Uria Simango

Uria Timoteo Simango (born March 15, 1926 , † between 1979 and 1983) was a Mozambican , Protestant pastor and leading member of the FRELIMO liberation movement during the liberation struggle against Portuguese colonial rule . The exact date of his death is unknown, as after the country's independence he was executed without trial along with other Mozambican dissidents and his wife Celina on the instructions of the Samora Machel government . Uria Simango is the father of the politician Daviz Simango .

Political career

At the time of the Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique in the 1950s, Uria Simango was a member of the Protestant organization Núcleo Negrófilo de Manica e Sofala , which was influenced by WEB Du Bois and aimed at spreading education and the Protestant religion. In 1953 the organization was accused of being behind a mutiny in the Machanga and Mambone area and was banned. Many of its members, including Simango, were banished.

In 1962 Simango was one of the founding members of the Mozambican liberation organization FRELIMO and was vice-president from its inception until the murder of its first boss Eduardo Mondlane in February 1969. Simango succeeded Mondlane as FRELIMO's president. The late 1960s were marked by factional struggles within FRELIMO, which cost several party members their lives.
In the course of the power struggle within FRELIMO after Mondlane's death, Simango was partially ousted as president in April 1969 and formed a brief collective leadership with him and Marcelino dos Santos and Samora Machel. However, the triumvirate did not last very long, Simango was expelled from the party's central committee in November 1969 and the Marxist- oriented leaders Samora Machel and Marcelino dos Santos gained complete control within the party. In April 1970 Simango left the country for Egypt , along with other dissidents such as Paulo Gumane (Frelimo's vice-general secretary in the founding years). In Egypt he became the leader of a smaller liberation movement for Mozambique, the COREMO. After the Portuguese Carnation Revolution in 1974, Simango returned to Mozambique and founded the political party PCN ( Partido da Coalição Nacional , National Coalition Party) in the hope of being successful in free elections against FRELIMO. Other prominent former FRELIMO members and dissidents gathered in the PCN: Paulo Gumane and Adelino Gwambe (also founding members of FRELIMO), the priest Mateus Gwengere and Joana Simeão.

Arrest and Execution

After the publication of a critical article under the heading “Dark situation in FRELIMO”, Simango was expelled from the party. Many of the Mozambicans living abroad, who had therefore not participated in the armed conflict on decolonization, supported his critical view. With his departure, the aspirations of black nationalism in FRELIMO disappeared. The principles that prevailed that the revolution was socialist, anti-colonial and anti-fascist, but not anti-white or anti-Portuguese. In 1974, immediately after the agreement between the new Portuguese government and Frelimo to hand over power in Mozambique to FRELIMO, there was an uprising of white settlers in what was then Lourenço Marques (now Maputo ), who occupied the capital's radio station . According to the controversial biography of Simango by Barnabe Lucas Ncomo, Uria Simango also appeared on the station and thus announced his support for the uprising. After the uprising was put down, there was a wave of arrests of FRELIMO critics and Simango fled to Malawi , FRELIMO had his wife Celina Simango arrested in his place. However, Malawi's President Hastings Banda extradited Simango to FRELIMO along with 11 other PCN activists, and he was taken to their Nachingwea base in southern Tanzania .

The new Portuguese government transferred sole power to FRELIMO and Mozambique gained independence on June 25, 1975. FRELIMO rejected multi-party elections and Samora Machel and Marcelino dos Santos were elected president and vice-president of the country, respectively. Uria Simango was forced on May 20, 1975 at the FRELIMO base in Nachingwea to make a twenty-page public confession in front of thousands of FRELIMO fighters. In it he revoked his convictions, accused some of his comrades-in-arms of being agents of Portugal and of being involved in the Mondlane murder himself, and asked for re-education. The content of this self-accusation is not taken for granted by FRELIMO representatives today either. The forced confession in Portuguese is preserved and can be found on the Internet. Simango and the rest of the PCN leaders never regained their freedom. In November 1975, after Mozambique gained independence, Simango was brought to the FRELIMO M'telela base in Mozambique. Simango, Gumane, Simeao, Gwambe, Gwengere and others were secretly liquidated on an unknown date between 1977 and 1980. Neither the place where they were buried nor the manner in which they were executed has ever been revealed by the Mozambican authorities. Simango's wife Celina Simango was also executed separately from him sometime after 1981, and no details were known about her death either.

Reasons for the Execution of Simango

Simango was probably seen by the FRELIMO leadership as a possible, dangerous competition, especially after the establishment of Renamo .

