Uria Simango

Uria Simango

The reverend Uria Timoteo Simango (born March 15, 1926) was a Mozambican Presbyterian minister and prominent leader of the Mozambique Liberation Front FRELIMO during the liberation struggle against Portuguese colonial rule. His precise date of death is unknown as he was extrajudicially executed (along with several other FRELIMO dissidents and his wife, Celina) by the post-independence government of Samora Machel. A biography of Simango was published in 2004.

Simango was a founder member of FRELIMO, serving as Vice-President from its formation in 1962 until the time of the assassination of its first leader Eduardo Mondlane, in February 1969. Simango succeeded Mondlane as FRELIMO's president but, in the power-struggle following Mondlane's death, his presidency was contested. In April 1969 his leadership was replaced by a triumvirate comprising the Marxist hardliners Samora Machel and Marcelino dos Santos as well as Simango. The late 1960s FRELIMO was blighted by fratricidal infighting with a number of party members dying of unnatural causes. See also.
The triumvirate did not last; Simango was expelled from the Central Committee in November 1969, and Samora Machel and Marcelino dos Santos assumed total control. In April 1970, Simango left for Egypt where, with other dissidents like Paulo Gumane (Frelimo's founding vice-General Secretary), he became a leader of COREMO, another small liberation movement.

After the Portuguese Carnation Revolution in 1974, Simango returned to Mozambique and established a new political party "National Coalition Party" (PCN) in the hope of contesting elections with FRELIMO. He was joined in the PCN by other prominent figures of the Liberation movement and the FRELIMO dissidents: Paulo Gumane and Adelino Gwambe (also a founder member of FRELIMO), Father Mateus Gwengere and Joana Simeao.

FRELIMO opposed multi-party elections. The post-1974 Portuguese government handed over sole power to FRELIMO and Mozambique gained its independence on June 25, 1975. Samora Machel and Marcelino dos Santos took over as its first President and Vice-President. Graca Machel was appointed minister of Education and Joaquim Chissano its Foreign minister. Uria Simango was arrested and forced to make a 20-page public confession on May 12, 1975, at the FRELIMO base in Nachingwea recanting and requesting re-education. His forced confession (in Portuguese) may be heard on-line. Simango and the remainder of the PCN leadership never regained freedom. Simango, Gumane, Simeao, Gwambe, Gwengere and others were all secretly liquidated at some undetermined date during 1977-1980. Neither the place of burial nor manner of their execution have ever been disclosed by the authorities. Simango's wife, Celina Simango was also separately executed sometime after 1981, and no details or dates for her death are on public record in her case either.

From the late 1970s, a bloody insurgency by RENAMO (Mozambique National Resistance) plunged the country into a devastating civil war. RENAMO was initially formed by the Rhodesian regime, but from 1980, in its most brutal phase, was sponsored by the Apartheid regime of South Africa: the insurgency in the 1980 was associated with widespread atrocities against civilians. Economic collapse and famine ensued, worsened by drought in the early 1980s. Following the death of Samora Machel in 1986, Joaquim Chissano gradually steered Mozambique back to a peace accord with RENAMO in 1992 and the restoration of democracy. Multi-party elections were finally held in 1994, twenty years after Simango's ill-fated PCN opposition party.