mozambique. There’d been problems, heavy problems before. But it was a country that had done so much for us, so much for us. And now their leader was killed because of the support that they were giving us in our freedom struggle in South Africa. And we felt like a double… a double devastation. Immediately afterwards Marcelino Dos Santos, deputy president, meets with Joaquim Chissano. Chissano takes over. But Mozambique never really recovered.
