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

‘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?