Mozambique’s Neglected Nationalists in Exile: Retracing Coremo’s Relations with the Congolese Government and the FNLA

Abstract

Even though the Mozambique Revolutionary Committee (Coremo) was Mozambique’s second largest liberation movement, historians have neglected its role in the struggle for Mozambican independence. This neglect has resulted in an imbalanced understanding of how Mozambicans fought to overthrow Portuguese colonial rule throughout the second half of the 20th century, including how Mozambican liberation movements navigated the precarious exile environment. By retracing and examining Coremo’s relations with Joseph Mobutu’s Congolese government and the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), this article adds to the growing literature on competing anti-colonial movements during Mozambique’s liberation struggle. Coremo’s relationship with these two actors is intertwined with and was founded on the earlier relations that Paulo Gumane’s reconstituted National Democratic Union of Mozambique (Udenamo) had established with the FNLA and Cyrille Adoula’s Congolese government. Reconstructing the story of this relationship deepens our understanding of the different transnational and transregional strategies that smaller liberation movements like Coremo employed in exile. The story of Coremo’s relations with Kinshasa and the FNLA highlights the importance of and difficulties in establishing support structures in the context of competitive liberation politics. The history of these long-standing relations also adds to our understanding of the formation and development of working relationships between lusophone African liberation movements, which have traditionally focused on the Conference of Nationalist Organisations of the Portuguese Colonies, and brings to our attention the role of alternative African support hubs in southern Africa’s liberation struggle.