Uria Simango
Encyclopedia
Mozambique
Mozambique, officially the Republic of Mozambique , is a country in southeastern Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi and Zambia to the northwest, Zimbabwe to the west and Swaziland and South Africa to the southwest...
Presbyterian minister and prominent leader of the Mozambique Liberation Front FRELIMO during the liberation struggle against Portuguese colonial rule. His precise date of death is unknown as he was extrajudicially executed (along with several other FRELIMO dissidents and his wife, Celina)
by the post-independence government of Samora Machel
Samora Machel
Samora Moisés Machel was a Mozambican military commander, revolutionary socialist leader and eventual President of Mozambique...
. A biography of Simango was published in 2004 .
Simango was a founder member of FRELIMO, serving as Vice-President from its formation in 1962 until the time of the assassination of its first leader Eduardo Mondlane
Eduardo Mondlane
Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane served as President of the Mozambican Liberation Front from 1962, the year that FRELIMO was founded in Tanzania, until his assassination in 1969.-Early life:...
, in February 1969. Simango succeeded Mondlane as FRELIMO's president but, in the power-struggle following Mondlane's death, his presidency was contested. In April 1969 his leadership was replaced by a triumvirate comprising the Marxist hardliners Samora Machel
Samora Machel
Samora Moisés Machel was a Mozambican military commander, revolutionary socialist leader and eventual President of Mozambique...
and Marcelino dos Santos
Marcelino dos Santos
Marcelino dos Santos is a Mozambican poet, revolutionary, and statesman. As a young man he travelled to Portugal, and Paris, France for an education. He was a founding member of the Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique , in 1962; and served as the party's deputy president from 1969 to 1977...
as well as Simango . The late 1960s FRELIMO was blighted by fratricidal infighting with a number of party members dying of unnatural causes . See also .
The triumvirate did not last; Simango was expelled from the Central Committee in November 1969, and Samora Machel
Samora Machel
Samora Moisés Machel was a Mozambican military commander, revolutionary socialist leader and eventual President of Mozambique...
and Marcelino dos Santos
Marcelino dos Santos
Marcelino dos Santos is a Mozambican poet, revolutionary, and statesman. As a young man he travelled to Portugal, and Paris, France for an education. He was a founding member of the Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique , in 1962; and served as the party's deputy president from 1969 to 1977...
assumed total control. In April 1970, Simango left for Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
where, with other dissidents like Paulo Gumane (Frelimo's founding vice-General Secretary), he became a leader of COREMO, another small liberation movement.
After the Portuguese Carnation Revolution
Carnation Revolution
The Carnation Revolution , also referred to as the 25 de Abril , was a military coup started on 25 April 1974, in Lisbon, Portugal, coupled with an unanticipated and extensive campaign of civil resistance...
in 1974, Simango returned to Mozambique
Mozambique
Mozambique, officially the Republic of Mozambique , is a country in southeastern Africa bordered by the Indian Ocean to the east, Tanzania to the north, Malawi and Zambia to the northwest, Zimbabwe to the west and Swaziland and South Africa to the southwest...
and established a new political party "National Coalition Party" (PCN) in the hope of contesting elections with FRELIMO. He was joined in the PCN by other prominent figures of the Liberation movement and the FRELIMO dissidents: Paulo Gumane and Adelino Gwambe (also a founder member of FRELIMO), Father Mateus Gwengere and Joana Simeao.
FRELIMO opposed multi-party elections. The post-1974 Portuguese government handed over sole power to FRELIMO and Mozambique gained its independence on June 25, 1975. Samora Machel
Samora Machel
Samora Moisés Machel was a Mozambican military commander, revolutionary socialist leader and eventual President of Mozambique...
and Marcelino dos Santos
Marcelino dos Santos
Marcelino dos Santos is a Mozambican poet, revolutionary, and statesman. As a young man he travelled to Portugal, and Paris, France for an education. He was a founding member of the Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique , in 1962; and served as the party's deputy president from 1969 to 1977...
took over as its first President and Vice-President. Graca Machel
Graça Machel
Graça Machel, DBE is a Mozambican politician and humanitarian. She is the third wife of former South African president Nelson Mandela and the widow of Mozambican president Samora Machel...
was appointed minister of Education
and Joaquim Chissano
Joaquim Chissano
Joaquim Alberto Chissano served as the second President of Mozambique for nineteen years from 6 November 1986 until 2 February 2005. Since stepping down as president, Chissano has become an elder statesman and is called upon by international bodies, such as the United Nations, to be an envoy or...
its Foreign minister. Uria Simango was arrested and forced to make a 20-page public confession on May 12, 1975, at the FRELIMO base in Nachingwea recanting and requesting re-education. His forced confession (in Portuguese) may be heard on-line . Simango and the remainder of the PCN leadership never regained freedom. Simango, Gumane, Simeao, Gwambe, Gwengere and others were all secretly liquidated at some undetermined date during 1977-1980. Neither the place of burial nor manner of their execution have ever been disclosed by the authorities. Simango's wife, Celina Simango was also separately executed sometime after 1981, and no details or dates for her death are on public record in her case either.
