By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

TO underline why Mozambique’s independence in 1975 was such a glorious turning point for Zimbabwe and the southern Africa region, it might help to start with a 1970 book on this region by a North American Zionist supporter of white rule in southern Africa.
The author’s name was Nathaniel Weyl and his book was tittled Traitors’ End: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Movement in Southern Africa, published by Arlington House.
Weyl reached the same conclusion about the fate of southern Africa which Henry Kissinger, as National Security Advisor to former US President Richard Nixon, had also reached in his 1969 National Security Memorandum Number 39, the Kissinger Study of Southern Africa:
l That all the African liberation movements of the entire region were under siege. They were banned in their own white-ruled territories and their leaders were either in jail/detention or in exile;
l That the white minority economies and regimes were thriving despite bad press and purported UN sanctions against Rhodesia;
l That in military terms, all the independent African states in the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and the liberation movements could never take-on the combined firepower of South Africa, Rhodesia and the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique;
l That the white settler-regimes were importing poor whites from all over Europe and resettling them throughout the region in order to boost white populations against African majorities and therefore help secure a permanent white settler-future;
l That through the massive importation of poor whites into the region, apartheid would be extended to Rhodesia and there the African majority population would soon be confined to Bantustans in the lowfeld;
l And that, finally, the interests of the Eastern bloc countries who supported African liberation movements (the so-called communists) had already been defeated.
The context of these conclusions was the global US policy also applied to southern Africa in which the purpose of the Marshall Plan was not limited to the economic reconstruction of Europe.
It included the reconstruction of white supremacy by replacing European nationalisms in Europe and in European settler-colonies with what Gerald Horne calls a ‘synthetic whiteness’ or a superior form of pan-European solidarity driven by rightwing anti-communism.
The US- sponsored form of global white supremacy considered itself to be above German racism, Italian fascism and colonial apartheid because it offered pan-European solidarity under the guise of combating communism and promoting ‘development’. (Horne, 2001: pp.54, 81, 90-93, 93-129)
The involvement of the US in Zimbabwe has consistently reflected one of the consequences of the Marshall Plan; the ability of the US to influence and even determine the policies of its European allies through strategic resource control, such as the control of petroleum.
By declaring southern Africa to be ‘the Persian Gulf of Minerals’, the US served notice to its European allies that their southern Africa policies had to be in line with US policy and US interests, just as in the real Persian Gulf itself.
That was why the title of Weyl’s book had to mislabel all African liberation movements in the entire region as ‘the communist movement’.
If one looks at the chronology of events as well as anti-communist and anti-African pronouncements by various white leaders as supporters of the colonial project in the region, Weyl’s conclusions would seem at the time to represent the inevitable truth.
In 1951, Dr A. L. Geyer, white South Africa’s Ambassador to the UK, addressed the Royal Empire Society in London and said, among other things, that:
“One fact can be put dogmatically: South Africa and Rhodesia are not part of Africa. Both have built up a permanent white population and established a modern state on European lines.”
On January 24 1957, the colonial journal East Africa and Rhodesia published a story entitled ‘American Congress Member’s Report on African Visit: Tribute to British Administration in East and Central Africa’. This was about a US intelligence gathering team led by Mrs Frances Bolton.
The team travelled through Africa from Addis Ababa in Ethiopia to Cape Town, South Africa. Its main purpose was to gauge the extent of Eastern Bloc influence on African nationalism and African liberation movements. Boton reported to the US Congress:
“We cannot close our eyes to Russia’s invasion of Africa. Just as she took hundreds of students from China and gave them education in their Communist schools, so is she (Russia) doing with hundreds of starry-eyed young Africans who see only the vision of freedom told to them” by communists.
On April 11 of the same year 1957, East Africa and Rhodesia journal reported: “US Vice-President (Richard M) Nixon’s Report on His African Visit: Great Stress on Plans of International Communism.”
In other words, US interest in measuring the extent of the influence of the Eastern Bloc in Africa was elevated from the level of Congresswoman Bolton to the level of Vice-President Nixon within a matter of months.
So, by the time Nixon himself became president in 1969, the US had already intervened in the Congo against Patrice Lumumba; and it was Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger who authored the 1969 Kissinger Study of Southern Africa which concluded that:
“The whites (in Rhodesia, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa) are here to stay and the only way that constructive change can come about is through them. There is no hope for the blacks to gain the political rights they seek through violence, which will only lead to chaos and increased opportunities for the communists.”
This meant that by 1969, the US Government’s thinking was that African independence would probably end at the Zambezi and the rest of southern Africa would evolve to become like white Australia with a sprinkling of African reserves.
Looking at this chronology, it is easy to understand why the Rhodesian settler-minority regime declared unilateral independence from Britain on November 11 1965; why it dared hang the first African guerillas without referring to Britain in 1968; and why it proceeded to dispossess the African majority of even more land by reconstituting the so-called Land Apportionment Act of 1930 as a more severe Land Tenure Act of 1969.
Having been told by the biggest white imperial power that they were here to stay, the whites assumed a very defiant mood. In Rhodesia, from 1969 to 1971 the regime bulldozed a whole community of the Tangwena people, more than 3 000 families, off their land.
In 1975, the same regime assassinated Herbert Chitepo, the Chairman of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) in Zambia and proceeded to pass the Indemnity and Compensation Act which exempted all armed personnel from any charges that could be brought against them for crimes committed ‘in good faith’ against the African population.
The Act was made retroactive to 1972! This white law meant, among other things, that African freedom fighters would be shot on sight and would not be treated as prisoners of war in terms of the Geneva Conventions.
The Meaning of Mozambique’s Independence
Although the period from 1969 to 1975 marked the gloomiest era in the history of Zimbabwe’s struggle for liberation and independence, liberation movements in Angola, Guinea and Mozambique made great strides from 1961 onwards.
It was their armed struggle which caused the Portuguese military to opt to overthrow the fascist Salazaar dictatorship in Lisbon rather than continue to wage unwinnable wars against the most determined African guerillas in Guinea Bissau, Mozambique and Angola.
The new military Government in Portugal immediately decided that Mozambique and Angola should become independent. The Portuguese coup and the impending independence of Mozambique and Angola surprised all those who had taken seriously the conclusions reached by Kissinger and Weyl.
White South Africa and the US were so shocked by the new situation that they intervened to stop Angolan independence from being won by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in 1976.
But for the freedom fighters of Zimbabwe, Mozambique’s independence on June 25 1975 meant that white Rhodesia was now vulnerable to guerilla infiltrations from the Botswana-South Africa border all around to the Limpopo Valley.
A whole new geo-strategic situation had arisen within months of the Portuguese coup d’etat of April 1974 which precipitated Mozambican independence.
And the new Frelimo Government in Maputo proceeded to give bases and logistical support to the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA), thereby reversing the false prophesies of Kissinger and Weyl.
In the end, the guerilla efforts of African liberation movements of Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique had helped to free not just Zimbabwe; Portugal itself was freed from a NATO/US-supported fascist junta under Antonio de Oliveira Salazaar.
It was the pressure and expense of Portugal’s wars against African liberation movements which forced the Portuguese armed forces to overthrow Salazaar in April 1974.