PARSELELO KANTAI
COMMISSIONED AND EDITED BY KONI BENSON
Koni Benson: “Uhuru Hustlers” is less of a blindspot than a deep dive and extension of conversations that link, layer, and complicate politics and geographies laid out in previous editions of the Funambulist over the past decade (such as Pan-Africanism; Militarized Cities; The Paris Commune and the World; They Have Clocks, We Have Time; The Ocean, Algerian Independence and Global Revolution; Questioning our Solidarities; and Schools of the Revolution). Parselelo Kantai explores some of the secrets of liberation exiles shaping and shaped by the unfolding social and geopolitical politics of Dar es Salaam as a Pan-Africanist hub in the 1960s, exposing an inconvenient story in the history of solidarity formations in flux.
It is common to hear critiques about writing history by telescoping back from the present to figure out how we got here (teleology), but much more difficult to stand, as historian Robin D.G. Kelley insists, in a particular moment in the past and look at the horizon in front of people at the time. By tracing the little-known story of Adelino Chitofo Gwambe through Salazar’s Portuguese messy intelligence agency archives, Kantai digs into the geopolitical Pan-African complexities and contradictions in deliberations of liberation movement macro and micropolitics exposing how leadership candidacies were created, cobbled, legitimized, contested, and countercreated in the global hustle embedded within the struggle for uhuru (freedom/independence in kiSwahili).
The Cold War on the Swahili Coast played out on a vast, layered canvas of negotiated decolonization in 1960s Anglophone East Africa and armed struggle in southern Africa. For exiles like Mozambique’s Adelino Gwambe arriving in a Dar es Salaam fashioning itself into the center of liberation bureaucracy, gaming Cold War patronage networks would pit Moscow against Washington in a scramble for African clients, in the process exposing the growing ideological rivalries in frontline struggle politics.
In early 1961, in the months after the Mueda Massacre of June 1960, the event that launched Mozambique’s anti-colonial struggle, thousands of refugees streamed north across the border into southern Tanganyika where they squeezed into cramped makeshift camps, swelling a humanitarian crisis with no precedent in a territory months away from independence. By mid-1961, the refugees numbered 250,000; they would swell to over 300,000.
In the stream of refugees was a 22-year-old originally from Vilanculos (now Vilankulo), a picturesque coastal town in southeastern Mozambique. His name: Adelino Hlomulo Chitofo Gwambe.
Driven by a burning ambition for the limelight, Gwambe was a political entrepreneur at the start of an adventure that would catapult him into the micro-politics of the liberation struggle: the back rooms of the Cold War theater, where the untidy deals were done.
A report by PIDE, the Portuguese dictator, Antonio Salazar’s secret police, described Gwambe thus:
“[Of] all [Mozambican] terrorist leaders, the maddest and most dangerous one is Gwambe […] those who know him [describe him as] […] shifty and [a talented judge] of human weaknesses, [something] which makes him a sinister monster.”