Visualising FRELIMO’s liberated zones in Mozambique, 1962–1974

Abstract

Headquartered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) engaged the Portuguese army from 1962 to 1974 in a ground war over Mozambique’s independence. At the centre of this military struggle were the geographical regions of the liberated zones, areas in northern Mozambique that FRELIMO designated as under its control. In order to make an exile movement present and real for illiterate populations, FRELIMO trained a group of its soldiers as photographers, who travelled across Mozambique to photograph the war. This act of photographing and distributing images had its political advantages for drawing international aid, but these image-making processes also risked disrupting the ethnically diverse coalitions that made up FRELIMO’s military and popular support. In an effort to address scholarship on liberation movements in Africa, which has overlooked the importance of photography, this article considers the technical, technological, and structural mechanisms FRELIMO instituted from 1962 to 1974 to facilitate the production and circulation of photographs of its liberated zones. Reading FRELIMO’s photographic archive of the liberation struggle against the stories of their producers and users allows for an understanding of how the visualising of the liberated zone enabled FRELIMO to situate itself as a national movement with broad regional and ethnic support inside Mozambique, all the while articulating for international audiences a multiracial and countrywide war effort. The liberated zone was not just a physical landmark, but its picturing transformed it into a visually constituted category for foreign and local populations to identify with an independent Mozambique under FRELIMO’s control.