3 January 2009
Maputo — Mozambique's first black lawyer, Domingos Arouca, died, after a brief illness, early on Saturday morning at his Maputo home, at the age of 80.
Born in July 1928 into a relatively wealthy landowning family in the southern province of Inhambane, Arouca initially trained as a nurse. But in 1949 he became one of the handful of black Mozambicans under Portuguese colonial rule who was able to study in Lisbon, first at high school, and then at university.
He obtained a law degree, thus breaking into a profession which had previously been a white enclave. He could have made a lucrative business out of practicing law in Lourenco Marques (as Maputo was then known). Instead, he became involved in nationalist politics.
In northern Mozambique, the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) began its armed struggle to overthrow colonial rule in 1964. Far to the south, in Lourenco Marques, supporters of the liberation struggle were involved, despite colonial censorship, in publishing papers such as "O Brado Africano", where Arouca became editorial director. He was also elected president of the Centre for Black Mozambicans - but shortly afterwards, the Portuguese secret police, the PIDE, swooped. He was arrested in 1965, and on the same day the Centre was closed down,
Arouca was accused of being a member of Frelimo, and responsible for "subversion" in southern Mozambique. He spent the next eight years in prison. The first four years were in Machava prison, on the outskirts of Maputo - but he was then deported to Portugal, to the notorious jails of Caxias and Peniche, where many anti-fascists, both from the colonies and from Portugal itself, were incarcerated.
On his release, in 1973, he was immediately flown back to Mozambique, but was not allowed to leave Inhambane without PIDE authorisation, though he was permitted to practice law.
By the time of the collapse of Portuguese fascism in 1974, Arouca's politics had come to diverge from those of Frelimo. During the guerrilla war, Frelimo had moved to the left, coming under the influence of Marxism (and in 1977, at its Third Congress, would redefine itself as a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party).
Arouca remained a more conservative nationalist. He claimed that, prior to independence on 25 June 1975, Samora Machel offered him the post of Secretary of State for Information in the new government, but he rejected it, on the grounds that he did not wish to serve in what he regarded as a communist administration.
Instead, Arouca returned to Portugal, where he founded an opposition party, the Mozambique United Front (FUMO). But there is no indication that FUMO was ever active inside Mozambique during the period of the one party state.
After Frelimo had abandoned Marxism-Leninism, and a new, liberal constitution, adopted in 1990, introduced political pluralism to Mozambique, Arouca returned. But FUMO was only one of several opposition parties trying to take advantage of the new climate, and all were overshadowed by the apartheid-backed rebel movement Renamo, now reorganizing itself as a political party.
In the country's first multi-party presidential elections in 1994, Arouca did very badly, winning only 0.76 per cent of the vote.
A bitter split in FUMO then followed, over whether or not the party should join the "Renamo-Electoral Union" coalition that Renamo formed with ten minor parties for the 1999 elections. Arouca was strongly opposed to this strategy, believing that Renamo's junior partners in the coalition would lose all their autonomy.
The rest of the FUMO leadership disagreed. Finding himself outvoted, Arouca resigned from the party he had founded. He warned FUMO "it is a political step backwards to enter parliament thanks to a political party which is not your own".
Arouca was proved correct. All the Electoral Union provided for the minor parties were parliamentary seats and salaries for a handful of their leaders. The parties themselves have shriveled, and today scarcely exist. Renamo has now ended the coalition, and the chances of any of its erstwhile partners entering parliament in 2009 under their own steam seem more remote than ever.
No longer active in politics, Arouca remained, despite his advanced age, a skilled lawyer whose services were widely sought. In the last years of his life, he became increasingly frail. But although he had difficulty walking, and his eyesight was beginning to fail him, his mind remained sharp, and his voice strong. At his 80th birthday celebrations last year, he declared that he had no intention of retiring. Right up to the end, he was continuing to defend clients in the country's courts.
Frelimo came to respect Arouca, and in 1997 he was one of the Frelimo candidates for membership of the Supreme Council of the Judicial Magistrature (CSMJ), the regulatory body for Mozambican judges. The president of the Supreme Court, Mario Mangaze, who also chairs the CSMJ, declared last year that the positions taken by Arouca on the Council, "were always driven by the need to establish an independent, strong and efficient judiciary, endowed with values such as morality, ethics and justice".
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