Visualising FRELIMO’s liberated zones in Mozambique, 1962–1974

Abstract

Headquartered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) engaged the Portuguese army from 1962 to 1974 in a ground war over Mozambique’s independence. At the centre of this military struggle were the geographical regions of the liberated zones, areas in northern Mozambique that FRELIMO designated as under its control. In order to make an exile movement present and real for illiterate populations, FRELIMO trained a group of its soldiers as photographers, who travelled across Mozambique to photograph the war. This act of photographing and distributing images had its political advantages for drawing international aid, but these image-making processes also risked disrupting the ethnically diverse coalitions that made up FRELIMO’s military and popular support. In an effort to address scholarship on liberation movements in Africa, which has overlooked the importance of photography, this article considers the technical, technological, and structural mechanisms FRELIMO instituted from 1962 to 1974 to facilitate the production and circulation of photographs of its liberated zones. Reading FRELIMO’s photographic archive of the liberation struggle against the stories of their producers and users allows for an understanding of how the visualising of the liberated zone enabled FRELIMO to situate itself as a national movement with broad regional and ethnic support inside Mozambique, all the while articulating for international audiences a multiracial and countrywide war effort. The liberated zone was not just a physical landmark, but its picturing transformed it into a visually constituted category for foreign and local populations to identify with an independent Mozambique under FRELIMO’s control.

Keywords:

• exile
• armed struggle
• photography
• national identity

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2010 Bonani Africa Festival of Photography, 2010 Love and Revolution Conference at the University of Western Cape, and lastly at the Camps Conference at the University of Western Cape’s Centre for the Humanities. I would like to thank Mary Jo Arnoldi, Erin Haney, Allen Isaacman, Paolo Israel, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, Christian Williams, and the two anonymous peer readers of this journal article for feedback on earlier versions of this paper. I also extend my gratitude to the staff of the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique and the Centro de Documentação e Formação de Fotografica who helped with the gathering, identification, and digitising of included images.

Notes

1. I credit Ambassador Peter Odalla, Margaret Dickinson, and David Morton for directing my attention to this and other propaganda made by the Portuguese military and distributed in FRELIMO-controlled areas.

2. I viewed the propaganda titled “We are all Portuguese” in Margaret Dickinson’s film Behind the Lines. I was unable to obtain the actual image. I would also point out that underlying the messages expressed within the propaganda cited here were claims of territory and citizenship where blacks were citizens not of Mozambique but of Portugal since Mozambique existed because of Portugal and therefore was one and the same with Portugal.

3. I was unable to locate these specific photographs, but it was through interviews with Paul Silveira (2010), a worker at the FRELIMO printing press in Tanzania during the liberation, struggle, and with the DIP director Jorge Rebelo (2008) that I was able to reconstruct the earlier images produced and circulated within FRELIMO.

4. When asked about African cooperation in 1971 with FRELIMO, Marcelino dos Santos was rather critical of the Organisation of African Unity’s (OAU) and in general Africa’s involvement in Mozambique. He stated (Schneidman 1978), “We believe that the help which the OAU has given us so far is very valuable, but it is not nearly sufficient to satisfy the needs of liberation. From a slightly different perspective, isn’t our problem in Africa today a problem of solidarity? Some African countries have not yet been able to understand the part they are supposed to play in the process.” FRELIMO’s alignment with solidarity groups in the West and its adoption of Chinese- and Russian-influenced socialism can also be read as an active effort to fill the ideological and economic voids left unfilled by the ideologies of Pan-Africanism and the organisational failings of the OAU.

5. The OAU’s Liberation Committee first facilitated interaction between FRELIMO, the Soviet Union, and China. But, increasingly towards the late 1960s, FRELIMO had direct contact with the Chinese government, which donated weapons and trained FRELIMO soldiers. The Soviet Union provided FRELIMO with de facto representation by voting in its position on the United Nation’s Security Council for African bloc countries before it directly donated weapons to FRELIMO in the 1970s. The Soviets also maintained influence in anti-colonial forums that did not include China.

6. In the wake of Mozambique’s independence from Portugal, Uria Simango publically asked FRELIMO for forgiveness of his transgressions. Nevertheless, FRELIMO secretly executed him sometime between the late 1970s and early 1980s.

7. The soldier on the left is using the self-loading Soviet PPSH-41 sub-machine gun, which had high rates of fire and 71 rounds with a magazine drum. The soldier in the centre is using the Soviet DShk heavy machine gun in anti-aircraft configuration, while the third soldier (right) carries a Soviet Mosin-Nagant Model 1944.

8. Many delegations visited Cabo Delgado also because of its proximity to Tanzania. Unlike the Portuguese, FRELIMO did not have at its disposal military transport such as tanks, trucks, or helicopters, which made trips to Mozambique difficult. This focus on Cabo Delgado because of proximity as well as the political tensions that dominated the region was a potential reason for why many of the images within the FRELIMO liberation struggle’s photographic archive are of Cabo Delgado and its populations.

9. In an interview (2010), Johansson recalled travelling for Dagens Nyheter on the Swedish Prime Minister’s official visit to Tanzania in 1968. Over the years before then, he had got to know both Eduardo and Janet Mondlane on their frequent visits to Sweden. While in Tanzania, he received permission from President Julius Nyerere to cross Tanzania’s border with Mozambique and to travel to the liberated areas. See “Anders Johansson: Journalist and Member of the Swedish South Africa Committee – Africa correspondent of Dagens Nyheter – Regional reporter of Dagens Nyheter.” Interview with Ted Sellström. Nordic Documentation on the Liberation Struggle in Southern Africa. February 10. http://www.liberationafrica.se/intervstories/interviews/johansson_a/?by-name=1.

10. Robert van Lierop’s film A Luta Continua, which Matias referenced here, was one of the first FRELIMO films that did not stage a Portuguese military attack. Lierop managed to obtain live footage that he incorporated into the film.

11. And here, I draw from Stuart Hall (1997) and Mahmood Mamdani (1996) to conceptualise ethnicity not only as regional and tribal categories of identification around which internal factions developed inside FRELIMO.

12. The signing of the Lusaka Accord marked the transferring of sovereign control of Mozambique from Portugal to FRELIMO.