Portrait of an African Revolutionary

Last December 24, a large party of Portuguese soldiers were celebrating Christmas Eve in a bar in the village of Miteda, a tiny outpost in the jungles of Portugal's African colony of Mozambique. In the midst of the revel, a small band of heavily-armed Africans slipped unnoticed out of the forests and surrounded the village. Grenades went flying into the bar, and machine guns opened up on the Portuguese as they spilled out of the crumbling building; 113 soldiers were killed. The guerillas disappeared into the jungle with their first major victory. A new African revolution was underway.

The revolution in Northern Mozambique is not a full-scale war. The Mozambican libration forces do not control large areas of the countryside as the Angolan rebels did when revolution broke out in that Portuguese colony in 1961. But from bases across the Ruvuma River in Tanzania, Mozambique's northern neighbor, African "freedom fighters" have spread across the country, attacking isolated tea and sisal plantations, ambushing search parties sent into the tropical bush country to surprise them, and always slipping away under the cover of darkness to reappear as peasant farmers in some remote village.

Armed Camp

Mozambique is a poor country, and though Portugal maintains some 40,000 soldiers within its borders (equal to more than a third of the total population), the country's roads and communications are not good enough to prevent rebel forces from traveling relatively freely from one end to the other. Since 60 percent of the Europeans live in the two costal cities of Beira and Lourenco Marques, the capital, the backcountry outposts and plantations have taken on the air of armed camps.

The Portuguese have controlled Mozambique since Vasco da Gama landed there on his way to India in 1498, but they have never really successfully colonized it. Although the Portuquese boast of their five centuries of "non-racial, Christian, civilizing mission," less than one percent of Mozambique's seven million African inhabitants are literate and less than five percent can speak Portuguese.

According to the 1950 census, only one-half of one percent of the total African population had achieved the "civilized" status of an "assimilado," an African enjoying full priviledges of citizenship. The other 99.5 percent are classified as "indigenous." They have virtually no civil rights under Portuguese law, and are required to do forced labor on the roads and plantations of the colony.

In a country and situation like Mozambique, what kind of man becomes a revolutionary? Jamie Siguake, a visitor at the University last month, is one example. Sharpened by a life of struggling against the restrictions that face all Africans in countries dominated by white minorities and hardened by more than two years in Portuguese prisons, Sigauke has the toughness required of a revolutionary. But it is the toughness of determination, not of vindictiveness. "We will shoot their [the Portuguese] soldiers like flies," Siguake says, "but when they cry 'Peace,' we will be the first to welcome them into a new society."

Jaime Siguake is 33 years old. His face looks much older at the rare moments when it is not covered with a friendly smile. Born near Beira in central Mozambique, he, like most Africans, had to leave school after his primary education. Determined to finish, he left Mozambique and went to South Africa's Transkei, where he entered a secondary school. But he soon had to go to work in order to support himself.

Traveling Salesmen

First in Johannesburg, and then the Rhodesias, Sigauke took jobs, from busboy to boxer, until he finally landed a well-paying position as a traveling salesman, peddling clothing to retailers all over Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. "That job brought status because I owned a car," he says. "I drove an Opel and then a Biscayne for two years, and I learned to know every road and every Mozambican in the Rhodesias." On one return trip to Mozambique he was arrested by the authorities, who could not believe that an African could earn enough money to buy his own car.

Sigauke used his travels for other purposes as well. In addition to his tribal language and his "native" Portuguese, he soon picked up English and most of the African languages of South Africa and the Rhodesias. More important, he and other young men living in and around Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia founded a liberation movement, the Democratic National Union of Mozambique (Udenamo). On his trips, he began actively organizing other Mozambicans living outside the country.

Shortly before Udenamo merged with other independent parties to form the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo), Sigauke was suddenly jerked from the political picture. On April 13, 1962, he was arrested in Salisbury by the Rhodesian government and illegally handed over to the Portuguese Security Police, the PIDE, who whisked him off for interrogation in Mozambique. Then began two years of torture, imprisonment, and finally trial, which completed Siguake's transformation from traveling salesman-politician to revolutionary.

Tortured

In a PIDE interrogation center in Lourenco Marques, Siguake was forced to watch the fatal beating of a friend, then to carry the friend's bloody body in a sack out for burial. Because he was known outside the country, the police were afraid to kill him, but they stood him facing a wall for six days of questions until he collapsed in pain and was hospitalized for a month.

After 14 months of imprisonment without trial, Sigauke was finally brought to court in August, 1963. Four of Mozambique's most prominent white lawyers defended him (Lourenco Marques is a haven for liberal Portuguese and self-exiled opponents of the regime in Lisbon), and he was given an eight-month sentence.

While serving his term, Sigauke was often able to obtain reading material. "I read about Washington and Jefferson," he said, "I had never heard of them before, but I did a let of thinking about what they were trying to do." In prison he also found a guard who would sneak him newspapers, and he read about James Meredith who he felt was "another American revolutionary."

When Sigauke was released from prison in April, 1964, the PIDE promptly rearrested him and "interogated" him for four more days at their headquarters. He was then released but kept under constant watch to prevent him from leaving the country. But last July, during a state visit to Mozambique by the president of Portugal, Americo Thomas, Sigauke slipped out of Lourenco Marques and across the border into Swaziland where he was met by Frelimo agents. A few days later Sigauke and his friends daringly recrossed the border and stood smiling in a crowd of African peasants as Amerigo Thomas rode past. "Of course we could have shot him," said Sigauke, "but why? He is an old man."

But Sigauke was by now too important to risk being captured. An English friend in Swaziland arranged for him to be driven, non-stop, across South Africa by Land Rover and into the Bechaunaland Protectorate. From there he crossed into Zambia (Northern Rhodesia) and made his way to join the other Mozambican revolutionaries in Tanzania. There he became Frelimo's secretary for internal organization within Mozambique. Because of his knowledge of the secret police, he now directs the Frelimo agents within the country.

Despite his experience, Sigauke retains his original idealism. Frelimo will not engage in terrorism and the murder of civilians, he says, "not because it would give us a bad image, but because it is wrong." "We fear racism," he adds. "We have known long enough the miseries of division. You cannot expect us to want to continue them ourselves." As for the future, "there will always be a place for the white man in Mozambique," he says adding softly, "Portugal is a poor country, we cannot expect them all to stay at home."

Portugal is a poor country, and it cannot afford to maintain a lingering colonial war on several fronts for a long period of time--perhaps no more than five years. Although Frelimo's guerillas, who number only a few thousand, are far from constituting a major threat to the polished forces of the Portuguese, they do not have to seize large areas of land or fight major battles. Time is on the Africans' side. As long as the rebels can maintain forces in the field, they will be winning the battle.

John D. Gerhart '65-3 went on Project Tanganyika last year and visited Mozambique in July.