Word: frelimo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Eduardo Mondlane was a revolution ary, and the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) he headed was one of black Africa's more effective independence movements. Tall, handsome Mondlane was also a scholar who loved the bookish academic world he abandoned just six years ago, and it is clear that his enemies knew their man all too well. Last week an expertly built bomb killed him as he worked at an American friend's villa' in Dar es Salaam. The bomb had come to him concealed in a book...
...assassination was the culmination of some 18 months of increasing difficulties within Frelimo's leadership...
...Frelimo's military operations in Mo zambique reflected these difficulties. The tempo of combat has dropped in recent months, or so the Portuguese claim, but Frelimo's estimated 8,000 well-trained guerrillas (most of them Mozambicans trained in Tanzania and sup ported from that country) are tying down more than 40,000 Portuguese regulars. The major centers of Frelimo activity are in northern Mozambique, where the rebels fully control three districts: the area around Tete, on the Zambezi River in the northwest and on the Mueda plateau in the north...
...continued Portuguese control over his native Mozambique. He was also a target for radical Mozambicans who look to Communist China for inspiration. In March 1968, angry radicals forced the temporary closing of the Mozambique Institute, headed by Mondlane's American wife Janet, and two months later a Frelimo central committee member was stabbed to death in a pitched battle for control of Frelimo's headquarters in Dar es Salaam...
...Mondlane's enemies linked to the factional clashes was Father Ma-teus Gwengere, a militant Catholic priest who fled Mozambique in mid-1967 and since then had consistently opposed Mondlane. Last July, however, Mondlane seemed to have reconciled all the opposing factions within Frelimo. After persuading them that continued conflict could only harm their common cause, he went on to stage party elections in a "liberated area" of northern Mozambique. It was a dramatic propaganda victory, and Mondlane was confirmed as head of Frelimo. Nevertheless he was forced to expand the membership of Frelimo's executive committee...