The Origins of FRELIMO and Mozambican Socialism
The African independence movements of the 1960s were extremely influential in the process of Mozambican decolonization. None, perhaps, boded better for the varied Mozambican liberation fronts than the 1961 independence of northern neighbor Tanzania (at the time just the mainland of Tanganyika) and the ascension of its first leader Julius Nyrere, after whom the main beachside promenade of Maputo is now named. The friendly outpost of Tanzania came to harbor almost exclusively all of the exile liberation fronts working for Mozambique's independence from Portugal.¹ In this safe haven, one group, The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, or FRELIMO, under its highly cosmopolitan leader Eduardo Mondlane, was consolidated from the three main regional Mozambican liberation groups at the behest of Nyrere in June of 1962.²

Mondlane had been educated in South Africa, Portugal, and in the United States, where he became a university professor. Later he made contacts and acquired crucial knowledge on international politics as an official at the United Nations.³ He was a close friend of Nyrere and others in the West which made financing his liberation project fairly easy. Also, his high level of education and achievement, despite the racial segregation and limited opportunities within the Portuguese colonial administration, endeared him to those crushed or otherwise undermined by the system. Mondlane's presence above all showed that there existed viable alternatives to a white led administration of an independent Mozambique.⁴

Two years after its birth, FRELIMO decided upon taking a militaristic approach to the liberation of Mozambique, particularly as it recognized that its wish to monopolize support from the Mozambican population was based on its ability to seize hegemony over the existing spate of armed resistance to the colonial order.⁵ FRELIMO benefitted particularly by virtue of being a second generation group in relation to the earlier anti-colonial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, drawing lessons about guerrilla warfare from both the aborted uprisings in Angola and Guinea, and the successful revolutions in China and Vietnam. Mondlane's group also profited from the support of Algerian and Tanzanian militants as well as receiving training, logistical support, and supplies from both the Soviet Union and China. All this occurred under the nose of the West, thanks largely to Mondlane's impressive diplomatic skills in assuaging US fears, and undoubtedly, his education in the United States.⁶

After the consolidation of the group under Mondlane, FRELIMO committed itself to a strategy of armed insurrection which began in late 1964. Initiating combat on the colonial state with only 250 men, a sporadic guerrilla war was fought with the Portuguese colonial authorities, with the infant guerrilla army effectively confined to the sparsely populated and economically unimportant northern provinces of Niassa, Cabo Delgado, and Nampula.⁷ However, it wasn't until four years later that this exile-founded and led movement first promulgated its policy line at its Second Congress in July of 1968. This was due to the many internal ideological arguments incumbent to FRELIMO's status as an umbrella organization formed from disparate Mozambican liberation movements.⁸ This successful Congress was boldly held on liberated territory within Mozambique, a highly symbolic gesture of both resistance to the legitimacy of Portuguese rule and the "return" home of a strong national liberation organization. The core results of this Congress were as follows:

The Central Committee was expanded to include more of the younger radicals who backed the twin concepts of social revolution and a prolonged guerrilla campaign based on politicising the peasantry and establishing co-operatives. The Congress also approved the concept of working with like-minded international movements and adopted the analysis that the war was against class enemies not race enemies. These propositions placed FRELIMO ever more clearly at the socialist end of the spectrum of world political opinion.⁹

Importantly, this socialist ideology, interested mainly in social reform and substantive national autonomy, clashed in many important ways with the Cuban model and methods while also maintaining a fundamentally different nature. This is an important detail because during Castro's insurrectionary war, his ideology and aims were not well established. In the case of Mozambique, the policies pursued FRELIMO had been forged during the many disputes between its internal factions during the late 1960s.¹⁰ These particular differences as expounded by Gillian Gunn and Alex Vines serve not only to show the differences between the Cuban and Mozambican plan, but reflect that in the face of an imposition of a foreign model a unique ideology was formed and articulated for the particular needs of Mozambique. The Cuban model and recommendation, as expounded by Che Guevara in Dar es Salaam during the mid-1960s, promoted the importance of the working class in the liberation struggle while downplaying the need for the long term mobilization of the peasant masses.¹¹ Mondlane disagreed vigorously with this template. He saw instead that,

