The Death of Samora Machel
- cepmurphywrites
- Sep 12, 2025
- 8 min read
By David Love.
Epilogue
"He's dead." My sister stood in my doorway.
It was the evening of the 20th October, 1986. Earlier that day, around lunchtime, my mother had come to school and told us the news that Mozambiquan President Samora Machel’s plane was missing, reportedly crashed or shot down in South Africa. We’d left school early and gone home, sitting with my parents waiting for updates on Zimbabwean local radio and the BBC World Service that didn’t really add anything.
Machel was a towering figure in southern African politics and the mechanics of liberation. As leader of Frelimo, he’d supported the liberation movements of Zimbabwe and South Africa since long before Mozambiquan independence, offering bases to Zimbabwean guerrilla forces as soon as Frelimo had liberated much of Tete province, despite more than half of Mozambique still being under Portuguese control at the time. He was a hero to many – I had a friend whose parents had named Samora in his honour, and the main street in Harare had been named Samora Machel Avenue since the early 80s – and that shine had only been slightly decreased by the Nkomati non-aggression pact he’d signed with Botha.
I had met Machel the previous month. My sister and I were in a folk dancing group at the Ministry of Culture that used to, among other thing things, perform at the airport as part of the ceremony for welcoming foreign dignitaries. Machel had arrived for the Non-Aligned Movement Summit, in the military cut jacket with tie that he wore in his later years rather than the fatigues and cap of the 70s and early 80s, but still making quite an impression on me.
Machel’s death felt like a personal loss to me, but more than that, an awakening that the good guys don’t always win.
Prologue
Samora Machel was in Mbala in the Zambian Copperbelt on 19 October to meet Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda and Angolan President Eduardo dos Santos, to discuss the security threats posed by Kamuzu Banda’s government in Malawi and Mobutu Sese Seko’s in Zaire. Mobuto was supporting UNITA, the rebel movement in Angola that was backed by South Africa, and Banda was supporting Renamo, the rebel movement in Mozambique originally set up by Smith’s government in Rhodesia, later supported by the apartheid government in South Africa. Renamo had bases in Malawi, and the South African government flew supplies for them into Malawi.
Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia had recently closed their land[1] borders with Malawi, and the meeting was to discuss next steps. Although the communiques were bland, the meeting discussed invading Malawi and replacing Banda, seen as a South African puppet, with a new government led by Malawian exiles.
The Flight
Machel departed Mbala for Maputo shortly after 1830 in the governmental Tupolev Tu-134, flown by a Soviet flight crew. Around 2100 the crew communicated with Maputo Airport that they were beginning their descent. Ten minutes later the plane turned abruptly right, and a further ten minutes later, after repeated communication with Maputo that they could not see the runway, the plane crashed into a hill near Mbuzini in south-eastern South Africa. Samora Machel, twenty-five other passengers[2], and four of the five crew all died.
The cause of the crash remains disputed. The South African government conducted an inquiry which found that the crash was caused by pilot error. Mozambiquan and Soviet reports from that time blamed a fake beacon, which caused the diversion of the plane, resulting in its crash at a site which the crew thought was Maputo. This was (and still is) widely believed in Harare and Maputo, and the conduct of the apartheid government such as refusing to hand over the black boxes was seen as highly suspicious. I remember a cartoon in the Harare Herald of Botha desperately trying to keep the black boxes under his suit jacket, with people asking, “if you’ve nothing to hide, why are you hiding them?”
Much later, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, reporting in 2001, heard a variety of evidence supporting the fake beacon as a cause, as well as the presence of security personnel at Mbuzini on the afternoon and night of 19 October – but did not make a finding.
What Might Have Been
But what if Machel’s flight had left at a different time, or had flown by another route?
Delay departure sufficiently, and the security operation at Mbuzini would eventually have been called off, the beacon removed, and the flight proceed to Maputo without incident. Say Machel is not in a rush for an appointment in Maputo the next morning, or is tired after the meeting, or has a mild stomach reaction to the Zambian habit of serving warm lager, perhaps he decides to fly back the following morning.
Or Machel could have decided to fly on to Dar-es-Salaam, as neither Ali-Hassan Mwinyi, the new Tanzanian president, nor Julius Nyerere, technically retired from government but still very influential, had attended the meeting. This was a consideration, as details of any action against Malawi would have needed further discussion in the coming days – and so would the aftermath.
The above still works with the pilot error theory for the crash, as the pilots would have been more rested, or the necessary coalescence of circumstance for human error to result in the crash would not have occurred.
Future: Pluperfect or Imperfect?
So let us imagine that Samora Machel is not killed. He was only 53 at the time of his death, and so could have lived on, and remained president, for another decade or three.
In our timeline, Mozambique transitioned from a one-party state to democracy in 1994, set on the road by Machel’s successor, Joaqium Chissano’s, reforms in 1989 and the Rome peace accord ending the civil war between the government and Renamo in 1992. Would Machel have done the same?
