Introduction
3
self-preservation as a defensive maneuver in the face of a “total onslaught” spearheaded by Soviet-backed “communist” forces. Among other things, it could point to Frelimo’s formal embrace of Marxism-Leninism in 1977 to bolster its case. It could also cite the significant influence exerted by the South African Communist Party within the African National Congress (ANC), the main liberation movement fighting for majority rule in South Africa. The gambit worked. The White House did not, in any case, need much persuading, bent as it was on waging war on militant nationalist states in the Third World, especially those seen as firmly ensconced within Moscow’s orbit. The Reagan and G.H.W. Bush administrations strongly tended to view the escalating struggle for South Africa through the prism of the Cold War. Throughout, Washington refrained from openly supporting Renamo – a posture that contrasts sharply with US foreign policy toward Angola, where Washington unabashedly supported the apartheid-backed rebel force, Unita (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). And, at times, it even issued warnings to Pretoria to rein in its “contra” forces in Mozambique. But the policy of “constructive engagement” effectively encouraged South Africa’s onslaught on Mozambique, as it did on the region as a whole. There has been considerable debate over whether Frelimo’s abandonment of Marxism-Leninism as its official ideology, a decision it took in 1989, attests more to the success of external aggression or to the failure of state socialism, Frelimo-style. In either case, the results of total strategy were disastrous not only for the black majority in South Africa, where the escalating internal struggle for power in the 1980s captured the attention of the international media. They were equally calamitous for the entire sub-continent, producing a human tragedy of major proportions that has yet to receive much outside notice. As Terry Bell has recently put it: Throughout the decade the apartheid military, assisted by the police and national intelligence, rampaged through the region. The financial cost to countries attacked and undermined as part of the destabilisation campaign has been estimated at more than $50 billion in 2000 values. The human cost of uprooting millions of people, causing the death of hundreds of thousands of children, ruining agriculture and wrecking infrastructure nationwide can never be quantified.9 A disproportionate share of these costs, human and otherwise, fell on Mozambique. Mozambique became a leading target of South Africa’s total strategy for three reasons. First, the Frelimo government hosted ANC guerrillas, giving them direct access to South African soil. Second, Mozambique’s ports and railways offered neighboring states a potential alternative to South Africa’s transport system for access to world markets. A major step in the direction of forging such an alternative was taken in 1980. Shortly after Zimbabwean
