On a hillside in South Africa's Lebombo Mountains, not far from the border with Mozambique, stands a memorial to Samora Machel - the leader of Frelimo and first President of independent Mozambique - and the 34 others who died with him on the evening of 26 October 1986. On that fateful day, the presidential plane, returning to Maputo from Zambia, crashed into the hillside. The monument, by sculptor Jos Forjaz, consists of a cluster of tall slender upright steel poles: thirty-five of them, one for each of those who died. As the breeze blows through the tops of the poles, they vibrate, humming like the engine of an aeroplane. When the wind rises, the hum changes to an eerie sobbing and crying.
Soon after Machel's death, the Mozambican writer and poet Albino Magaia wrote: "The blood of Samora sealed the knot of union between the Mozambican people and the South African people."At the unveiling of the memorial in January 1999, Nelson Mandela spoke of a place "drenched with Mozambican blood", and remembered Machel's untimely death, saying, "We mourned with Mozambique for the loss of a statesman, soldier and intellectual who we claimed as our leader too. He was taken from us even as a new Southern Africa was struggling to be born amidst the death throes of the colonial and apartheid order."The story of Frelimo and the anti-colonial struggle in Mozambique is intricately caught up with the story of the African National Congress (ANC) and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. And the intertwining relationship between the two political organisations is reflected in the personalities and personal lives of Samora Machel and Nelson Mandela, both of whom were reviled in the West in the 1960s and 1970s as terrorists and leaders of terrorist organisations, both of whom believed a high standard of moral probity to be an essential quality in a revolutionary leader (and indeed in all revolutionaries), and both of whom found themselves, when in power, necessarily becoming strategists and negotiators. Machel and Mandela became their respective country's first post-colonial, and post-apartheid, presidents. The two men never met.