I read a book of his speeches and writings in the early 90s[3], maybe five years after his death – the book was published by Zed press a few years before his death, and it’s out of print, but Marxists.org has a pirate copy. Machel was very much an authoritarian, which I hadn’t really taken in during my hero-worshipping, folk dancing youth! And not just as a matter of exigency, as a belief: he knew what was best for his people, both in the vanguardist sense, and in a traditional sense, coming from a moderately wealthy farming family in Gaza[4]. It is difficult to imagine that Machel would have moved with the same speed as Chissano, and he might well not have moved in the same direction without external pressure.
In our timeline, Malawi transitioned from Banda’s life presidency[5] to democracy, also in 1994, following a referendum Banda was pressured into holding in 1993. Without Machel’s death, an invasion of Malawi could well have gone ahead in late 1986, spearheaded by Mozambique, with support from Zimbabwe (who had troops in Mozambique at the time[6]), as well as military or logistic support from Tanzania and Zambia. Three of these countries had done this before, with the war to remove Idi Amin in Uganda and replace him with a transitional government in 1979. For Malawi in 1986, unlike in Uganda in 1979, there was no exiled former president to install, so the options would have been largely limited to prominent Malawian exiles. Although Chakufwa Chihana was arguably the most prominent exile by 1986, Mwinyi would probably have favoured the Tanzania-based Willie Chokani, who had inherited Henry Chipembere’s Pan-African Democratic Party. Kaunda would also have been less keen on the unionist Chihana, given the problems the unions were already giving him on democratisation.
Nowadays, when the African Union immediately suspends countries with undemocratic transitions or coups, it seems inevitable that a transitional government would give way to elections – and to be fair that did happen in Uganda in 1980, albeit under the watchful eye of the Tanzanian army and with a more or less guaranteed outcome for the regional powers’ preferred candidate, former president Milton Obote. Malawi could have been somewhat different, given the need to ‘decongressify’ the country of Banda’s Malawi Congress Party, as well as the ongoing war in northern Mozambique. Chokani’s transitional government could have stayed in power for several years, with rising opposition from Chihana and (ironically) from former (by then) Congress politicians like our timeline’s first post-Banda president, Bakili Muluzi.
For Machel, with a friendly government – and Mozambiquan troops – in Malawi, the stalemate in the civil war at home could have given way to a series of government victories over Renamo. A victorious Machel would probably have resisted calls for multi-party democratisation for another decade, before acceding to pressure for a transition, possibly under democratic South African pressure, in the late 1990s. That might be only a few years later than OTL, but without the diplomatic leadership of Chissano there is probably a more fraught transition and a more limited democracy – and a possibly earlier resumption of violence by Renamo, and also earlier urban unrest led by the unions. Overall, the late 1990s Mozambiquan “miracle” of peace, democracy, decreased poverty, and fast economic growth might never have occurred.
So, we could see democratisation in both Malawi and Mozambique delayed for several years, and taking a different form, notwithstanding that the ultimate cause would have been the removal of one of Africa’s (then) longest-serving dictators.
Then there is Graça Machel. In our timeline, she was a widow and international activist on children and refugees from 1986, to her marriage with Nelson Mandela in 1998, and was South Africa’s first lady for the last year of his presidency. That obviously doesn’t happen with her husband surviving, she probably remains Mozambiquan Minister of Education for as long as he remains in power. With Mozambique a state at best reluctantly democratising, the world is denied her leadership in the Elders and the Commonwealth (Mozambique doesn’t join the Commonwealth), and the University of Cape Town and SOAS don’t get her as chancellor.
And Nelson Mandela? Without Graça to marry, he might not have remarried – at the time there was much comment that only she would have been an acceptable match. And so Mandela’s last years as president could have seen him more isolated and lonely, leaving more space for Mbeki and his allies to manoeuvre, and an earlier centralisation of the democratic South African state.
It’s ironic. Samora Machel was a behemoth in the liberation of southern Africa, and his death an act of terrorism and pain felt across the sub-continent. And yet his departure opened the space for kinder people, Chissano, his widow Graça, and Mandela, absolutely a tough man but not a hard man, to start to build a better Africa, can we say, a better world?
Notes
[1] And the lacustrine border, although Malawi claimed the whole lake anyway.
[2] As a weird tangent, “Bra” Dan Moyane, nowadays one of South Africa’s top veteran journalists, then a reporter for Radio Moçambique, was bumped from the flight at the very last minute, to accommodate an additional official.
[3] Mainly while at a young communist banana farm in Cuba, but that’s another story.
[4] As in the province along the Limpopo River, not that Gaza.
[5] As in the constitution saying, “this specific named man shall be President”, sounds utterly insane these days. My personal favourite is Lucas Mangope, president of Bophuthatswana from the Bantustan’s proclamation in 1977 to its deproclamation in 1994. A true Life President, Mangope served until the death (not his death, the death of the Bantustan).
[6] Including the formidable One Parachute Regiment which had played a key role in seizing the Renamo HQ at Gorongosa the previous year
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