CIP Mozambique Elections: Afternoon report - more irregularities and low turnout | Dec. 10, 2023
Image: Social Media
One of the few surviving founder members of the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo), the writer and politician Sergio Vieira, died on Thursday in a South African clinic.
Cause of death was not immediately announced, but the 80 year old Vieira had been ill for several years.
Born in the western province of Tete, in 1941, Vieira studied law in Lisbon. His involvement in nationalist politics, notably through the “Casa dos Estudantes do Imperio” (“House of Students of the Empire”) brought him to the attention of the Portuguese political police, the PIDE, and he was forced to leave Portugal for France, and later Algeria, where he took a degree in political science.
He was one of the Mozambicans who founded Frelimo at a Congress in Dar es Salaam in 1962. He took on several senior positions in Frelimo, including that of secretary to its first President, Eduardo Mondlane, and to his successor, Samora Machel.
After Mozambican independence in 1975, Vieira became director of Machel’s presidential office, and then governor of the Bank of Mozambique, where he oversaw the highly successful operation to replace the colonial escudo with a new Mozambican currency, the metical.
He held several government posts in the 1980s, including Minister of Agriculture, Deputy Minister of Defence, governor of Niassa province, and Minister of Security. After leaving the government he became Director of the Centre of African Studies at Maputo’s Eduardo Mondlane University.
After the first multi-party elections in 1994, Vieira became one of the most outspoken orators in the Frelimo parliamentary group. He held his parliamentary seat for ten years, representing Tete province.
Vieira was one of the best-known voices on the left wing of Frelimo, and never abandoned his belief in a socialist future for Mozambique.
He was a regular contributor to the Mozambican media with polemical articles, which were a joy to read, but were certain to irritate conservative figures.
In 1983, he published a volume of poetry. “Tambem Memoria do Povo” and his poetry was widely anthologised in collections of work from Portuguese speaking Africa.
On the occasion of his 80th birthday in May, President Filipe Nyusi sent Vieira a warm birthday message, saying that his 80 years of life “are a reference point for the progress made by Mozambicans. Much of your life is part of the history of building our state”.
Nyusi hoped that “the young memory of this country will find in your person the parameter and reference necessary to assess the various phases of the collective struggles that Mozambique has waged”.
Key to this will be the memoir that Vieira published in 2015, entitled “Participei, por isso Testemunho” (“I participated, and so I bear witness”), a first hand account of the dramas that marked the liberation struggle and the first years of Mozambican independence.
One of the country’s best-known writers, Luis Bernardo Honwana, commented on this book “These pages have a notable and refreshing capacity to make us relive the drama, the suffering, the commitment, and the solidarity surrounding the ideal of the liberation of the motherland, and the glory of the highpoints of the struggle”.
Leave a Reply
Be the First to Comment!
You must be logged in to post a comment.
You must be logged in to post a comment.