22/05/2004 MOZAMBIQUE
A book that will make waves
The biography of a former vice president of Frelimo who was executed after the country gained independence, will go on sale in Maputo next month.
A political science student at the University Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo is the author of a biography of the former vice president of Frelimo, Uria Simango . Simango was executed after the country gained independence, and he is still the subject of controversy thirty years on. The book by Barnabé Lucas Nkomo, entitled Uria Simango : un homem, uma causa (468 pages) will be published by Ediçoes Novafrica of Maputo. It is the result of long years of research and interviews with people who lived through the events and will raise considerable doubts on the official version of the role of Uria Simango in the movement of national liberation. This will not fail to cause a degree of embarrassment to the leaders of the governing party just six months before the general elections at the end of this year.
Nkomo, a native of the province of Sofala, like the Simango family, has reconstituted the first years in the life of Uria Simango , then a churchman, and of his close ties with the Udenamo, a nationalist movement which afterwards formed the core of the Frelimo of which Simango later became vice president. By working from testimonies by the founder members of Frelimo and from documents declassified by the American State Department, the author is able to sketch a portrait of the various factions that were in contention at the time within Frelimo. The author also outlines Simango 's last years, interned by his former companions in arms, in a re-education camp in Niassa province (in the northern part of the country) where he was summarily executed on an unknown date sometime between 1977 and 1979. Since then Uria Simango has always been presented as a reactionary ?enemy of the people? in Frelimo mythology. However, Nkomo sees him more as ?a nationalist missionary whose commitment and dedication to the cause of freedom of his people were negated by his country's recent history? .
One of Uria Simango 's sons, Lutero is now the leader of the Partido da Convençao Nacional (PCN, opposition) while another son, Davis, was elected mayor of Beira in November 2003 on an opposition list presented by Afonso Dhlakama's Renamo.
