The Conflict

Mozambique was a colony of Portugal for more than two hundred years. Following Mozambique's independence from Portugal in the early 1970s, the white minority governments of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and South Africa, began to fund and direct a campaign to destabilize Mozambique. Brutal warfare and massive destruction of the infrastructure left Mozambique impoverished.

Political

• Rhodesia and South Africa did not want successful black governments in neighboring states, because it undermined their claim that Africans could not govern themselves.
• FRELIMO turned to the Soviet Union for funding following independence, declaring itself to be a socialist organization.
• Some Western nations, including the Untied States, provided funding for the South African-sponsored RENAMO, as a way of fighting the socialist FRELIMO.

Modern Mozambique has been shaped by many forces, chief among these being its thirty-year war. The war began in...