A bomb inside a parcel bearing stamps from Moscow tragically ended Eduardo Mondlane’s life in 1969. He was forty-nine. After being educated in Portugal and the United States, and teaching at Syracuse University, he was living with his American wife and their children in a suburb of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s capital. Mozambique was still a colony of Portugal, and Mondlane, immensely likable, tall, imposing, and with a formidable presence, was the leader of Frente de Liberação de Mozambique (frelimo), a Soviet-backed liberation movement that had training bases in Tanzania and guerillas in the field against the decaying Portuguese dictatorship.The Soviet stamps were false flags. The Tanzanian police have never made arrests, but they determined that the bomb was constructed in Dar es Salaam (two others were found) and inserted into Mondlane’s mailbag by a frelimo worker. Apartheid South Africa, China, the Soviet Union, and Portugal might each have had reasons for assassinating Mondlane. So would more radical rivals within frelimo. Portugal was an obvious suspect, but eliminating Mondlane would have paved the way for a more strident antagonist to assume control of frelimo (which is exactly what occurred). Or private Mozambican business interests close to dictator Salazar may have arranged the detonation. Tanzanian officials who disliked Mondlane were also implicated.The mystery remains. But Mondlane’s death greatly transformed his own country’s liberation trajectory and, arguably, led to a civil war within independent Mozambique and the descent into corruption that now consumes the nation. Mondlane’s removal also preceded similar kinds of suspicious losses in other Tanzanian-based liberation movements, especially within the Zimbabwe African National Union (zanu), as well as atrocities amid the training camps of all of the southern African guerrilla contingents.The examination of Mondlane’s demise is this book’s most significant contribution to the workings of anti-colonial machinations in one of its main African hubs. But the book has much more of value to modern African history and politics.Supporting the liberation of Africa was the guiding star of Tanzania’s “front-line” policy under its Afro-socialist founding president, the amiable and charismatic Julius Nyerere. frelimo was but one of Nyerere (and Tanzania’s) many anti-colonial causes. Tanzania had won its independence from Britain in 1961 without much of a struggle. Thereafter it served as the safe haven and operational base for the South African African National Congress (anc), zanu, Namibia’s South-West African People’s Organization (swapo), and frelimo, among other less successful nationalist groups.Nyerere’s backing and the support of his sometimes-divided government was critical to the maturing and ultimate success of the armed struggles in all of these eventually independent countries—even distant Namibia. Nyerere shepherded zanu particularly, even when Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda, his close collaborator, preferred the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (zapu), a rival Zimbabwean movement.Roberts’ well-researched book is about the interplay of the various liberationists and ruling party Tanzanians from its own independence to the fall of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal. There are important discussions of Tanzania’s transforming itself into the “spearhead of Third World revolution.” Tanzania, writes Roberts, “routinely adopted the most radical stances toward questions of anticolonial liberation on the international stage” (10). Indeed, as the author explains in several places, and fully explores in a very salient chapter on the Arusha Declaration of 1972, “Revolution beyond its [own] borders went hand in hand with revolution within them …” (10). Ujamaa (family community togetherness, in the sense of brotherhood) and rural transformation rather than heavy industrialization became the emphasized pathways to an envisaged prosperity and development that never matured. Millions of peasants were relocated, nomads gathered in clusters, and plantations nationalized. Media freedom was also eliminated; a very important chapter details how the press was curtailed, and then made subservient to the new nation.The state became more and more authoritarian, as this book demonstrates. Indeed, Roberts says that Nyerere’s promotion of anticolonial liberation was closely connected to its accelerating authoritarianism (15). As well, Roberts shows how authoritarianism had its internal critics, and how the early indigenous local founding political elites were replaced by more pliant “second generation” leaders—how Oscar Kambona and Paul Bomani, to give two examples, were superseded as the state drifted away from its early democratic roots.Because Roberts chose to focus on Dar es Salaam rather than Tanzania, this book is less a political history of Tanzania than it is a series of loosely related—but stimulating and intelligently crafted—essays on how Tanzania altered internally (from idealism to cynical statism) while simultaneously (and at some substantial cost to itself) helping to free southern Africa from white domination.
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Open Access
Jan 2, 2023
John Mowitt 
