The African hero in Mozambican history: on assassinations and executions – Part I

SUMMARY

‘A gun shot in the middle of a concert [is] something vulgar, [yet] something which is impossible to ignore’, writes Stendhal, the greatest of political novelists. The same is true of death – especially of death by assassination and death by execution – in the political analysis of Africa. For, as argued here in two linked texts, one in this issue of the Review of African Political Economy, ROAPE, and a second in the following issue of ROAPE, such intrusions of planned and orchestrated deaths are seen to have provided key moments in African politics (and, not least, in Mozambican politics), albeit moments that have too seldom been allotted the theoretical attention they warrant or debated with the seriousness they deserve. In this Part I (and its subsection 1) of the present contribution to the Debate section of ROAPE, different ways of approaching this matter are first reflected upon. Then, in subsection 2, some of the issues so raised are exemplified with reference to the first of the two most pertinent assassinations in Mozambican history, the assassination in 1969 (in Dar es Salaam) of Frelimo’s first president, Eduardo Mondlane. In Part II of this essay (to appear in the next issue of ROAPE), the discussion of Mondlane and his assassination will be complemented by a reflection on the assassination in 1986 of his immediate successor as Frelimo president (and the eventual first president of Mozambique), Samora Machel. Several other related matters will also be discussed in this Part II, matters I will anticipate at the end of this first part (below). But such sections, too, will help us to bring into focus the main theme of this two-part article and of the subsequent debate it seems to stimulate, which are: just what difference can the several assassinations and executions that have scarred Mozambican history be thought to have made to the shaping of longer-term outcomes in the country’s history; and what, more generally, can we hope to learn from such a closer examination of the ‘what ifs’ of history?

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

John S. Saul, a founding editor of ROAPE, is Professor Emeritus, York University, Canada and has also taught at the University of Dar es Salaam, the Universidade de Eduardo Mondlane, and the University of the Witwatersrand. A long-time solidarity activist, Saul has published some 26 books on southern Africa, including, next year for Cambridge University Press, Race, class and the thirty years war for southern African liberation, 1960–1994: a history.

Notes

1 On this, see my article in ROAPE issue 127 on Mozambique entitled ‘Mozambique: not then but now’ (Saul 2011): see also the entries on Mozambique that appear in my Race, class and the thirty years war for southern African liberation, 1960–1994: a history (Saul Forthcoming b).

2 The politics of the extra-judicial execution of opponents once a post-liberation state and legal system is in place demands reflection, whether one is opposed (as I am) to capital punishment or not. Of course, it is self-evident that the killing of the enemy is an inevitable part of warfare, not least in the entirely ‘just wars’ that southern African liberation struggles were. It is also regrettable that, in such cases, the necessity to kill can also have a coarsening effect on combatants’ moral predilections and values.

3 Nor is this only true of the Mozambican historiography. As regards South Africa, for example, the decision by the United Democratic Front (UDF) to vote itself out of existence in 1991 rather than continue as a powerful social-political watchdog that could now keep a critical eye even on the African National Congress (ANC) when necessary has always been a controversial one as I have noted elsewhere (see my Chapter 2, ‘The transition: the players assemble, 1970–1990’, in particular at pp. 90–91 and 96, Saul and Bond 2014). In trying to follow up on the question as to why this should have happened, I have heard numerous allusions to the role played by ANC violence against (even the killing of) vocal dissenters within the then UDF … and also clear indications of fear as regards any suggestion of researching the topic much more closely.

4 As the Wikipedia entry on Ben Barka records, ‘Many theories attempting to explain what happened to him were put forward over the years, but it was not until 2018 that details of his disappearance were established by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman in his book Rise and kill first: the secret history of Israel’s targeted assassinations. Based on research and interviews with Israeli intelligence operatives involved in planning the kidnapping of Ben Barka, Bergman concluded that he was murdered by Moroccan agents and French police, who ended up disposing of his body’ (Wikipedia n.d.; Bergman 2018).

5 Lumumba’s demise was marked in the Guardian newspaper 50 years later (17 January 2011) by an article written for it by George Nzongola-Ntalaja (2011). It was there described as being ‘the culmination of two inter-related assassination plots by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed’ – a murder that the article then seconds Belgian author Ludo De Witte in labelling it ‘the most important assassination of the 20th century’. See also Victoria Brittain (2006), ‘Political assassination as a strategy against liberation movements’.

6 I learn directly from Rhys Williams, however, that he is still working to produce a final text of the talk he gave in Australia – a testimony, no doubt, to the sheer complexity of the task of pinning down answers to the kinds of questions he has chosen to raise. See also, for a guarded scholarly advocacy of a revival of the history of ‘great men’, Margaret MacMillan’s History’s people (2017).

7 Thus Hook had begun his intellectual life as a convinced Marxist and only slipped away from that position when he witnessed the deadening distortions that the Soviet Union under Stalin would inflict upon Marxist theory and also the full impact of the resultant anti-democratic and self-righteous (vanguardist?) thrust such a sub-Marxist creed now came to thrive upon. Not that this gave him any excuse for the excesses of the rabid right-wing post-Marxist position that Hook himself would eventually arrive at, a position that found him joining the ranks of the Encounter magazine apparatus, this journal being a key CIA-sponsored Cold War ideological weapon of the capitalist right. An unsettling trajectory, to say the least.

8 Indeed, Hook sets up a careful discussion of ‘“If” in history’ in that chapter by setting off from the question: ‘Under what circumstances can a scientifically credible rather than an imaginatively credible answer be given to questions of this sort, a question’ (Hook 1943, 120). This is the question he seeks to provide an answer to in the pages of the chapter that follow.

9 See Herb Shore’s exemplary biographical sketch, ‘Resistance and revolution in the life of Eduardo Mondlane’ (Shore 1983). This was published as one of the two introductory essays to a second edition (the first edition was published by Penguin Books in 1969) of Mondlane’s The Struggle for Mozambique; I was myself honoured to be asked to write a new ‘Forward’ to the book which also appears in that second edition (Saul 1983).

10 I transcribed and translated this passage from a tape then in the possession of the late Aquino de Bragança. I am grateful to Aquino for the subsequent opportunity to quote from it several times in later years. In it Mondlane also stressed the importance of learning from the ‘concrete experience, including the errors of the socialist countries which since 1917 have worked and lived the socialist experience’.

11 As a friend wrote in reaction to a similar section in an earlier draft, ‘What would have happened to Mondlane’s “democratic sensibility” had he lived? In the absence of a democratic culture among the people, don’t you think the iron law of oligarchy could be relied upon to operate – the result being overdetermined?’ A good question, of course.