Mozambique’s Samora Machel

Samora Machel (1933–1986) led Mozambicans through a war against their Portuguese colonizers and in 1975, became the first president of the People’s Republic of Mozambique. His military successes against a colonial regime backed by South Africa, Rhodesia, the United States, and its NATO allies enhanced his reputation as a revolutionary hero. In 1986, during the country’s civil war, Machel died in a plane crash under circumstances that remain uncertain.

Allen F. Isaacman, Regents Professor of History at the University of Minnesota and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Western Cape, is the author of seven books, including the coauthored (with Barbara S. Isaacman) Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development, winner of the ASA Book Prize (formerly Herskovits Award) and the AHA Klein Prize in African History. Barbara S. Isaacman, a retired criminal defense attorney, worked with the Mozambican Woman’s Movement (OMM) and taught at the law faculty of the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane while living in Mozambique in the late 1970s. She wrote Mozambique—Women, the Law, and Agrarian Reform and coauthored with Allen several books.