ANC-Mozambique Relations’ Impact on the Armed Struggle
On 30 May 1983, a New York Times newspaper article maintained that “Mozambique could be ruined by South Africa, and that appears to be the reason that its leaders have sought to disperse concentrations of African National Congress (ANC) personnel in its capital and have moved some of them to the northern province of Nampula”.
This article was followed by a report that arrived on 14 June 1983 at the headquarters of the apartheid South African Defence Force’s Special Forces at Voortrekkerhoogte, which was alleging that the ANC was developing a base in Mozambique’s Nampula province. According to the report, the camp was located 12 kilometres north-west of a small centre called Mecuburi, which in turn was located north-west of the town of Nampula. The camp was an old farm called Impirima, which was previously owned by a Portuguese rancher, and it was started in June 1982, without special fencing around, except for a normal cattle fence covering 600 hectares of land.
The camp was in reality a product of tensions that were evolving between the ANC and the Mozambican authorities, which were mainly prompted by pressure from the racist South African government over increasing armed activities, conducted by Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) within South Africa. Actually, the South African authorities had set themselves the goal of eliminating the ANC presence in the neighbouring states. They applied a carrot-and-stick polic
