2 - From the Rovuma to the Maputo: Confluences of Independence, 1974–1975

Summary

Within a year of the 1973 revelations of the Wiriyamu massacre (see Chapter 1), the Carnation Revolution in Portugal toppled the New State and Frelimo was catapulted into the position of being able to demand independence for Mozambique. As Rui Assubuji and Patricia Hayes recount, in November 1974, shortly after the signing of the Lusaka Accord that brokered independence, Samora Machel was flown from the Zambian capital to Nachingwea, the Frelimo military base in Southern Tanzania close to the border with Mozambique. With him were Frelimo officials and journalists from Lourenço Marques who had taken the inaugural flight from the Mozambican capital to Dar es Salaam on a new route that opened following the Carnation Revolution; from Dar they travelled to join Machel in Zambia. Journalist Migueis Junior published a series of accounts of this trip in the newspaper Notícias, recalling that he and his colleagues looked down from the plane, searching ‘down on the ground for the key that would perhaps open for us the secret, the magic of Frelimo’s most famous political-military centre.’ This vertical perspective onto the territory was one that had, during the armed struggle, only been available to those operating on the side of the Portuguese army. Now that Frelimo was poised to take over the government of Mozambique, it was they who could command this view from the skies, and this too signals a shift in orientation of the films made with Frelimo away from addressing only international audiences to capturing the hearts and minds of the people of Mozambique.

Back in Tanzania for the occasion was Yugoslav camera operator Dragutin Popović, who had made Venceremos with the liberation movement (see