Iain Gray: How the Left made it right

THE Diamond Jubilee comes to Scotland this week, with the Queen herself in residence for a special royal week. Celebrations will understandably focus on the Queen’s enduring love of Scotland. That was the heart of the tributes paid recently by Scottish party leaders in a Jubilee parliamentary debate. But all the contributions also acknowledged her role as head of the 54 Commonwealth countries. They were right to do so, since the Queen has clearly attached great importance to that role over the years. She was of course in Kenya when she heard of her father’s death and her accession to the throne.

Ruth Davidson took the opportunity to point out that two of the Commonwealth countries had chosen to seek membership, even although they had never been part of the British Empire. The newest member is Rwanda, but Mozambique was the first to seek, and be granted, membership without the usual historical links. The origins of that decision lie in a curious corner of cold war politics.

Mozambique was a colony of Portugal, although by 1975 large areas of the country were controlled by Frelimo, a Marxist-Leninist rebel movement. In that year fascism was toppled in Portugal, colonies were freed and Frelimo leader Samora Machel became the first president of the People’s Republic of Mozambique. Portuguese colonialism had banned Africans from education beyond grade four, and effectively reserved all skilled jobs for Portuguese immigrants. So when Portuguese Mozambicans fled en masse, the country found itself not just without doctors or engineers, but also teachers, plumbers, car mechanics and joiners.

Thus I found myself in 1982 employed by the Mozambican education ministry to teach physics and maths in Portuguese in a technical school on the banks of the Limpopo. Mozambique was closely allied with eastern Europe at the time, and most of its foreign “experts” came from there. My school had a team of Soviet agronomy and tractor mechanics teachers, some Bulgarians and a group of Cubans too. They were recruited by their own governments, incentivised by the chance to be paid in US dollars. They were joined by idealistic “lefties” from the West, telling ourselves that we were using our skills to help a new country build socialism from the ruins of colonialism, while standing shoulder to shoulder in the struggle against apartheid South Africa next door.

That struggle was real and hot. When Mozambique became independent, Rhodesia launched a proxy war against its neighbour. It fabricated a “rebel” group, Renamo, armed it and provided it with logistics support and strategic direction to infiltrate and destabilise the new Mozambique. Renamo grew by atrocity. It burned villages, destroyed schools and hospitals, murdered teachers or health workers and cut off limbs, lips and breasts. Boys were kidnapped as soldiers and girls as camp followers.

Renamo’s days seemed numbered when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. But the RAF helpfully airlifted its high command to South Africa, which redoubled the support it was receiving. By 1982, most of Mozambique was rendered unsafe by the war, which lapped at the edge of all major towns. In my school we occasionally slept fully dressed as battle raged half a mile away on the opposite bank of a Limpopo reduced by drought to puddles.

Throughout, Machel was a remarkable leader. Although short in stature, he exuded palpable energy and powerful charisma. His reputation was for discipline, frugality, and impatience with others who fell short. When he heard complaints that port bureaucrats were allowing food imports to rot in warehouses he turned up unannounced at the docks, literally kicked the doors in and personally sacked those responsible on the spot.

I once saw Machel speak, in the town of Matola. It was an event to remember a group of ANC exiles who had lived there and been killed by a South African army assassination squad a year before. He only spoke for two hours that day (sometimes his speeches lasted six), and it was electric – punctuated by singing, jokes, call and response, dialogue with people in the audience, language switches between Portuguese and Changaana and finally dancing, when he descended from the stage leading the hapless platform party in a giant conga line through the ecstatic crowd as dust rose. You had to be there. But if you were, you will never forget it.

So far, so revolutionary. But Machel and his urbane prime minister, Joaquim Chissano, had begun to feel constrained by their close association with the Soviet bloc, perhaps foreseeing the growing weaknesses there. So they set off on a European tour to build bridges with the West, and included the UK even although Mozambique did not even have an embassy here at the time. In one of the most unlikely reactions of political and personal chemistry of recent times, Machel and Margaret Thatcher hit it off. To the mortification of every British footsoldier of socialism in Mozambique who fancied themself fighting on the frontline against imperialism, Machel told the Noticias newspaper on his return that if he ever had a daughter he would call her Margaret, so impressed had he been. Frankly, we did not know where to put ourselves. Yet the feeling was clearly mutual, and so Machel became Thatcher’s favourite Marxist-Leninist, and the road to the Commonwealth began.

This love affair may have been political and platonic, but it had real substance. Britain began to include Mozambique in its aid programme. British “experts” who followed me were sourced through IVS, and paid for by British aid, not the ministry. That British icon Blue Peter devoted some of its legendary appeals to Mozambique and visited the country. But the most surprising and significant sign of prime ministerial approval came in the form of British troops, who arrived in a country which still boasted military “advisers” from the Soviet Union, Cuba and North Korea. What is more, they came to guard the Beira railway, by far the most important strategic transport route in Mozambique, linking its major port to Zimbabwe and Malawi. The very same armed forces who had once saved Renamo were now deployed to frustrate its terror.

Machel died in a plane crash in 1986, allegedly murdered by South African sabotage. But Chissano replaced him and Britain continued as a key ally, helping Mozambique position itself strongly with Europe as the Soviet Union fell. By now Chissano was an advocate of transcendental meditation rather than dialectical Marxism. Whatever his secret, he negotiated peace with Renamo, successfully incorporated its fighters into the national army and then defeated it in a free democratic election. It was a remarkable end to decades of bitter, brutal civil war, and probably unique in post-colonial Africa. Now a firm friend of Britain and the West, he set about reintroducing a market economy, and for a while Mozambique was the fastest growing country in the world, although from a very low base. Above all, there was peace at last.

Thus it was that in 1995, with more than ten years of “special relationship” with Britain, and surrounded on all sides by Commonwealth countries, including a free South Africa, Mozambique became the first country to join that body without a history of British rule. Two years later, the Queen made Machel’s widow, Graca, a dame in recognition of humanitarian work. Now remarried to a certain Nelson Mandela, Graca Machel was minister of education when I taught in a classroom which lacked enough chairs for the class, but featured a slogan on the wall saying “Let’s make mathematics a weapon in the revolution!” How times change. As we never said back in the day: “Viva the Jubilee! Viva the Commonwealth! Viva Moçambique!”