Samora Moisés Machel

Biography

Samora Machel was born in 1933 in Gaza Province, in southern Mozambique, to a farming family that suffered under Portuguese colonial rules. After mission schooling he trained as a nurse in Lourenço Marques from 1954, working as a hospital aide while studying at night, and protested against lower pay for Black nurses.

Warned that the secret police were watching him, he left in 1963 to join FRELIMO in Dar es Salaam, trained as a guerrilla in Algeria and ran FRELIMO's camp at Kongwa in Tanzania. Once the independence war began in 1964 he became a leading commander, especially in Niassa, and later head of the army. After Eduardo Mondlane's assassination in 1969 he shared the leadership in a triumvirate and became FRELIMO's president in May 1970, steering it toward Marxism-Leninism.

After the 1974 coup in Lisbon, FRELIMO negotiated the Lusaka Accord, and on 25 June 1975 Machel became the first president of independent Mozambique, heading a one-party socialist state. Mozambique applied sanctions against Rhodesia and sheltered liberation movements, while a Renamo rebellion begun in 1977 with Rhodesian backing was later supplied by South Africa. In 1984 he signed the Nkomati Accord with South Africa, which promised to stop aiding Renamo in exchange for Mozambique curbing the ANC.

On 19 October 1986, returning from a summit in Zambia, his Tupolev aircraft crashed at Mbuzini, just inside South Africa, killing him and 33 others. A South African-led inquiry blamed the crew, while Mozambique and the Soviet Union suspected a decoy navigation beacon.