Mozambique...was a peasant dominated country with virtually no working class, and Maoist-style long-term mobilization of the peasantry was better suited to Mozambican conditions than Guevara's "foco" strategy [a strategy of forming a liberated zone in the mountains, then after gaining strength, expanding towards the cities]¹²...Mondlane's opinion was influenced by FRELIMO's experience a few months earlier in Mozambique's Tete province, where a foco-style strategy had produced disastrous results.¹³

The particularities of the Mozambican condition did much to make Marxist policy choices an attractive and necessary option. However, the socialist path decided upon by Mondlane, and later his successor Samora Machel, who had succeeded him after Mondlane's death in 1969, were first and foremost part of the liberation project which sought to raise the quality of life in a decolonized Mozambique. It was a development plan devised and defended, with the help, of but not at the behest, of China or the Soviet Union in the realm of Cold War polarities, and was indeed framed and instituted by the Mozambicans with much autonomy. Of particular interest to support this necessity of policy choice and commitment to socialism was the fact that the Cuban model, a Third World sister who had also looked to implement socialism after a national "liberation" struggle, was rejected. Thus, the socialist project in Mozambique can be perceived to be an autonomous and historically necessary revolution used as a vehicle to right the wrongs of hundreds of years of colonialism, and also to set right gender and class bias present in the indigenous cultures of Mozambique.

Independence Era Socialist Development: Gains and Failures under FRELIMO
With independence guaranteed nine months from the Portuguese-Mozambican negotiations held in Lusaka, Zambia in September of 1974, the transfer of power to FRELIMO was consolidated without consideration for elections or referendum. This was due to the recent change in government in the imperial metropole, which had originally taken shifted away from the fascist dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar and its conservative policies concerning the independence of its African colonies in 1968.¹⁴ The military scene changed along with the political one and by the early 1970s, Margaret Hall and Tom Young have concluded, the situation was the following:

Despite war fatigue the Portuguese army, and especially the élite units, could still inflict damage, but "spread eagled" across Mozambique, they could not prevent infiltration, pacify the countryside or injure fatally the guerrilla infrastructure. They would not have been able to win. However, few expected the end to come as swiftly as it did...But the end, when it came, was a consequence of the collapse of military will in Lisbon and reflected the cumulative effects of thirteen years of wars in Africa and the prospect of eventual defeat in Guinea-Bissau, as well as the deterioration in Mozambique itself.¹⁵

The decisive push came on the 25th of April 1974, when a coup d'état headed by General António de Spínola took power. This group embraced the idea of self-determination for the colonies, which naturally gained support among the demoralized military forces serving in Mozambique. These events led to the rapid decision Portuguese withdrawal from Mozambique, and the institutionalization FRELIMO as the single party and administrator at the helm in Lourenço Marques, soon to be rechristened Maputo, was set.¹⁶

While there existed little challenge to the legitimacy of the FRELIMO government, it was still a party created and led by exiles, many of whom, like Mondlane, had been outside the country for many years. Most crucially, it was above all an élite party based primarily on theory, with little attachment to vast numbers of regular Mozambicans and conditions on the ground. However, this élite were modest enough to acknowledge that large steps needed to be taken in order to understand the unique needs of a unified Mozambique and therefore intense studies of the history, social structure, and economic development were compiled so as to formulate appropriate policy based on correct information.¹⁷

This research led to the consolidation of the socialist project as proclaimed at the Second Congress seven years previous:

At first there was no particular orientation of Frelimo towards Marxist thought, and the dominant ideas of Mondlane were little different from those of other African nationalists. However, following the power struggle which ousted [traditionalists] Nkavandame and Simango in 1969-70, the party moved sharply to the left. From then on its leadership became much influenced by the pragmatic Marxism of Amilcar Cabral with his classic identification of neo-colonialism, as well as colonialism, as the enemy to be confronted. When it took power in 1975, Frelimo was already armed with a range of policies and an analysis of the task to be done which reflected the revolutionary ideologies of the 1960s, of Cuba and Vietnam as well as those Cabral and the PAIGC [African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde]. However it was only in 1977, at its Third Party Congress, that it declared itself to be a Marxist-Leninist Party.¹⁸

Early on, FRELIMO had felt that it was indeed the Mozambican people who would be able to make the rational choices required to propel the advancement of society. It thus reached out to the traditional leaders of African society, as well as the oppressed groups of workers and women. This was a plan originally cast in the administration of the three northern provinces that it had controlled up to the eve of independence, where it had made impressive advances in setting up schools, clinics, and stores as a way of protecting its support base while amassing popular support.¹⁹

