It’s as if the Samora Machel Monument wasn’t meant to be found. After the turn-off from a well-marked highway between South Africa and Mozambique, the road to the site of the mysterious plane crash of Mozambique’s first president twists and turns for miles.
Revolution
There are only a sparse handful of signs, so we turn to Big Brother Google for guidance and follow a map to Mbuzini, the town closest to the memorial to the president whose revolution changed Mozambique. Built at a cost of US$240,000 to the ANC government, the monument was declared a South African national heritage site in 2006, seven years after its inauguration by peace icon Nelson Mandela and former Mozambique president, Joaquim Chissano. Chissano ascended the democratic throne when, on their way back from an international meeting in 1986, Machel and 34 fellow passengers plunged to their deaths in the mountain range between South Africa’s Mpumalanga province and Mozambique, in circumstances that to this day remain a chilling whodunnit.
Machel took office as Mozambique’s founding president in 1975, after years of heading the country’s guerrilla movement FRELIMO in the struggle for independence from Portugal, and proceeded to lead the country through a tempestuous decade. He was a firm believer in armed struggle not as a means to an end, but as a means to the beginning.
“Of all the things we have done,” he said, “the most important – the one that history will record as the principal contribution of our generation – is that we understand how to turn the armed struggle into a Revolution …it was essential to create a new mentality to build a new society.”
Continue reading this article at: This is Africa