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| The Frelimo–Renamo Struggle, 1977–1992 |
The sixteen-year-long war in Mozambique between the Frelimo
government and Renamo rebels remains one of the most overlooked and
misunderstood of the conflicts that raged across Africa during the height of
the Cold War. While usually viewed as mere sideshow to more high-profile wars
in Angola, Rhodesia and within apartheid South Africa itself, it nonetheless is
noteworthy in its complexity, duration and destructiveness. Before it was all over in 1992 at least one
million Mozambicans would be dead, millions more homeless and the country lying
in ruins. Ultimately Frelimo would get its victory not on the battlefield but
rather at the polling booth in 1994.
Based on more than a
decade of meticulous research, a review of thousands of pages of military
records and documents, and dozens of in-depth interviews with political
leaders, diplomats, generals, and soldiers and sailors, this book tells the
story of the war from the perspective of those who fought it and lived it. It
follows Renamo’s growth from its Rhodesian roots in 1977 as a weapon against
Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwean nationalist guerrillas operating from Mozambique
through South African patronage in the early 1980s to Renamo’s evolution as a
self-sufficient nationalist insurgency. In tracing the ebb and flow of the
conflict from the rugged mountains and savannah forests of central Mozambique
across the hot, humid Zambezi River valley and down to the very outskirts of
the Mozambican capital in the far south, it examines the operational strategy
of Frelimo and Renamo commanders in the field, the battles they fought and the
lives of their troops. In
doing so it highlights personal struggles, each side’s successes and failures,
and the missed opportunities to decisively turn the tide of war. Accordingly,
this book provides the first real comprehensive military history of a war too
long neglected and underappreciated in the chronicles of modern African history
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