Challenging Frelimo Nationalism and the 1963-1965 ‘Union Talks’ for the Liberation Struggle in Mozambique

A few months after the birth of FRELIMO in Dar es Salaam, various regional and continental diplomatic channels were set in motion in an attempt to recompose the fractures, splits and exclusions that had already taken place at this stage among Mozambican nationalists. In particular, a series of rounds of negotiations took place between 1963 and 1965 involving, in addition to FRELIMO, a number of parties that had been revived or had survived the FRELIMO founding process, such as two UDENAMOs and MANC. The talks, hosted in Cairo, Dar es Salaam and finally in Lusaka, failed in bringing those movements back into FRELIMO, and led to the birth of a new formation, COREMO, which for years represented the most serious threat to the hegemony of FRELIMO on the nationalist discourse. Eventually, these events paved the way for FRELIMO as the sole legitimate representative of the Mozambican people struggling for the end of Portuguese colonialism, but the analysis of the processes that led to the origin of COREMO allows us to better assess the subsequent adversarial political history of the country.