One hundred years since the birth of the Mozambican revolutionary-intellectual Aquino de Bragança on 6 April 1924, his friend and comrade, Colin Darch, writes about this “man of anguish” – constantly battling to understand what it meant to be a Marxist in the twentieth century. Darch writes how Aquino spent his adult life committed to the struggle for the liberation of Mozambique and for the rest of southern Africa. In 1986 he died in the plane disaster alongside President Samora Machel.
By Colin Darch
I first met Aquino sometime in late 1978 or early 1979, when I moved from Dar es Salaam to Maputo to become part of the team that Ruth First – as the recently appointed research director – was enrolling to work in the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA) within Eduardo Mondlane University. This was a time of political optimism – the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) had driven the US from Viet Nam and the country had been reunified, the Portuguese had been forced from their colonies in Africa and elsewhere, and the struggle for liberation in Zimbabwe and the rest of southern Africa was intensifying.
I have no clear memory of that first, probably formal encounter, but we shook hands as I was introduced as a new staff member and exchanged the usual pleasantries. Much more vivid in my mind is bumping into him quite soon afterwards in the then somewhat cramped offices of the CEA, and his suggestion that we should go for a drive along the Avenida da Marginal, as far as the Costa do Sol restaurant. We drove the same route a couple of times, along what was in the late 1970s an empty beachfront, while Aquino talked in a mixture of French and English – my command of Portuguese was almost non-existent at that time. This happened at an extremely difficult period in Aquino’s life, as his wife and comrade Mariana was seriously sick, and eventually died after a long illness on 29 May 1979.
Aquino was an extraordinarily generous person with his time, devoid of arrogance, and willing to share his knowledge and his friendship. His influence manifested itself in various ways – early in my time at the CEA, for instance, he told me that if I really wanted to master Portuguese, I should read the great writers, such as Eça de Queiroz or the more difficult Aquilino Ribeiro. I remember spending many evenings slowly but dutifully reading O Crime de Padre Amaro (1875) and Os Maias (1888), with a dictionary at my elbow – and it’s my belief that Aquino’s advice eventually paid off. He would often bring distinguished visitors – the MPLA’s (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) Lúcio Lara, the Brazilian intellectual Neiva Moreira, the Soviet Africanist Roza Ismagilova, and many others – to the Centre so that we could meet and talk to them. On one memorable evening, there was even a knock at the door of our house on Avenida Mao Tse-tung, and Aquino came in accompanied by Carlos Rocha “Dilolwa” of the MPLA. They sat discussing Angolan politics and drinking whisky for a couple of fascinating hours. Aquino also brought Mário de Andrade, the first president of the MPLA, to the Centre between May and July 1985, to teach a course on the ideologies of national liberation.
The Mozambican revolutionary intellectual Tomaz Aquino Messias de Bragança – Aquino to all who knew him – was born one hundred years ago on 6 April 1924 in what was then the Portuguese colony of Goa. Self-described as a “man of anguish” – constantly battling to understand what it meant to be a Marxist in the twentieth century – Aquino spent his adult life committed to the struggle for the liberation of Mozambique and for the rest of southern Africa and died in the plane disaster at Mbuzini in October 1986, alongside President Samora Machel. As the memorial in the garden of the CEA puts it, he was “murdered for the cause of peace, science, and freedom”. A trusted confidant of Machel’s, he played multiple roles as a teacher, a journalist, an academic, and a diplomatic messenger, undertaking sensitive and highly discreet missions in the service of the Mozambican revolution.
Known in FRELIMO (Liberation Front of Mozambique) for his discretion, he consistently refused all offers of political appointment after Mozambique’s independence, whether as an ambassador or a minister, and never held an official role in the Mozambican liberation movement. He believed that the mobilisation of popular support for the objectives of national liberation required getting inside people’s heads, understanding their ways of thinking, and to do this successfully required study and reflection on history, culture, and society. Consequently, in 1975 he told Samora Machel that he didn’t want a political appointment, but “only… a centre of studies” – the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA) which he set-up and led from 1976 until his death, defending its independence when those in power disliked the outcomes of its research. It was in the CEA that I had the opportunity to work with him and to get to know him, as a member of the staff that he memorably described as consisting not of Mozambicans and foreigners but rather of “militants of different nationalities”.
When Aquino was born, Goa was still under Portuguese colonial rule, three small settlements scattered along the lengthy western Indian coastline. Many of his friends and relatives were active in campaigns for greater political autonomy within the Portuguese empire. In 1948, at the age of 24 and like other disillusioned young Goans of his generation, he migrated to Mozambique, but failed to win appointment to the colonial civil service through the competitive examinations. He had mentored some young white settlers who were preparing for the same examinations – but they all passed, while he, an Indian, was placed last.
After this experience, in 1951 Aquino left to study physics in Grenoble and Paris. In France – and later in Morocco and Algeria – he began to move in anti-colonial political circles and to forge lifelong friendships with such figures as Marcelino dos Santos, Mário Pinto de Andrade, Agostinho Neto, Eduardo Mondlane and Amílcar Cabral. After graduating, he moved to Morocco as a teacher, and in April 1961, representing the nationalist Goa People’s Party (GLP) he helped to found the Conference of Nationalist Organisations of the Portuguese Colonies (CONCP), a coordinating body for the common struggle against Portuguese domination in the colonies of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and elsewhere. The CONCP was initially based in Casablanca, but later moved to Algiers after objecting to revanchist Moroccan claims over Mauritanian territory. Aquino himself remained in Algiers until Mozambican independence in 1975.
