Freedom Fighter
Joaquim Chissano represented Frelimo, the Mozambique independence movement, in Paris during the 1960s. He was known there as a soft-spoken diplomat who worked to reconcile radical and moderate Marxist factions of the Frelimo party.
He went on to fight in the Mozambican War of Independence against the Portuguese colonial government and the authoritarian regime of the Estado Novo, by then engaged in a multi-front colonial war. By the time that Mozambique finally achieved its independence in 1975 as a result of the liberation struggle and the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, Chissano had risen to the rank of major-general.
The new president of Mozambique, Samora Machel, appointed him foreign minister. Chissano served in this position for the next eleven years. In 1974, he participated in the Lusaka talks, which paved the way for the independence of Mozambique, and subsequently was elected Prime Minister of the Transitional Government.
Read more about this topic: Joaquim Chissano
Famous quotes containing the words freedom and/or fighter:
“Life’s so ordinary that literature has to deal with the exceptional. Exceptional talent, power, social position, wealth.... Drama begins where there’s freedom of choice. And freedom of choice begins when social or psychological conditions are exceptional. That’s why the inhabitants of imaginative literature have always been recruited from the pages of Who’s Who.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“A pleasant smell of frying sausages
Attacks the sense, along with an old, mostly invisible
Photograph of what seems to be girls lounging around
An old fighter bomber, circa 1942 vintage.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)