The Portuguese Massacre of Wiriyamu in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-2013 by Dhada Mustafah

Author:Dhada, Mustafah [Dhada, Mustafah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472512000
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2015-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

Portuguese reprisals

A month after the officer’s departure, Mucumbura saw its third bout of reprisals. FRELIMO guerrillas had crossed the border to kidnap Chief Bauren, a Rhodesian informant who had consistently betrayed FRELIMO positions with information garnered through his extensive social networks on both sides of the frontier. They failed to nab him. Alerted by his informants, Bauren had escaped, leaving his possessions behind, from which FRELIMO guerrillas took an item of value as their calling card. In the eyes of FRELIMO, he was a marked man and his Rhodesian protectors knew what to do next. They launched two operations, one to look for an “informant” who had betrayed Bauren’s role in Rhodesian counter-insurgent intelligence, who was subsequently found, killed, his feet and hands cut off. He had been left on a hillock near Deveteve as a deterrent to others from his village.

The Christian community in the village rallied to give him a proper burial with the Burgos priests in attendance, who then found the perpetrators after a brief search. Confronting them with the facts, the priests stressed that the deceased, named David, was an upstanding member of the local community, married with four children, and came from a long family of community-minded civic leaders, and decidedly not a FRELIMO member or politically connected with Rhodesian insurgents.65 “A very unfortunate thing, Father. Sorry, we thought he was a terrorist.”66

Five days later, another unit of Rhodesian troops, having committed a similar error of judgment in Singe, attempted a cover-up by burning the bodies of eight civilian victims.67 Villagers found the charred remains the next day and informed Valverde de Lion and Hernandez Robles. This time, they took a camera to the site guided by two children who had dodged bullets during the crossfire. They found the remains which they photographed and sent to the bishop of Tete. Would the bishop now do something about this? An officer arrived two days later at the mission demanding the Burgos hand over any additional photographs in their possession. “We informed him that we had already given everything we had to the bishop in Tete,” who unbeknown to them had already sent the film to Lourenço Marques to be developed. Tete’s bishop, who was duly informed of the meeting with the military, now feared he would not get back the offending images, which the Burgos had hoped could be used as admissible evidence to initiate legal proceedings over mass violence in Mucumbura.68

Now that the evidence was presumed to be in the hands of the secret police, it was fair to assume that the two priests were persons of great interest to the authorities.69 It was only a matter of time before they, too, were hauled in for interrogation. Almost immediately after this incident, thirty-one Tete missionaries met to draft a note urging Tete’s bishop to speak up against mass violence; it was signed by thirty-six named priests and delivered on July 1, 1972.

In the meantime, the Burgos of Mucumbura watched helplessly as their mission unraveled before their eyes.

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