Now thrust, however, into responsibility for the administration of all ten Mozambican provinces, FRELIMO policy was required to introduce a major change in the execution of its socialist development plan; that of a centralized, vanguard Marxist-Leninist state. Despite the moniker and its connotation of intolerance, Malyn Newitt asserts that the state was quite conscious of the dangers posed by the single party system, which it took pains to avoid while allowing a modicum of dissent and promoting self-criticism.²⁰

While FRELIMO, the guerrilla liberation army, looked to overthrow Portuguese colonial oppression, the FRELIMO social revolution promised by the government sought to destroy all forms of internal oppression, in particular that of ethnic rifts and gender bias, as well as the problems caused by ignorance. In creating equality through social integration, the government focused on universal literacy. While a goal in and of itself, this skill was crucial as a stepping stone to the future development of the country, that of a modern economy based on mechanized farming and industrialization run by educated and properly trained Mozambicans. The Portuguese tongue, ironically, was introduced as the official language and the state attempted to eliminate gender, ethnic, and rural schisms by standardizing the community construction itself through the introduction of communal villages with democratic structures. All of these measures were a way to achieve Samora Machel's vision of Mozambique's modernization: "The main objective of the revolution is to destroy the system of exploitation and build a new society which releases the potential of human beings, reconciling them with labour and nature."²¹

Machel, head of FRELIMO since Mondlane's assassination by FRELIMO dissidents and traditionalists in 1969, had been at the forefront of policy aimed at such goals. His projects paid off early. In the first six years of independence primary school enrollment nearly doubled from 700,000 to 1,376,000 and the adult literacy campaigns were beginning to have an effect. Half a million adults were enrolled in the campaigns, 40% of whom were women.²² The report of OXFAM, a development non-governmental organization (NGO) in Mozambique, noted that in the eagerness to raise the standard of living of its population, the government used its new vanguardist centralization to great effect, winning international praise for its success in establishing an efficacious health care system and improving literacy while simultaneously fostering an impressive production efficiency. The group also notes that secondary school enrollment increased from 20,000 to 135,000 and that, by the end of the 1970s, Mozambican health workers had vaccinated approximately 90% of the population against smallpox, tetanus, and measles. Most dramatically, the infant mortality rate dropped by 20 percent in the space of just a few years.²³

As is always difficult in developing a modern society from a colonial structure based on exploitation, FRELIMO had to grapple with both the elimination of traditional and colonial social structures and to find a way to manage meager resources, not the least of which was time, a precious commodity in subsistence agriculture, which was asked particularly of rural Mozambicans in order to carry out education initiatives and literacy campaigns. This was the beginning of tensions between Maputo and the rural peasants who largely tended land only for the survival of themselves and their extended families.

The economic aspects of FRELIMO's administration originally focused on agricultural production as a base in order both to gain hard currency for imports as well as to support the vast array of social programs embraced by the Maputo central government. The commodification of agriculture further looked to create food surpluses with which to feed the urban population, which it felt could only be done through forming state-owned farms. As part of its socialist development project, it also looked to instill the sense of a New Man, much like the metaphysically free argument stated earlier by Che Guevara, about how the material conditions in a socialist society bring about a man motivated by moral, not material, incentives. Thus the rural population was organized into farming collectives.²⁴ While feeding the widely dispersed population of Mozambique, the hope was that in the collectivization and commodification of agriculture, cash from its sale abroad could be invested in industrial development, which would propel the country into developed status while providing the country with domestically growth subsistence for its nutritional and caloric needs.²⁵

Like the agricultural sector, the state control over the industrial realm of the economy was seen to achieve two goals fundamental to socialist development:

[The collectivization and state control strategies] were intended to have the double objective of immediate increases in production and the transformation of social and economic structures; with the latter would come political and ideological transformations as well.²⁶

For FRELIMO state-led planning was about both production and social discipline; about the destruction of the "class enemy" and the creation of the classless basis of the FRELIMO state.²⁷

As such, the thrust of FRELIMO economic policy was also rooted in the idealism of socialism and pushed by a central government with little else than theoretical knowledge of agriculture and industry, as had also been the case in Cuba. It therefore could be expected to run into problems in its concrete implementation. Particularly problematic to the development of socialism in extremely undeveloped countries is the over reliance on its only immediately available natural resource, human labor. "Moral incentive" and sacrifice therefore were expected to overcome the lack of other resources or funding. Failures and mobilization problems were then interpreted by the centralized authority as a lack of will power or, worse, counter-revolutionary attitude.²⁸

Also, the idealism of FRELIMO's socialist policies compelled them to express a moral solidarity over economic reward at the macroeconomic level. In trying to serve as an example of the New Man through their leadership, the government chose to disrupt two traditional forms of income that Mozambique had traditionally relied on in for its hard currency, that of acting as a passage way for goods from the interior and eliminating the migrant labor system with South Africa.

