Wiriyamu, 1972: the Mozambique massacre Portugal took 50 years to own up to

At half past nine on the morning of Tuesday 10 July 1973, a colleague handed Mustafah Dhada a copy of The Times. Dhada was 22, a student in London who had left Mozambique in 1964 after the Portuguese authorities classed him as “not assimilated”. On the front page was a report headlined “Portuguese massacre reported by priests”.2 sources2 sources

It was signed by Adrian Hastings, a British Catholic priest who had worked as a missionary in Africa. He described an attack seven months earlier on a village called Wiriyamu, south of the town of Tete, by Portuguese commandos working with agents of the DGS, the secret police. His article drew on a confidential report by two Spanish missionaries who had collected the testimony of survivors. They counted more than 400 dead and identified 120 of them by name, most of them women, children and old people.1 source1 source

Dhada thought of his own village, Búzi, and how much it must have resembled Wiriyamu. He promised himself a doctorate at Oxford on the massacre. He did take an Oxford doctorate, in 1987, but on Amílcar Cabral and the war in Guinea-Bissau; his history of Wiriyamu took more than four decades.1 source1 source

The timing mattered. A week later Marcelo Caetano, who had succeeded Salazar as head of Portugal's dictatorship, was due in Britain on an official visit to mark the 600th anniversary of the Anglo-Portuguese alliance. Instead of a celebration, he arrived to protests.2 sources2 sources

By 1972 Portugal was fighting three colonial wars at once: in Angola since 1961, in Guinea since 1963 and in Mozambique since September 1964. In Mozambique Portugal faced FRELIMO, the Mozambique Liberation Front, founded in Dar es Salaam in 1962. Mozambique had some 200,000 settlers, and the regime treated its African territories as an inseparable part of the nation.1 source1 source

For its first six years the war was fought mainly in Cabo Delgado, the far north, on the border with Tanzania. In 1970 General Kaúlza de Arriaga became commander-in-chief. He wanted a quick, decisive victory, and in July 1970 launched Operation Gordian Knot against FRELIMO's northern bases with some 8,000 men, the largest Portuguese force used in a single operation in any of the wars.1 source1 source

While Portuguese troops were concentrated in the north, FRELIMO shifted its effort to the centre of the country, and above all to Tete. The district was a wedge of Mozambican land surrounded by other African states, easy to infiltrate across the borders. It was also where Portugal had chosen to build one of the world's largest dams, on the Zambezi at Cahora Bassa.1 source1 source

The dam was meant to show the world that Portugal intended to stay in Africa. The contract went to the ZAMCO consortium in 1969 and building began in 1970. Guarding the site and the long supply roads to it took troops that Arriaga complained he did not have.2 sources2 sources

By late 1972 guerrillas were operating within reach of the town of Tete itself, and the DGS office there described the situation as “simply chaotic”. White settlers wanted a harder line. On 9 December 1972 a Portuguese electrician wrote to Caetano “on behalf of the entire population of the city of Tete”, complaining that soldiers were forbidden to shoot guerrillas and demanding that they be “eliminated once and for all”.1 source1 source

On 14 December 1972 a civilian aircraft was shot at near Tete. A DGS team went to question the villagers south of the town and learned nothing. When it returned the next day with an army patrol, the patrol was ambushed by FRELIMO on its way back and suffered six casualties.1 source1 source

The commandos were told that a FRELIMO leader called Raimundo had a base with an estimated 300 fighters somewhere between “Fumo Williamo” and “Cantina Raul”. The orders for the operation, codenamed Marosca, set three aims: capture Raimundo, capture or destroy his guerrillas, and remove the population from FRELIMO's control. There were three briefings the day before; at the one held at 18:30, DGS guides were assigned to the combat groups.2 sources2 sources

The assault force was drawn mainly from the 6th Commando Company, a unit of Portuguese and locally recruited volunteers, with the 17th Light Infantry Battalion, the Air Force and DGS agents. According to Dhada, its commander was ill that day, and the company was led on the ground by a 21-year-old alferes (second lieutenant), Antonino Melo, named António Melo in some accounts.3 sources3 sources

The attack began with two Portuguese jets bombing. According to the DGS's own report, the bombs did not fall on the hamlet itself: the DGS had wanted the Air Force to strike it first, but the military chose to bomb around it, hoping to take Raimundo alive. Commandos were then landed by helicopter. No guerrilla was killed or captured and no weapons were found.2 sources2 sources

