SANF 06 No 87
Southern Africa will commemorate in October the 20th anniversary of the death of Samora Moises Machel, Mozambique’s first president and leader of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo).
Machel and 34 others, including some of his closest aides and advisors, died when the presidential plane, returning from a summit in Zambia, crashed at Mbuzini in South Africa on 19 October 1986.
The cause of the crash has not been officially determined, although circumstantial evidence points to a false navigational beacon placed by the former apartheid regime in South Africa to draw the plane off course.
President Armando Emilio Guebuza, who chaired the Mozambican inquiry in 1986 which did not have full access to materials held by South Africa, said his government will not rest until the circumstances of the death of the country’s first president have been fully clarified.
Unveiling a plaque in memory of Machel, Guebuza described him as “a farsighted leader and a visionary politician.”
He was speaking at ceremonies in the north of the country, in Pemba, to mark Armed Forces Day, the anniversary of the launching on 25 September 1964 of the liberation war to free the country from Portuguese colonial rule.
This year, the date marks the start of a month of commemorations of the 20th anniversary of Machel’s death, including a ceremony at Mbuzini.
The memorial at Mbuzini is perched on an isolated hillside and has, embedded in a cement base, 35 vertical steel pillars, one for each person who died. They cast long shadows over the base, and the wind causes a permanent whispering through small incisions in the pillars.
The monument was designed by well-known Mozambican architect, José Forjaz, who is Director of the Faculty of Architecture at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo. Forjaz says the memorial “has a number of meanings – symbolic, aesthetic, and even acoustic…”
Machel was the leader of Frelimo, which toppled the colonial Portuguese administration through guerrilla warfare.
Machel became the first president of Mozambique at independence on 25 June 1975, and his government accommodated liberation fighters from South Africa and Zimbabwe who were still battling to overthrow the apartheid and Rhodesian regimes.
