Mozambique: Marcelino dos Santos lies in state – AIM report

Login

Register

http://www.clubofmozambique.com/

Mozambique: Marcelino dos Santos lies in state – AIM report

5:32 CAT | 18 Feb 2020

Photo: O País

The body of the veteran revolutionary and founder of the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo), Marcelino dos Santos, on Tuesday lay in state in Maputo City Hall, in the capital’s Independence Square.

The coffin of dos Santos, who died of heart failure on 11 February, at the age of 90, was driven under military escort from the morgue of Maputo Central Hospital to the City Hall. Here the coffin was opened, and thousands of mourners filed past to pay their last respects.

Dos Santos was born in Lumbo, in the northern province of Nampula, on 20 May 1929. From his days as a student in Lisbon in the late 1940s, he threw himself into revolutionary and socialist politics.

Under surveillance from the Portuguese political police, the PIDE, he escaped to France where he worked with many other exiled African nationalists. Alongside the Angolan Mario Pinto de Andrade, and the leader of the Guinea-Bissau liberation struggle, Amilcar Cabral, he founded the Conference of Nationalist Organisations of the Portuguese Colonies (CONCP) in 1961.

In 1962, dos Santos was a founder member of Frelimo, created in Dar es Salaam, as a merger of three nationalist groupings.

When the first Frelimo President, Eduardo Mondlane was assassinated by the Portuguese colonial regime in 1969, dos Santos became one of a three member presidential triumvirate, alongside Samora Machel and Uria Simango, that briefly led the movement.

Simango soon defected, writing the bitter tract “Gloomy Situation in Frelimo”, and in 1970 Machel was elected President of Frelimo and dos Santos Deputy President.

After independence in 1975, he held several senior positions, including Minister of Planning and Development, and, from 1986 to 1994, Chairperson (Speaker) of the country’s parliament, the People’s Assembly.

Although his advanced age, and his frail state of health limited his activities in his final years, Dos Santos never abandoned his commitment to socialism. Asked about the prospect of death in an interview in 2015, he replied “As long as there is a revolution to be remade, there is no time to die”.

The funeral ceremonies will reach their climax on Wednesday, when the body of dos Santos will be laid to rest in Maputo’s Monument to the Mozambican Heroes. Here he will lie alongside others who devoted their lives to Mozambican independence, including Eduardo Mondlane and Samora Machel.

The government has declared a seven day period of national mourning, and during this period, throughout the country, the Mozambican flag is being flown at half mast.

Source: AIM