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It will take more than an emphasis on the work ethic, however, to solve Mozambique's economic problems. Of its 8 million people, 80% live in rural areas and 90% are illiterate. With only about 1,000 trained administrators, both black and white, Frelimo will have a hard time running a country twice the size of California. Rail and road transport are already breaking down, and internal communications are chaotic. Even some of Machel's "dynamization committees," set up all over the country to sell the people on the new life in Mozambique, have broken up in disagreement. Hundreds of once trusted cadres have been sent out in disgrace to rural areas to "learn from the masses."
Mozambique's independence will inevitably affect the white-ruled regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia. From South Africa, Mozambique gains at least $250 million a year, mostly from earnings of the 100,000 Mozambicans who work in the South African mines; this represents more than half of Mozambique's national income. When electric power starts flowing to South Africa from Mozambique's Cabora Bassa dam in October, Mozambique could make another $50 million a year. Commercial ties probably outweigh ideology and are likely to continue.
The relationship with Rhodesia —which relies on Mozambican rail lines and ports to handle 80% of its exports —is another matter. Though he said nothing about a blockade last week, Machel seems certain to shut off Rhodesia's vital transit trade sooner or later. That would cost Mozambique about $50 million a year in transport revenues, but might also topple the hated white regime in Salisbury. "The struggle in Zimbabwe," he said last week, using the African name for Rhodesia, "is our struggle."
If anything, independence may prove to be even more traumatic in Mozambique's sister colony of Angola, which is due to be given its freedom in November. Reports from the Angolan capital of Luanda last week spoke of "relative calm"—meaning only scattered shooting in the city's muceques (slums) and perhaps a dozen deaths in the capital. An estimated 1,200 people have been killed in fighting since last January. In an effort to halt the bloodshed, Portuguese troops swept through the muceques and found an enormous hoard of arms, including mortars, machine guns, mines and homemade bombs. Two weeks ago, leaders of the territory's three warring liberation groups met and agreed that civilians should be disarmed, but the task seems impossible. The agreement piously deplored "private justice," but the three movements continued to kill and torture each other's supporters.