Frelimo founder Marcelino dos Santos dies

Maputo(AIM-New Ziana) -One of the founders of the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo), Marcelino dos Santos, died in Maputo on Tuesday aged 90 years.

President Filipe Nyusi announced the death from the northern city of Pemba.

“We have lost our icon, Comrade Marcelino dos Santos”, he said, promising that more details would be made public later.

“We will organise ourselves, as a government, because he has already been declared a national hero (in 2015),” he added.

Dos Santos was born on May 20, 1929 in Lumbo, Mozambique Island district, in the northern province of Nampula.

He was deeply involved in nationalist politics from an early age while a student in Lisbon, Portugal from 1948 to 1951.

Under surveillance from the Portuguese political police, the PIDE, do Santos escaped to France where he worked with many other exiled African nationalists.

Together with Angolan Mario Pinto de Andrade, and the leader of the Guinea-Bissau liberation struggle, Amilcar Cabral, they founded the Conference of Nationalist Organisations of the Portuguese Colonies (CONCP) in 1961, and dos Santos was made General Secretary.

By then, the first Mozambican nationalist movements were being set up, and dos Santos became head of the foreign relations department of Udenamo (National Democratic Union of Mozambique).

In 1962, Udenamo merged with two other movements, Manu (Mozambique African National Union) and Unami (National African Union for the Independence of Mozambique) to form Frelimo, under the leadership of Eduardo Mondlane.

It was dos Santos who wrote the first Frelimo statutes.

When Mondlane was assassinated by the Portuguese colonial regime in 1969, dos Santos became one of a three member Presidential Triumvirate, together with 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, dos Santos became Minister of Planning and Development in Machel’s first government.

He held several other senior state and party positions, but perhaps the most important of these roles was that of chairperson (Speaker) of the Mozambican Parliament, the People’s Assembly from 1986 to 1994.

Dos Santos headed what became the most reforming Parliament in Mozambican history – which abolished the one party state, replacing it with political pluralism, approved a Constitution of the Republic which included guarantees for freedom of assembly, freedom of expression and freedom of the press, and even changed the county’s name – from People’s Republic to Republic of Mozambique.

Despite this liberalisation, and despite Frelimo’s embracing of a market economy, dos Santos never wavered from his commitment to socialism.

His age and his increasing frailty restricted his activities in his final years, but he remained a member of the Frelimo Central Committee up to his dying day– being last re-elected to the the organ at the party’s 11th Congress in 2017.

Dos Santos was also a poet, writing under the pseudonyms of Kulangano and Lilinho Micaia.

His early poetry was published in the Mozambican paper “O Brado Africano”, and his work also appeared in the 1950s in two anthologies edited by the “Casa dos Estudantes do Imperio” (“House of the Students of the Empire”) in Lisbon.

A collection of his poetry was also published in the Soviet Union.

AIM-New Ziana