📍Chilembene, Gaza Province, Mozambique
1933 – 1986“I was born Samora Moisés Machel on the 29th of September 1933 in Chilembene, Gaza Province, in what was then Portuguese Mozambique. I trained as a nurse, joined FRELIMO — the Mozambique Liberation Front — in 1963, rose to become its military commander, and led the armed struggle against Portuguese colonialism. Mozambique became independent in 1975 and I became its first President, immediately inheriting a war as Rhodesia and then apartheid South Africa destabilised the country through RENAMO. I died in a plane crash on the 19th of October 1986 near Mbuzini on the South African border under circumstances that have never been fully explained. I was fifty-two. Chilembene and the Gaza Province landscape — the coastal lowlands, the rivers running to the Indian Ocean — were where I began.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Christie, I. Samora Machel: A Biography (1988), Panaf Books; Mondlane, E. The Struggle for Mozambique (1969), Penguin