Samora Machel

Samora Moisés Machel was born on 29 September 1933 in the village of Chilembene, in Gaza Province, southern Mozambique. His family were Shangaan farmers, and like their neighbours they were forced to grow cotton for the Portuguese colonial state and were pushed off good land to make room for settlers. That early experience of injustice never left him. He went to mission schools, refused the seminary, and instead trained as a hospital nurse in the colonial capital, Lourenço Marques — today's Maputo — from 1954. In the wards he saw, in his own words, that 'the rich man's dog gets more vaccination and medical care than the workers', and the unfairness of colonial medicine pushed him toward politics.

In 1963 Machel slipped across the border to join FRELIMO, the Mozambique Liberation Front, and was sent for military training in Algeria. He proved a gifted organiser as well as a fighter, ran the movement's training camp in Tanzania, and after the war of liberation began in 1964 rose to command its guerrilla army. When FRELIMO's founder Eduardo Mondlane was assassinated in 1969, Machel was chosen to lead the movement in 1970. Five years later, on 25 June 1975, he proclaimed 'the total and complete independence of Mozambique' and became the new nation's first president, ending nearly five centuries of Portuguese rule.

As president, Machel poured his nurse's instincts into the new state. His government built roughly 1,200 rural health posts, trained over 8,000 health workers, vaccinated most of the population against smallpox, polio and measles, and launched a sweeping literacy campaign to teach reading to villages the empire had ignored. He also made Mozambique a haven for freedom fighters from Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia, declaring that his country's freedom was bound up with theirs — and his cry 'A luta continua', the struggle continues, became a rallying call across the continent. His years in power were also hard ones, marked by drought, a brutal civil war with Renamo, and difficult compromises like the 1984 Nkomati Accord with apartheid South Africa.

On 19 October 1986, returning from a summit in Zambia, Machel's Soviet-crewed Tupolev Tu-134 crashed into a hillside at Mbuzini, just inside South Africa, killing him and 33 others. A South African commission blamed pilot error; Mozambique, the Soviet Union and many African leaders suspected the aircraft had been lured off course by a false navigation beacon, and the cause is still debated today. He is remembered in the star-shaped crypt at Heroes' Square in Maputo, and in the words his people still chant: the struggle continues, victory is certain.