Aquino’s interests were not limited to the Portuguese colonies, or even to southern Africa. His published articles show that he followed closely political life in such regions as the Maghreb, Vietnam and Indonesia, and in the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote extensively on a wide range of political topics – on Brazil, in West Africa, in Angola – as well as on events in metropolitan centres such as Portugal, West Germany and the United States. His articles were published in French in Algeria in such progressive magazines and newspapers as the weekly Révolution Africaine and the FLN daily El Moudjahid, and later in France in such radical publications as Afrique-Asie, edited by Simon Malley, and the monthly L’Economiste du Tiers Monde. Interviews with Aquino – especially after 1980 – published in weekly and daily newspapers constitute an important component of his intellectual heritage.
When the 25 April 1974 coup took place in Portugal, Aquino was sent to Lisbon to find out who held real power. As he recounts in his article “Independence without Decolonisation”, his advice to FRELIMO was to wait for the demonstrations on 1 May, and then to negotiate with the captains rather than with the generals – an assessment that turned out to be entirely correct.
After Mozambican independence, when he had become Director of the CEA, Aquino led a collective research project analysing the political economy of Rhodesia, in support of the Zimbabwean liberation movements at the ill-fated Geneva conference of 1976. Later he brought Ruth First to Mozambique for several months to lead another collective project – with a team of teachers from other faculties and departments – to assess the impact of the migrant labour system to South Africa on the peasantry of Inhambane (a province in southern Mozambique). By the end of 1978 a decision was taken to bring Ruth back permanently as research director, and to build on the earlier experience of collective investigation. Aquino and Ruth’s sharply different personalities meant that they did not always see eye to eye, but nonetheless they led the CEA during what may have been its most productive years. They were committed to critical and engaged teaching and research practices, and believed in research that had a transformative impact.
The methods deployed – collective work, the critical reading of published sources, the use of interviews and fieldwork, and the rapid publication and distribution of results – were largely organised by Ruth. But critically, the Centre provided Aquino with a platform – above all through the Oficina de História or History Workshop – that supported him in producing much of his later body of political work.
Important though the CEA was to him, Aquino was more than just the director of an academic research centre. According to Graça Machel, speaking in 2006, his nickname in Frelimo Party circles was ‘the submarine’ because of his ability to carry out delicate diplomatic missions with little fanfare. It’s clear that he influenced policy, and Samora Machel sent him at different moments to Lisbon, London, Paris, Washington, Luanda and Harare. In January 1985 it was through Aquino that the Portuguese-Galician businessman Manuel Bulhosa tried to suggest a way to end the war with RENAMO (the anti-communist guerilla movement opposed to Mozambique’s FRELIMO, funded by racist South Africa); in March 1985, in Lisbon, Aquino held talks about possible Portuguese military support in the struggle against RENAMO. There were other similar occasions, most of which we may never know about.
Aquino believed in the value of the spoken word – he ‘loved to talk, and [intellectual discourse fascinated him’. Conversation was, for him, a means for acquiring and evaluating new ideas and fresh concepts, to be synthesised and deployed later on in innovative ways. His collaborator Yussuf Adam wrote several years later that ‘Aquino had a great capacity to listen’ but nevertheless, while ‘the whole world said that Aquino talked a lot… Aquino spoke when he wanted to’.
This was a key characteristic of Aquino’s personality, a characteristic that made him such an effective interviewer and an inspiring teacher. His occasional public lectures – sometimes advertised as ‘A Night of Conversation’ – delivered at the Casa Velha in Maputo or in the lecture rooms of the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, covered topics such as ‘Race and Class’, ‘The Thought of Eduardo Mondlane’, ‘People’s Power in the Liberated Zones’, ‘Samora Machel’ and ‘Guinea and Amílcar Cabral’. There are plans afoot to publish transcriptions of recordings of some of these lectures – specifically, on the Salazar dictatorship, as well as on the origins and history of FRELIMO.
Aquino was a ‘totally political person’ and despite his admitted intellectual anguish he was a personification of Gramsci’s “optimism of the will”. His friend Immanuel Wallerstein said that Aquino played three different political roles during his life: militant, diplomat and revolutionary. There’s little doubt that these three political dimensions were present in many different moments, always accompanied by a desire for social transformation and the hope that a new world could be built through political action. One of Aquino’s favourite sayings, after all, echoed his close comrade Amílcar Cabral in affirming that “sonhar é préciso” – we need to dream.
One hundred years after Aquino’s birth, then, and nearly forty years after his murder at Mbuzini, while genocide rages unchecked in Gaza and brutal conflicts drag endlessly on in Europe and Africa, let us acknowledge how much we miss the generous commitment of Aquino and his generation, and their vision of a democratic transformation of society.
A Note on Online Sources
Much of Aquino’s journalism from the 1960s onwards has been digitised and is available, in the original French, on the website Mozambique History Net, here. A collection of twelve of his post-1980 articles and interviews, translated into English, was edited by Marco Mondaini and Colin Darch and published as Independence and Revolution in Portuguese-speaking Africa (HSRC Press, 2019) and can be downloaded here. A biographical text organised by his second wife, the late Sílvia Bragança, was published in English in Goa as Battles Waged, Lasting Dreams and can be obtained here. The book is based on a wide range of interviews with Aquino’s comrades and friends. There is also a collection of photographs and document facsimiles on Flickr here.
Colin Darch worked in Mozambique from 1979 to 1987, and is the founder of the website Mozambique History Net. With Amélia Neves de Souto he’s the author of A Dictionary of Mozambican History and Society (HSRC Press, 2022).
Featured Photograph: Colin Darch (right) and Aquino de Bragança in Dar es Salaam during a mission to interview Mwalimu Julius Nyerere about early FRELIMO history, October 1985 (Colin Darch personal archive).