During 1976, less than a year after independence, and probably one of the less than pragmatic decisions taken by the young government, Mozambique shut its borders with the white settler regime of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. This was done in cooperation with international sanctions against the government in Salisbury as well as to help Robert Mugabe's black liberation insurgents succeed. In closing its borders to, and thus cutting its economic ties with, its landlocked neighbor who had long depended on Mozambican sea outlets, this meant for the already resource-strapped coastal country:

In economic terms alone this move cost Maputo some US$ 550 million in lost revenue from cargo entering and leaving Rhodesia through Mozambican ports. The revenue obtained from this activity had been one of the mainstays of the pre- and post-independence Mozambican economy.²⁹

Hall and Young similarly estimate that this cost Mozambique "250 million in revenues but add that the early attempts by Rhodesia to destroy border infrastructure amounted to another "21 in damage.³⁰

Likewise, the effort to disrupt the migrant labor patterns between Mozambique and South Africa was a principled stand that it could ill-afford to maintain. The FRELIMO administration was ideologically committed to the elimination of this system because it exploited its inhabitants. The seasonal migration patterns disrupted family relationships, caused health problems, and took its young productive age males out of the Mozambican economy.³¹ Maputo was forced to compromise on this issue, however, since it was a major source of income for the country. It did choose to systematically disrupt the system by various means, but unlike the Rhodesia sanctions, this hurt only the Mozambican income and therefore impoverished its people and caused unemployment within the country. Moreover, it was a decisive step and once FRELIMO chose to reinstate some migration, it did not reenter the lucrative system as it once was:

In 1976 Mozambique closed seventeen of the twenty-one WENELA (Witwatersrand Native Labour Association) recruiting centres. It also declared old passports invalid and was slow to produce the replacements, but by the time the new immigration procedures at last became properly operational, the Chamber of Mines had in fact altered its labour policies.³²

Thus the government of Mozambique compromised its idealism by returning to the well-paying, but ultimately exploitative, relations with South Africa but gained less remuneration than before due to South Africa's efforts to solve its labor crisis by recruiting from more friendly governments like Malawi.³³

In short, the internal problems with socialism in Mozambique were the non-connectedness of the élite Mozambican FRELIMO administration with practical needs of the country which alienated the peasants in particular, but also the workers; the over-extension of resources to social programs which did not take into account the costs of such policy, which compounded massive debt due to the failure of the agricultural initiatives; and the decision to eliminate the system of migrant labor with South Africa along with refusal to act as a passage way for Rhodesia to the Indian Ocean.

External Factors Subverting Mozambican Socialism
It is not doubted that Mozambican socialism ran up against problems due to problems within the socialist model itself, which were mainly the result of allowing theoretical decisions to override practicality. In particular the problems associated with its agricultural policy which had failed because of inexperience and centralization, as well as problems regarding peasant cooperation in surplus producing farming.³⁴ These caused massive problems within Mozambique because of the squandering of scarce resources while also curtailing traditional sources of income contrary to practical economic sense in the name of socialism. These caused many of the economic problems that would eventually force the government to allow for liberalization and privatization the economy in the mid-1980s.

