Abstract:
From 1976 to 1992, the government of Mozambique
under the leadership of Frente de Libertação de
Moçambique (FRELIMO) and Resistência Nacional
Moçambicana (RENAMO), the latter sponsored by
the right-wing and racist regimes of Rhodesia and
South Africa went to war. The independence of Rhodesia
(now Zimbabwe) in 1980 and the signing of the Nkomati
Non-aggression Pact between the government of
Mozambique and South Africa in 1984 led scholars and
government officials to claim that the government would
win the war because RENAMO had lost its support.
These claims proved wrong as RENAMO resisted for
another eight years until the signing of the general
peace agreement in 1992. The paper argues that the
continuation of military confrontations shows that wars
are mainly fought with a complex combination of means
that are not necessarily military. Claiming that the survival
of RENAMO depended on external support represents
a misunderstanding of the logistics and morale of
both RENAMO and government troops. It is from this
perspective that this paper looks at the logistics and
enthusiasm of both RENAMO and government military to
demonstrate that both lacked adequate military logistics
to wage war. It shows that the belligerents depended on
civilians and surrounding natural resources to obtain the
bulk of supplies of staple foods and recruits. This state
of affairs compels scholars to rethink the nature of civil
wars and helps to explain the almost decade long delay
in achieving peace in Mozambique. It also shows that the
burden of the Mozambican civil war fell on the shoulders
of civilians. Thus, what is often described as a hotspot of
Cold War in Southern Africa or a war of aggression by
the apartheid regime was, in practice, a peoples’ war with
devastating, yet varied impacts on peoples’ livelihoods.
