Mozambique, 50 years (1975–2025): Does the struggle continue?

This article revisits Samora Machel's famous slogan ‘ A luta continua ’ (‘The struggle continues’) to analyse the 50 years of Mozambican independence (1975‐2025). It argues that the initial anticolonial struggle has transformed into a series of protracted internal conflicts. Drawing on historical analysis and long‐term ethnographic insight, the article traces a sequence of challenges: from FRELIMO's postindependence turn to Marxism‐Leninism and the devastating civil war with RENAMO, to the contemporary pressures of extractive capitalism and the recent jihadist insurgency in Cabo Delgado. The article analyses this latest conflict as a complex manifestation of local grievances articulated through a religious idiom. It concludes that in the face of these persistent crises and a flawed 2024 election, Machel's revolutionary slogan now functions as a poignant interrogation of Mozambique's unresolved contemporary dilemmas.