However, unavoidable disasters and external factors also played a huge role in subverting the structures that socialism depended upon in order to maintain its viability as a development model. Portuguese colonial infrastructure and economic were not designed for use by a Mozambique free of the colonial core, so much of the economy needed to be built upwards from its foundations. Also, in the harvest seasons right after independence floods had ruined crops and droughts threatened a large scale famine. To top it off, Mozambique's formative years came within the context of the market conditions caused by the OPEC oil crisis of the earlier 1970s. Economic conditions resultant of this last factor resulted in the degeneration of its terms of trade with other nations as well as forced Mozambicans to divert a greater percentage of their resources to the purchase of petroleum products.³⁵

Rachel Waterhouse discusses the result of Mozambican independence:

National independence was declared in 1975, and in response virtually all the Portuguese colonials and many of the Asian traders left Mozambique in a mass exodus. FRELIMO inherited a fragmented nation, governed by colonial laws and a weak administrative machinery. Some 98 per cent of its African population were illiterate. The fleeing Portuguese took with them whatever goods and capital they could, plus all their technical and managerial skills. What they could not carry - tractors, buildings, cattle - they destroyed. Commercial production and rural and urban trade collapsed in their wake.³⁶

Newitt continues by noting that the nationalization process of housing, as well as abandoned enterprises and lands, fueled a snowball affect. Those who saw property nationalization fled the country, and in turn, the state nationalized the abandoned property, thus continuing a rapid cycle of flight and state takeovers.³⁷

While the economy was drained of capital and skilled personnel during the exodus, the economic structures that they had left behind were already inappropriate for use even in the hands of the new government:

The particular form of Portuguese colonialism had produced a distorted colonial structure in which the economy was heavily dependent on supplying labour services and transport facilities of for the stronger economies of the region, notably Rhodesia and South Africa. These features, combined with the unique characteristics of Portuguese racialism and the need to provide employment for Portuguese immigrants, had created an economy which even by colonial standards was peculiarly backward and devastating in its effects on the African population - who, as a result, were largely excluded from the modern sector in both consumption and the acquisition of skills of all kinds.³⁸

Hall and Young explain that in addition to the unexpected amount of work left ahead of the Maputo administration due to the destruction of any real economic framework and people with which to operate it, environmental disasters in the years immediately after independence destroyed agricultural production. Admittedly, these authors concede, better agricultural policy could have alleviated the problems of food provision during the times of these crises, but they are also quick to point out that the problems imposed by environmental conditions on the Mozambicans were particularly nasty in the late 1970s:

The Limpopo and Incomati rivers flooded in early 1977 (the worst floods in living memory), making some 400,000 people homeless and causing some $34 million worth of damage. The Zambezi flooded in early 1978, resulting in some $60 million worth of damage and affecting some Mozambique's most fertile zones. Serious water shortages in some parts of the country (especially Inhambane) turned into full-scale drought in 1980, leading the government to make an urgent appeal for international food aid. By the end of 1980 the drought was seriously affecting about 1.5 million people in six of the countries ten provinces.³⁹

Machel's government after independence aligned itself closely with fellow liberation movements in southern Africa, as Tanzania's Nyrere had done for Mondlane and others a decade earlier. Here ideology and racial solidarity had won out over practical considerations that would have done more to develop Mozambique itself. Before independence and the subsequent blockade of its western border, FRELIMO had allowed Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwean majority movement to operate from FRELIMO's liberated territory on the Rhodesian border, and in so doing provided them with a safe haven against Rhodesian retribution. After independence, as discussed earlier, Mozambique shut its border with Rhodesia. This well-intentioned policy choice was the result of fervent revolutionary idealism, but was to become what could be called the first shot in the civil war that was to engulf Mozambique until the end of the Cold War and the fall of apartheid. What began as a blow to the economy of Mozambique soon culminated in severe political and military concussions.

The Rhodesian response to the embargo was not long in coming, and within a few months, in June of 1976, Salisbury had created a group calling itself the MNR, which in Portuguese came to be known as RENAMO, The Mozambican National Resistance. The group began by broadcasting propaganda against the Mozambican government and complemented it with pro-Rhodesian rhetoric. Later in the year it began to train recruits in Rhodesia, culled mainly from the black diaspora in Johannesburg and Lisbon, with Intelligence Service funding and resources. The core of the group came to consist of "a mixture of disgruntled Portuguese and black Mozambicans, dissidents from FRELIMO, veterans of the colonial army (black and white and many of whom had fled to Rhodesia upon Mozambican independence), some intellectuals, middle class businessmen, and régulos (traditional chiefs)."⁴⁰

Following Rhodesia's transfer to a majority ruled, non-racial society and name change to honor the pre-colonial African kingdom of Zimbabwe, South Africa inherited the reactionary anti-FRELIMO insurgents. Pretoria's original tiff with Maputo was its inclination to support black liberation groups in the region. For South Africa this meant that Mozambique would likely aid its main black insurgent banned political group, the African National Congress. Later impulsion to interfere with the sovereignty of its neighbors came from the fear of further Soviet operations in the region which had been supplying war matériel to the Cubans in Angola. The trepidation that the Soviets would aid black liberation groups within South Africa caused it to adopt a policy bent on curbing the Evil Empire's influence in the region. This proactive anti-communist initiative became known as the "Total Strategy."