Only a few members of the FRELIMO regime from 1975 to 1986 made public statements on Simango's death. Vice-President Marcelino dos Santos was a notable exception in a TV interview in 2005, in which he justified the secrecy of the execution by saying that at that time a state had been built in Mozambique on the basis of the power of FRELIMO, and that there was great confidence in the Had "revolutionary justice" that was built up during the armed struggle, but knew that some people might not understand things (meaning the extrajudicial executions). At the same time he stressed that they (the FRELIMOS leadership) did not regret the execution of Simango and others, as this was an act of revolutionary violence against traitors to the Mozambican people.

In the absence of an official trial, it remained unclear what the cause of the allegation of treason was. Simango's biographer Ncomo claims that when he returned to Mozambique in 1974 as leader of the PCN, he had preparatory talks with white settlers in order to win their support against party rule by FRELIMO. That sounds like talks that led to free elections in Zimbabwe with the Lancaster House Agreement at the same time. However, this was viewed as treason by hardliners of the FRELIMO leadership.

Joana Simeão and Lazaro Kavandame, two of the executed political prisoners, had surrendered to the Portuguese authorities before 1974 out of fear for their lives, but not Simango, Gumane or Gwengere, who had only converted to the competing liberation movement COREMO. The strategic reason for the execution of Simango's wife Celina Simango, who did not hold a leading political position, a few years later in 1982, is even more unclear. What the executed leaders had in common was that they were members of the then opposition party (PCN), that they challenged the FRELIMO hegemony and advocated multi-party elections.

In 2004 a 400-page biography of Simango by the student Barnabe Lucas Ncomo was published, which led to a discussion of Simango's death in Mozambique. After several years of civil war against the South African- backed RENAMO guerrilla movement and the one-party dictatorship FRELIMO, free elections were held in Mozambique for the first time in 1994, almost 20 years after Simango's arrest . Uria Simango's son Daviz Simango became the founder of what is now Mozambique's most important opposition party alongside RENAMO, the Movimento Democrático de Moçambique (MDM).

Web links

• Page with photos of Simango's confession.

Individual evidence

1. ^ J. Cabrita: Mozambique: the tortuous road to democracy . Macmillan, 2001, ISBN 978-0-333-92001-5
2. ↑ Eric Morier-Genoud, Michel Cahen (ed.): Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World , books.google.de
3. ↑ Time magazine Feb 14 1969
4. ↑ Walter Opello Jr .: Pluralism and Elite Conflict in at Independence Movement: FRELIMO in the 1960s . In: Journal of Southern African Studies , Vol. 2, No. 1, Oct. 1975, pp. 66-82. JSTOR: 2636615 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2636615?seq=1
5. ↑ encyclopedia.com
6. ↑ Joseph Hanlon: Mozambique. Revolution in the crossfire . edition southern Africa 21, Bonn, 1986, pp. 48-49
7. ↑ Summary review of the biography Uria Simango - um homem, uma causa by Paul Fauvet, h-net.msu.edu
8. ^ Dictionary of African Biography by Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong, Henry Louis Gates, Mr. Steven J. Niven. Oxford University Press, 2012 - 2720 pages, 6 volumes. P. 388, chapter "Uria, Timoteo": books.google.de
9. ↑ Moçambique para todos: Uria Simango Um homem, uma causa .
10. ^ Phillip Rothwell: A postmodern nationalist: truth orality and gender in the work of Mia Couto . Bucknell University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-8387-5585-2 . “Dos Santos, a man loathed by Mondlane became vice-president. Simango was later captured, interned and then secretly executed in October 1979, an execution ordered by FRELIMO to prevent him being used as a figurehead by the then emergent rebel movement RENAMO. For many years the Frelimo government did not acknowledge the extrajudicial killing of its former members and even led his relatives to believe that he was still alive. "
11. ↑ Comments on the execution can also be found in Karl Maier et al .: Conspicuous destruction, famine and the reform process in Mozambique . 1992, ISBN 1-56432-079-0 , p. 6.
12. ↑ TVM “no singular” programs. macua.blogs.com, September 19, 2005. “Because one must see that at that moment, and naturally, while we ourselves felt the validity of revolutionary justice, the one built and fertilized by the armed struggle of national liberation, there existed, nonetheless, the fact that one had already formed a state, albeit one where FRELIMO was the fundamental power. So it was that, perhaps, which led us, knowing precisely that many people would not be able to comprehend things well, to prefer to keep silent. But let me say clearly that we do not regret these acts because we acted with revolutionary violence against traitors and traitors against the Mozambican people. "
13. ↑ BL Nkomo: Uria Simango: Um homem, uma causa (Uria Simango: a man, a cause). Edicoes Novafrica, Maputo 2004 (Portuguese)