Cutting Heads or Winning Hearts: Late Colonial Portuguese Counterinsurgency and the Wiriyamu Massacre of 1972

In the early 1970s, Portugal still held on to the oldest European colonial empire, resisting the winds of decolonization in Africa. In this period, the Portuguese were fighting counterinsurgency campaigns in three of its overseas territories: Angola, since 1961; Guinea, since 1963; and Mozambique, since 1964. This article focuses on the counterinsurgency campaign in Mozambique because it was there, in 1972, that the most serious known atrocity took place, at least in terms of its international impact, from these unconventional wars. The appointment of a new commander-in-chief, Kaúlza de Arriaga (1970–73), to Mozambique intensified the war. Larger airborne search and destroy operations were carried out in an attempt to win the campaign quickly and decisively. It was in this context that the killing of civilians took place somewhere around the town of Tete in December 1972, which was eventually followed by an international outcry in response to its public denunciation by Catholic missionaries. The exact location, even the existence of Wiriyamu, as well as the extent of the atrocities, remain contentious. This article will use multiple sources to clarify as far as possible: what happened, why it happened, and its implications for the dynamics of counterinsurgency and intra-state wars generically. Furthermore, it will address specifically what it meant for the Portuguese way in counterinsurgency, until the rapid end of multiple campaigns as a result of a military coup in April 1974, in which Mozambique and the stain of Wiriyamu loomed large.