Furthermore, the neighboring black-ruled states had recently kicked off an initiative to reduce the region's economic dependence on South Africa, embodied in the SADCC, the South African Development Coordinate Conference, which was seen as a political expression of regional solidarity.⁴¹ Thus, South Africa was compelled to subvert the Mozambican government for three specific reasons,

First, it supported ANC activity and allowed the movement to infiltrate South Africa. Second, there was an anti-FRELIMO guerrilla movement available to use against the regime and to pressure it towards concessions. Third, Mozambique was assigned a key role in SADCC, serving as the nerve center for transport and telecommunications...The destabilisation of Mozambique would therefore also constitute a serious set-back for the emancipation of the frontline states of the region vis-´-vis the apartheid hegemon.⁴²

The government of Mozambique then found itself embroiled in a civil war fought against a rebel movement manned by young, impressionable, and often genuinely disgruntled Mozambicans but controlled and coordinated from outside. Ostensibly, the group espoused freedom and democracy as the processes necessary for the development of Mozambique. In reality, RENAMO had no alternative governing manifesto. They sought only to discredit the ruling party, this is evident in how they carried out their rebellion. If they were interested in protecting the interests of the nation a large, one wonders why they chose a campaign of terror. The targets of this group included roads, railways, power plants, and other economic installations, the main thrust of the assaults being against symbols of FRELIMO. Therefore, the objects at which RENAMO directed its wrath were the main accomplishments of the FRELIMO government, i.e. the state-run schools, health clinics, local administrations and their administrators, leaving a swath of infrastructural damage and discouragement that destroyed the government's ability to carry out its social policies effectively.⁴³

In the final analysis, the price paid by FRELIMO's decision to implement socialist development policies was war. OXFAM estimates the cost, one can only surmise the loss of potential:

The toll of war was tremendous. According to UN estimates, close to one million lives were lost through war, hunger, and diseases. Nearly two million refugees fled to neighboring countries, while an estimated four million people were internally displaced (from a total population of 17 million). Mozambican Finance Ministry calculations put the cost of "damage and lost development" at $15 billion. Schools and health posts across the country lay burned out or abandoned, industry was in ruins, domestic transport at a standstill. By 1994, over two million Mozambicans still depended on international food aid. Mozambique was among the poorest nations in the world, with an average annual income per head of only $88.00, and two thirds of its population living in "absolute poverty," according to the World Bank. It was the most indebted country in the world (relative to income), and the most aid-dependent.⁴⁴

This war, and the government who supported its insurgent antagonist against FRELIMO was rightfully condemned in the publication of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission last year, whose job it is to seek justice for the wrongs of the apartheid government. They found that:

The South African government's security strategy was shaped by the doctrines of pre-emptive interventionism and counter-revolutionary warfare. By the 1980s, the region had become an arena of cold war confrontation. For the leadership of the government and the SADF [South African Defense Forces], the war in Angola and the other conflicts across the region were good and just wars, part of the West's resistance to a perceived Soviet global offensive...[However] it is the Commission's view that the destruction wrought on the region by South Africa's counter-revolutionary war, particularly in Angola and Mozambique, was disproportionate to the threat posed by their post-independence governments and the fact that they played host to groups engaged in armed resistance to the South African government. At the time of their independence in 1975, Angola and Mozambique were severely underdeveloped and posed no credible military threat to the Republic of South Africa. Centuries of colonial exploitation had left them with a legacy of poverty and without the skills to build and manage a modern economy...From the evidence before the Commission, it appears that, while some acts of regional destabilisation may have been a defense against Communism, the purpose of the war was also to preserve white minority rule in South African and was, therefore, a race war.⁴⁵

Regardless of South African motivation, the war could be seen as the decisive factor in Maputo's decision to retreat from socialist ideals towards more pragmatic policy based on liberal capitalism. A shift away from socialism was seen as the only way to both cope with the costs of war and to pacify the opposition. Therefore the war started from outside, above all, was the reason for the end of socialism in Mozambique.

Chapter 3: Notes