Mueda is the largest town on the Makonde Plateau in Cabo Delgado Province, northeastern Mozambique, and grew up around a Portuguese colonial army barracks. It became a center of Makonde culture and, later, a focal point in the Mozambican struggle for independence from Portugal.
On 16 June 1960, Makonde nationalists organized a demonstration at the Mueda District headquarters, gathering in the town square to demand independence from Portuguese colonial rule. According to accounts of the event, the district administrator had invited demonstrators to present their grievances, but instead ordered their leaders arrested. When the crowd protested this action, the Portuguese administrator directed troops who had been pre-positioned for the confrontation to open fire on the crowd. Reports of the event state that, following the shooting, many more people were thrown to their deaths into a nearby ravine. The exact number of dead in the massacre is disputed.
The events at Mueda generated significant resentment among the Makonde population and other Mozambicans. This resentment is credited with helping the independentist guerrilla organization FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front) gain crucial momentum at the outset of the Mozambican War of Independence, which began in 1964 and continued until 1975. The Makonde people were strong supporters of FRELIMO, and the Makonde African National Union (MANU, later renamed Mozambique African National Union) was one of the three founding organizations that merged to form FRELIMO.
Mueda continued to be strategically significant throughout the war. Portuguese forces conducted operations against FRELIMO from the town, including hosting an airbase. In 1967, FRELIMO launched one of its first major military actions, an attack on the Mueda airbase that, while ultimately unsuccessful in capturing it, seriously damaged the base. In May 1970, Portuguese General Kaúlza de Arriaga began Operation Gordian Knot, headquartered out of Mueda, during which he claimed to have eliminated more than seventy FRELIMO bases, though the operation reportedly did not substantially diminish FRELIMO's capacity to infiltrate arms from Tanzania or continue the war effort. In a later 1972 attack on the Mueda airbase, all nineteen airplanes stationed there were destroyed.
Today, the site of the 1960 massacre in Mueda is marked by a commemorative statue.
Credit: Nicolaes Visscher IIPublic domainSourceSOLVEDListen
