Portuguese Fascism’s Genocidal Strategy in Mozambique: the Zambezi River South Bank in the Early-Mid 1970s

Abstract

An exceptional combination of circumstances would make the Wiriyamu massacre of December 1972 the most documented operation of the total war waged against the populations by Portuguese fascism along the southern bank of the Zambezi river from the early 1970s. The representation of Wiriyamu by present-day Portuguese intelligentsia oscillates between the acknowledgement of an “episodic” case and a sort of relativistic denial. Both representations explicitly deny the carnage as a moment of a vaster genocidal strategy meant to prevent African guerrillas from crossing the critical border of the Zambezi river, which would signify a direct threat to the main bastions of apartheid. Since African troops constituted more then one half of the Portuguese army’s total enrolment, denial positions are based on the rhetorical assumption that the imperial war was a sort of “civil war”. This mystification is directly linked to the fact that the mass-killings in the Wiriyamu area were carried out mainly by African commando units. In this essay a parallel is made with the 1920s’ colonial literary accounts of the genocidal processes which took place in Mozambique in the 1910s. Like in the 1920s, the argument of today’s Portuguese elites is that savagery is the work of savages and the Portuguese, with their scant resources, had to rely on what was available. A general contextual view is presented, particularly attentive to the developments of the last months of Portuguese rule around Inhaminga, where regular mass-killings were carried out mainly by Portuguese soldiers and settlers. This essay aims to contribute to the understanding of their moral distress, but at the same time their determination, as a community self-represented by ideas of “race” and nation, to “exterminate all the brutes”. Moreover, it seeks to promote the discussion on the connection between present-day denial rhetoric and racist or culturalist hierarchical representations.