What followed is known mainly from survivors. The missionaries' report, written from the testimony of people who reached the São Pedro mission hospital, described soldiers looting and burning huts, women raped, people suffocating inside burning huts, villagers executed and others beaten to death. Most of the victims, it said, were women, children and the elderly.1 source1 source

Survivors and later accounts gave a central role to an African DGS agent, Chico Kachavi (also spelt Cachave), who is said to have urged the soldiers on and carried out killings himself. Melo later told interviewers he had orders to kill everyone.2 sources2 sources

The historian Andreas Zeman, using army and secret-police files, argues that it was all too easy for the commandos to blame the notorious DGS and its agent afterwards. Kachavi, who worked for the DGS as a prison guard in Tete, was killed by FRELIMO in August 1973, and the DGS's own report on the operation blamed the army.1 source1 source

Dhada found that the killing spread over five settlements in what he calls the Wiriyamu triangle: Wiriyamu, Djemusse, Riacho, Juwau and Chawola. His count does not include people killed in the three days of “clean-up” that followed, or during interrogations.2 sources2 sources

Nobody knows exactly how many people died, and the figures depend on who was counting and why. The army's action report, dated 21 December 1972, listed 102 huts destroyed and 20 “collaborators of the enemy” killed. The DGS chief in Tete was blunter in his report for the second half of December: about a hundred members of the population had been killed.1 source1 source

The report went on to regret that no guerrillas had died alongside the villagers, which would have given the “moral consolation” of blaming their presence for the deaths. It also saw a positive side: the operation had given the European population some confidence and cut FRELIMO off from the people of the Rego and Gandar chiefdoms.1 source1 source

The first written account came from Father Domingos Ferrão, a Mozambican priest from Tete who spoke the local language, Nyungwe. With Domingo Kansande he drew up a list of the victims and passed it to Spanish and Dutch missionaries. Two priests of the Burgos Fathers, a Spanish missionary society, at São Pedro mission, José Sangalo and Vicente Berenguer, took about three days to write their report on Chawola and three more weeks for Wiriyamu.4 sources4 sources

The Church tried to act quietly. According to the memoir of the Jesuit José Augusto Alves de Sousa, published in 2015, he and the Burgos superior handed a report with the victims' names to the secretary of the papal nunciature at an episcopal ordination the day after the massacre, asking him to pass it to the nuncio. The Bishop of Tete sent a doctor and a Red Cross representative, who found many unburied bodies, and the bishops asked the governor-general for an inquiry. For months nothing happened.2 sources2 sources

Copies were smuggled out to Madrid and to Rome, where Father Cesare Bertulli of the White Fathers, an order that had left Mozambique after clashing with the authorities, sent the material to Amnesty International in London in June 1973. Hastings read the reports at a religious meeting in Spain and persuaded The Times they were genuine. Its editorial compared the killings to My Lai, the American massacre in Vietnam.1 source1 source

When Caetano reached London in mid-July, he was met with hostility and a demonstration near the Portuguese embassy. Harold Wilson, the Labour leader, spoke of genocide. In private the British government took the reports seriously: a Foreign Office brief of 27 July concluded that, although there was no physical evidence, it was highly probable that they had some basis in fact.2 sources2 sources

Lisbon's first answer was flat denial. Hastings's article had placed Wiriyamu imprecisely, and the government argued that the village did not exist. The settlements were too small to appear on most maps. Yet the army knew the place: the 17th Light Infantry Battalion had mentioned it in reports as early as August 1972.3 sources3 sources

Journalists went to look. Peter Pringle of The Sunday Times was harassed by DGS agents and expelled after three days, but he managed to see maps and documents showing that Wiriyamu, or “Williamo”, existed, and he interviewed a teenage survivor of Chawola, António. On 5 August his paper ran the boy's story under the headline “I survived the Mozambique massacre”.1 source1 source

Caetano asked Jorge Jardim, an influential settler businessman, to find out what had happened. Jardim visited Tete in August with three journalists and, according to Zeman, found clear proof of a massacre. The Ministry of Defence then issued a statement admitting wrongdoing by some soldiers, and Portuguese officials told the Daily Telegraph that 98 villagers had died in a raid on Chawola.2 sources2 sources

The army had already investigated itself. Arriaga ordered an inquiry in March 1973; it reported on 29 May that 63 people had died, not 20, but found nothing wrong: the villagers had run away despite orders to stop, so the troops had been “right” to treat them as the enemy.1 source1 source

