Mozambican women in battle and the construction of a colonial liberation heroine

The country gained independence on June 25, 1975. Women participated actively in the fighting fronts, even taking up arms. Reference to the first groups of Mozambican women who organized themselves to support Frelimo dates back to the 1960s. They were active in mobilization work, such as that carried out by the Women's League of Mozambique (LIFEMO), and in guerrilla advances, such as that promoted by the Women's Detachment (DF).

         Frelimo has two central historical male leaders. Eduardo Mondlane (1920-1969) and Samora Machel (1933-1986). Machel declared several times that "The liberation of the woman is, in the first place, the task of the woman herself. There was the understanding that there should be simultaneous liberation from colonial rule and the fight for women's emancipation. 

In 1963 she tried to go to the Frelimo headquarters in Tanzania, but was captured by the Portuguese political police. She was imprisoned in Maputo for two years. In 1965, at the age of 20, Josina managed to reach Dar es Salaam. That same year, the first detachment of Mozambican women guerrillas began its training. It was created by women who wanted to participate in the liberation struggle through weapons.

In 1967, Frelimo absorbed the initiative, promoted the foundation of the Women's Detachment (DF), and started to offer military training and political instruction to the guerrillas of the movement.

Josina Machel died on April 7, 1971, in a hospital in Tanzania, suffering from a serious illness. The date of her death marks Mozambican Women's Day. After the founding of the Mozambican Women's Organization (OMM) in March 1973, she was successively honored as the "top leader" of Frelimo's main women's representative body. 

After independence, Frelimo began a series of propagandist publications that aimed to disseminate the foundations of the movement's thinking. The image on the cover refers to the tools necessary for liberation: guns and books, both of which could be handled by women's hands. An association between literacy and liberation was established. The hands that have shot are the hands that should now write the decolonized future.  

In this sense, the emancipation process of Mozambican women should be in accordance with the internal political and moral precepts of the movement. The "emancipated woman" would only be born within Frelimo, leaving little room for the existence of a multiplicity of experiences and voices of womanhood.

The struggle against colonialism was accompanied by the struggle against systems and practices that reserve women a subordinate place in society. The defense of national liberation and of a post-colonial world invariably went through - and still goes through - the continuation of the struggle for women's emancipation, including within Frelimo itself.