Remembering Mozambique Independence

My, how the world has changed. 

Mozambique independence in 1975 was a kind of high water mark of communism. Fresh from victory in Portugal’s 1974 military coup and its triumph in Vietnam, 'world revolution' arrived in southern Africa on June 25, 1975 with the People’s Republic of Mozambique.

In the days before the Portuguese handover, pundits in what was still Lourenco Marques wondered whether the Frelimo liberation movement would embrace Soviet communism or its rival Chinese variant. Newly arrived foreign correspondents counseled that clues would be revealed by where dignitaries were placed on the dais. Would the Russians or Chinese be seated closest to Samora Machel and Frelimo leadership?

Ian Smith in a Rhodesia, awkwardly perched between Mozambique and soon to be independent Angola, warned that the Kremlin’s objective was a belt of compliant states stretched across the subcontinent. In South Africa the Financial Mail worried that Frelimo would squeeze Smith economically by closing Mozambican ports to Rhodesian commerce.

It was in Mozambique that I observed my first revolution, if that’s the right term. In late 1974 and 1975 I made three trips to the country, always exhilarated by the ease with which blacks and whites interacted compared to the stifling constraint of apartheid. 

But the shortcomings of Portuguese rule were equally visible. Why were the cab drivers in a black majority city almost exclusively white? Why in 300 years had the Portuguese failed to build a highway between the capital and Beira, the second city 1200 km north?

Mozambique and Angola were rushed to independence because the coup plotters in Lisbon wanted a quick end to Portugal's African wars. For all of its bluster Frelimo had liberated very little Mozambican territory. By its own admission the liberation group was ill-prepared to assume power. Significantly the independence agreements for Mozambique and Angola made no reference to free elections or democracy. Mozambique was to be a one party state ruled by the vanguard party.

As independence approached Beira was curiously silent. The only activity was in the port. British frigates could be seen off shore. At the airport despondent settlers lined the tarmac awaiting refugee flights to Portugal.  On the train to Rhodesia I was one of only a dozen passengers.

Mozambique independence was my first assignment for NBC News. As the midnight hour approached for the celebratory hauling down of the Portuguese flag seasoned correspondents headed not to Machava Stadium but the suburban home of Fernando Fernandes, everybody’s L.M. stringer, to be in the queue for the telex machines that would get the story out.

Returning to Johannesburg it was strange to listen to Radio Beijing where the English program consisted of reading verbatim from Chairman Mao’s little red book. ANC broadcasts from Dar es Salaam voiced the empty rhetoric of imperialism’s retreat and the certainty of African revolution.  

Fast forward 40 years and 1975 is a time warp. Portugal rather quickly abandoned socialism and moved to democracy and eventual membership in the European Union.

Communism was repudiated by its main practioners, China and Russia.  A modernizing China moved towards a market economy in the late 70s while maintaining only the trapplngs of communism. Mikhail Gorbachev said the Russians had tried but failed to make communism work. In 1991 the Soviet Union imploded and fragmented into multiple states.

For its part Frelimo abandoned communism in 1990 and dropped ‘peoples republic’ from the country’s name. Property and enterprises that had been nationalized were privatized. With huge gas and coal deposits in the north, foreign investment is propelling rapid economic growth.

In the globalized world China has emerged as the biggest winner. Millions have been lifted  out of poverty not by communism but by free market capitalism.  China has risen to be the world's second biggest economy.

A visitor to Mozambique today witnesses a Chinese presence that is large and growing. The Chinese built Maputo’s modern airport. They are big investors in liquefied natural gas, minerals and agriculture.

One doesn’t have to see where they’re seated on the dais to know that the Chinese are winners. Hopefully, the Mozambicans are making up for lost time are becoming winners as well.

Missing from the Celebration of Freedom—Two Leaders Who Died Too Soon

BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA:  As the world marked the 25^th anniversary of freedom returning to Eastern Europe, it is sad that two of the wisest post-communisleaders are no longer with us.