From the late 1970s, a bloody insurgency by RENAMO (Mozambique National Resistance) plunged the country into a devastating civil war. RENAMO was initially formed by the Rhodesian regime, but from 1980, in its most brutal phase, was sponsored by the Apartheid regime of South Africa: the insurgency in the 1980 was associated with widespread atrocities against civilians. Economic collapse and famine ensued, worsened by drought in the early 1980s. Following the death of Samora Machel
Samora Machel
Samora Moisés Machel was a Mozambican military commander, revolutionary socialist leader and eventual President of Mozambique...
in 1986, Joaquim Chissano
Joaquim Chissano
Joaquim Alberto Chissano served as the second President of Mozambique for nineteen years from 6 November 1986 until 2 February 2005. Since stepping down as president, Chissano has become an elder statesman and is called upon by international bodies, such as the United Nations, to be an envoy or...
gradually steered Mozambique back to a peace accord with RENAMO in 1992
and the restoration of democracy. Multi-party elections were finally held in 1994, twenty years after Simango's ill-fated PCN opposition party.
Simango's public recantation
Following his arrest (and abduction from MalawiMalawi
The Republic of Malawi is a landlocked country in southeast Africa that was formerly known as Nyasaland. It is bordered by Zambia to the northwest, Tanzania to the northeast, and Mozambique on the east, south and west. The country is separated from Tanzania and Mozambique by Lake Malawi. Its size...
) Simango was obliged to read out a 20-page forced public recantation
in front of thousands of FRELIMO fighters.
Simango's confession includes utterly implausible claims, accusing colleagues of being agents of Portuguese secret services, and of involvement in Mondlane's murder, which are no longer seriously credited, even among the present Mozambican leadership.
Mozambique's lost opposition
The exact circumstances and motivation for the wholesale liquidation ofthe PCN, in the late 1970s-early 1980s has never been officially investigated by the post-1994 Mozambican authorities.
The Rev. Simango had no connection with RENAMO having been imprisoned before its formation. It is also doubtful, given his pacifist leanings that he would have supported the abuses of civilians during that very brutal insurrection. He may nevertheless have been perceived by FRELIMO as a dangerous rallying point. This view is espoused by Rothwell in 2004
"Dos Santos, a man loathed by Mondlane became vice-president.
Simango was later captured, interned and then secretly executed
in October 1979, an execution ordered by FRELIMO to prevent
him being used as a figurehead by the then emergent
rebel movement RENAMO. For many years the Frelimo government
did not acknowledge the extrajudicial killing of its former
members and even led his relatives to believe that he was still
alive".
Brief comments on the executions, in the context of human rights violation in this period in Mozambique, appear also in Maier 1992
.
President Samora Machel
Samora Machel
Samora Moisés Machel was a Mozambican military commander, revolutionary socialist leader and eventual President of Mozambique...
died in 1986. Few members of the 1975-1986
regime have commented publicly on the death of Simango; one notable exception is the hardliner vice-President Marcelino dos Santos
Marcelino dos Santos
Marcelino dos Santos is a Mozambican poet, revolutionary, and statesman. As a young man he travelled to Portugal, and Paris, France for an education. He was a founding member of the Frente de Libertacao de Mocambique , in 1962; and served as the party's deputy president from 1969 to 1977...
who has spoken quite forthrightly; in a TV interview in 2005 he explained why the executions were kept secret
" Because one must see that at that moment, and naturally, while we ourselves felt the validity of revolutionary justice, the one built and fertilised by the armed struggle of national liberation, there existed, nonetheless, the fact that one had already formed a state, albeit one
where FRELIMO was the fundamental power. So it was that, perhaps, which
led us, knowing precisely that many people would not be able to comprehend things well, to prefer to keep silent. But let me say clearly that we do not regret these acts because we acted with revolutionary violence against traitors and traitors against the Mozambican people".
As there was no judicial process, it remains unclear what prompted the charge of treason. On his return to Mozambique in 1974, according to his biographer Ncomo, as leader of the PCN, Simango held tentative talks with white settler parties, in a bid to garner strategic support against one-party rule. This pressaged a settlement like that negotiated five-years later in the
Lancaster House Agreement
Lancaster House Agreement
The negotiations which led to the Lancaster House Agreement brought independence to Rhodesia following Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965. The Agreement covered the Independence Constitution, pre-independence arrangements, and a ceasefire...
for multi-party elections in Zimbabwe but, in 1974, it was viewed as treasonous by Frelimo hardliners.
Joana Simeao and Lazaro Kavandame, two of the executed political prisoners, had fled and surrendered to the Portuguese colonial authorities before 1974 (the latter in fear of his life). But not Simango, Gumane or Gwengere who had simply moved to the rival Liberation movement COREMO. The strategic reason for executing Celina Simango, not a prominent political figure, years later in 1982, is even less clear. What the executed leaders had in common was membership of the 1974 opposition party (PCN) and the attempt to challenge FRELIMO hegemony and one-party rule through multiparty elections.
In 2006, Joana Simeao's husband, wishing to remarry after 30 years but unable to prove his status as a widower, sued her for desertion. Joana Simeao was defended against the charge of marital desertion by a government tribunal as there is still no official acknowledgment of her death
or of Simango's.