";mso-ansi-language:EN" lang="EN">The People's Republic of Mozambique was
proclaimed on 25 June 1975 in accordance with the Lusaka Accord signed in September
1974. A parade and a state banquet completed the independence festivities in
the capital, which was expected to be renamed Can Phumo, or "Place of
Phumo," after a Shangaan chief who lived in the area before the Portuguese
navigator Lourenço Marques first visited the site in 1545 and gave his name to
it. However, after independence, the city's name was changed (in February 1976)
to Maputo. Maputo's name reputedly has its origin in the Maputo River. The
statues to Portuguese heroes were removed and most were stored at the fortress,
and black soldiers carrying Russian rifles replaced Portuguese Army soldiers
(both black and white) with western arms in city barracks and on the streets.
Most of the city's streets, originally named for Portuguese heroes or important
dates in Portuguese history, had their names changed to African languages, revolutionary figures, or pre-colonial historical names.
After the Carnation Revolution in
Lisbon, over 250,000 ethnic Portuguese pulled out virtually overnight, leaving
Mozambique's economy and administration unmanageable. With the exodus of
trained Portuguese personnel, the newly independent country had no time to
allocate resources in order to maintain its well-developed infrastructure. In
addition, authoritarian Stalinist policies and bureaucratic central planning
made the newly independent country slip into an extremely precarious condition
since the beginning, and so the economy plummeted. FRELIMO, now the governing
party, turned to the communist governments of the Soviet Union and East Germany
for help. By the early