In the extraordinary events that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Poland was the inspiration. It had elected a non-communist government months before the wall came down. Lech Walesa, Pope John Paul II are true heroes who changed the world. Ronald Reagan’s strong stance and his 1987 call to “tear down this wall” were similarly decisive. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader-- still alive at 83—courageously allowed the wall to be opened, sacrificing in the process Moscow’s loyalist East German communists. 

Comprehending the enormity of Gorbachev’s deed, an astonished British editorialist wrote that, “all of Stalin’s war time territorial gains in Europe were given up without a shot being fired.”

Events cascaded rapidly. Czechoslovakia’s communist government collapsed within days after the wall came down. Hungary catapulted towards free elections while the remaining regimes-- Romania, Bulgaria and Albania-- toppled like a row of dominoes.  In 1990 East Germans voted to merge their country with West Germany. And late in 1991 the USSR itself collapsed, fragmenting into 15 separate countries.

History, in my opinion, will judge Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic and Lennart Meri of Estonia the most significant leaders to have emerged from the wreckage of communism.

Meri, Estonia’s president from 1992 to 2001, deserves recognition. Born into a prominent family, when the Red Army invaded in 1940, 12 year-old Meri, his mother and younger brother were exiled via prison train to the Siberian gulags. His father, an Estonian diplomat, had to endure Moscow’s infamous Lubyanka prison. Miraculously the family survived and later Lennart was permitted to attend university. He became a respected writer and filmmaker. He was 60 when the Wall came down.

Meri earned the admiration of Estonians during the failed coup against Gorbachev in August 1991. With his countrymen terrified that a Russian invasion would soon snuff out their drive for independence, Meri took to the radio, assuring citizens they needn’t worry, that he knew the plotters to be clueless and incompetent. There was no invasion and Meri’s grandfatherly counsel had enormous impact. 

Fluent in six languages, most learned as a youth during his father’s postings abroad, Meri repeatedly observed that the end of communism was a beginning, not an end. A tall, dignified man, Meri understood the horror of mass deportation. But remarkably he championed the cause of freedom for Russians. He died in 2006. Were he alive today Meri would be aghast at Russian actions in Ukraine, and equally comforted that Estonia’s security is anchored in Nato and European Union membership.

Lennart Meri as president

Vaclav Havel, like Meri, for five decades was deprived of the honest, authentic life he so passionately wanted. Like tens of thousands, he had to make the best of a bad situation.

Like Meri, Havel paid a heavy price for coming from an entrepreneurial family that after the communist takeover in 1948 was denounced as a class enemy. Coming of age during the period of maximum repression, he was banned from universities.  In 1975 he wrote a devastating critique of totalitarianism. In six pages Havel dissected the massive fraud and corruption of communism. Its lofty ideals, he wrote, were hollow.

Reflecting on the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, Havel explained to an audience at the World Economic Forum in 1992 how Soviet imperialism imploded.

"Communism was not defeated by military force, but by life, by the human spirit, by conscience…. It was defeated by a revolt of color, authenticity,.. and human individuality."

Famous for his essay on the power of the powerless, Havel lived to see the society where imperfectly, “truth and love prevail over hate and lies.”

Vaclav Havel

Universally hailed as a great European, Havel the dissident playwright spent years in communist jails before being swept to the Prague Castle in the Velvet Revolution. He served as president first of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic from 1989 to until 2003.  Vaclav Havel died at age 75 in 2011.  Writer Anne Applebaum hails Havel’s unique success in making the transition from dissident to national leader.

Alan Levy, the founding editor of the Prague Post, was asked why Prague had become the in spot for émigré young Americans in the 1990s. He replied that he himself had pondered the question, why Prague instead of Berlin, the place that exemplified both the wall and freedom. “Prague,” he concluded, “became the Mecca for young people because of one man, Vaclav Havel. It was Havel’s example of intelligence, modesty, artistry and love that drew people to Prague.”

Havel and Meri, I suspect, would both celebrate 25 years of freedom, while warning of the obvious dangers ahead.

Barry D. Wood covered the collapse of communism and the rebuilding of Eastern Europe for Voice of America. A version of this article appeared on marketwatch.com