Mozambique and the world received the news that Afonso Dhlakama, one of Mozambique’s most influential politicians, has died. The former guerrilla fighter and leader of Mozambique's National Resistance (known by its Portuguese acronym Renamo), the largest opposition party, died from ill health complications at one of the most crucial points of the country’s history – peace negotiations.
For over 40 years, Dhlakama led Renamo, a militant organization founded in 1977 and supported by anti-communist, white-minority rule governments of neighboring Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, which fought in a civil war that devastated Mozambique for 16 years.
In 1992, most of the group disarmed and became a political party, but so far it has never managed to win a parliamentary majority in the Assembly of the Republic or beat the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) for the post of president.