Abstract

The assassination of Mozambique’s president Samora Machel in 1986 was the culmination of a broader political crisis in the region opened by the failure of the 1984 Nkomati Agreement between Mozambique and South Africa, an agreement that was supposed to lay the ground to end the conflict in Mozambique between the Frelimo government and Renamo. The real direct peace talks between the Mozambican government and Renamo would only officially open in 1990 in Rome on new bases, but the framework in which that dialogue developed should also be understood in view of the various levels of regional diplomacy that were activated by Maputo at that time to end the conflict. In particular, in this article, the regional politics of those years is analysed in the light of the various negotiations between the Frelimo leadership and other Mozambican «nationalists» that followed one after the other since the years of the liberation struggle, a political trajectory almost never considered by a literature mostly focused, over time, either on the influences of the Cold War powers, or on the limits of Frelimo’s socialist modernisation policies.