A second inquiry, prompted by Jardim's findings and led by Brigadier Henrique Nunes da Silva in September 1973, looked only at Chawola. For a time it became a judicial case against two suspects, Melo among them. Nunes da Silva accepted that there had been acts of violence against the local people that “might have been partly avoided”. He then advised dropping the case, because it would bring the affair back into the public eye and might frustrate the soldiers. The defence minister agreed, calling some of the soldiers' actions “reprehensible” but blaming the tense situation on the ground.1 source1 source

The DGS reported in August 1973 that, although the governor of Tete, Colonel Armindo Videira, had twice sent troops to remove all evidence, bodies still lay on the ground at Chawola eight months after the attack. Videira, who held both civil and military power in Tete, was removed after the scandal broke. Arriaga left Mozambique at the end of August 1973.3 sources3 sources

Abroad the pressure grew. On 12 December 1973 the United Nations General Assembly set up a five-member Commission of Inquiry on the Reported Massacres in Mozambique and asked Portugal to cooperate. Portugal did not. In its report of 22 November 1974 the commission found that between 1971 and 1973 personnel “for whose acts the Portuguese colonial Government is responsible” had committed atrocities in Mozambique, naming Chawola, João (Juwau) and Wiriyamu in the chiefdom of Gandali.2 sources2 sources

On 25 April 1974 junior officers of the Armed Forces Movement overthrew the dictatorship, known as the Estado Novo. Wiriyamu had fed their unease: on 23 April, two days before the coup, The Guardian published a report on the massacre compiled by dissident officers in Mozambique. Portugal and FRELIMO signed the Lusaka Accord on 7 September 1974, and Mozambique became independent on 25 June 1975.2 sources2 sources

Under the dictatorship the Lisbon press kept attacking Hastings. In January 1974, when he turned to criticising the aldeamentos, the Diário de Notícias, relaying the regime's news agency, carried a Mozambican Catholic paper's charge that his eyes were clouded by malice and that his claims were lies. Democracy did not bring a reckoning either: neither the dictatorship nor the governments after 1974 allowed an independent inquiry into Operation Marosca.2 sources2 sources

In 2012 Bruno Cardoso Reis and Pedro Aires Oliveira, historians in Lisbon, published a detailed study in the journal Civil Wars, drawing on missionary, Portuguese, British and FRELIMO sources. They concluded that there was enough evidence to prove a mass killing of civilians by a company of Portuguese commandos. But they wrote that the exact location, even the existence of a place called Wiriyamu, and the scale of the killing remained contentious. Dhada replied sharply in the same journal in 2013, and they answered him.2 sources2 sources

Dhada, by then a professor of history at California State University, spent almost a year in the field interviewing survivors and one of the commando officers. His book, The Portuguese Massacre of Wiriyamu in Colonial Mozambique, 1964–2013, launched in Coimbra in November 2015 and published by Bloomsbury in 2016, won the American Historical Association's Martin A. Klein Prize in 2017. A volume of oral testimony followed in 2020.3 sources3 sources

Dhada argues that the troops acted on the orders of the regime and the Portuguese state, and that the massacre was “planned and executed as planned”. Zeman, writing in 2023, doubts that. Both Dhada and Reis and Oliveira had written as if the Portuguese archives held little or nothing on Wiriyamu. Zeman pointed to a 222-page file in the Torre do Tombo, mostly press cuttings and church reports, and found the operation's own papers in the military archive.2 sources2 sources

Those papers, Zeman argues, show that the killing of civilians was seen as a problem inside the army and the secret police in 1972, even though the internal inquiries later shielded those responsible.1 source1 source

The archives are silent on one thing. Zeman notes that the Portuguese forces showed no interest in the names and lives of the dead. Those names survive because priests at the time and Dhada decades later wrote down what survivors told them.2 sources2 sources

In 2015 Dhada told Público that he had written his book for the Portuguese people and their politicians, in the hope that the state would one day put it on record that Wiriyamu existed and that Portuguese troops had killed its people.1 source1 source

Seven years later a Portuguese prime minister offered both. On 2 September 2022, at the end of a two-day visit to Mozambique for a Portuguese-Mozambican summit, Prime Minister António Costa hosted a dinner for President Filipe Nyusi in Maputo and spoke about the massacre.2 sources2 sources

Costa added that between friends, the side that had done wrong had a duty never to forget it and to do penance before history. The Mozambican news agency AIM reported that it was the first time any Portuguese government had officially recognised that the massacre took place.2 sources2 sources