So, who killed Mondlane? This article is not conclusive about who actually did it
David Martin, news editor of the Tanganyika
Standard during that time – Brendon Grimshaw was the managing editor – said the Portuguese secret police killed Mondlane. He had high-level contacts with officials in the Tanzanian government and elsewhere and was close to Nyerere.
He was a very reliable source of information and did not have a reputation of parroting the government's version of events. I knew him.
He was also a strong supporter of the liberation struggle and had close ties with the liberation movements and their leaders including Robert Mugabe who stayed in Tanzania for quite some time, as did other leaders. He went to live in Zimbabwe after the country won independence and worked closely with Mugabe and other ZANU officials. He lived there before when the country was known as Rhodesia, before then as Southern Rhodesia.
Almost four years after Mondlane was assassinated, a senior Tanzanian government official whom I knew well said the same thing David Martin did – that it was the Portuguese authorities – their secret police – who assassinated Mondlane. He didn't tell me anything new. He only confirmed what I had heard earlier from other reliable sources in Tanzania that it was the Portuguese secret service that was responsible for Mondlane's assassination.
The Portuguese didn't want FRELIMO to succeed or have a good reputation in the international arena. They were already at war with the liberation movement and wanted to tarnish its image. Mondlane was the embodiment of that image. He was a highly respected leader, internationally, and on both sides of the Iron Curtain and kept FRELIMO united in spite of the fact that the organisation was divided within because of bitter rivalries among different factions – ideological, ethnic, regional and so on. He also earned FRELIMO a good international reputation as a credible liberation movement; so did Marcelino dos Santos, a Marxist intellectual and FRELIMO's leading ideologue and theoretician who later became vice president of Mozambique under Samora Machel.
