After a decade-long guerrilla war waged by the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), Portugal formally transferred sovereignty to the new nation of Mozambique. Samora Machel was sworn in as president amid jubilant celebrations in Maputo, but independence quickly gave way to a brutal 16-year civil war against the Rhodesian- and South African-backed RENAMO insurgency that devastated the fledgling state.
Portugal's 1974 Carnation Revolution, which toppled the Estado Novo dictatorship in Lisbon, suddenly opened the door to independence for its African colonies after years of stubborn colonial war. FRELIMO, which had fought Portuguese forces since 1964 from bases in Tanzania, negotiated a transitional government and then full independence, declared at midnight on June 25, 1975, in the capital then still called Lourenço Marques (soon renamed Maputo).
Samora Machel, a former nurse turned guerrilla commander, took the podium before a jubilant crowd to declare Mozambique a one-party Marxist state aligned with the Soviet bloc — a choice that alarmed the white-minority governments of neighboring Rhodesia and South Africa.
Those regimes soon began arming and funding RENAMO, plunging Mozambique into a civil war lasting until 1992 that killed roughly a million people and displaced millions more. Independence Day remains a national holiday in Mozambique, but it's remembered with the bittersweet knowledge that the celebration in Maputo's stadium preceded nearly two decades of war.
Key people: Samora Machel