on what was regarded as the FRELIMO heartland of Cabo Delgado in the far north. Kaúlza de Arriaga boasted of destroying a large number of guerrilla bases – but since such a base was just a collection of huts, the military significance of such supposed victories was dubious. Machel reacted by shifting the focus of the war elsewhere, stepping up FRELIMO operations in the western province of Tete. This was where a massive dam was being built at Cahora Bassa, on the Zambezi, to sell electricity to South Africa. Fearful that FRELIMO would attack the dam site, the Portuguese set up three concentric rings of defence around Cahora Bassa. This denuded the rest of Tete province of troops, and in 1972 FRELIMO crossed the Zambezi, striking further and further south. By 1973, FRELIMO units were operating in Manica and Sofala Province and began to hit the railway from Rhodesia to Beira, causing panic among the settler population of Beira, who accused the Portuguese army of not doing enough to defend white interests. The end came suddenly. On April 25, 1974, Portuguese officers, tired of fighting three unwinnable wars in Africa, overthrew the government in Lisbon. The coup was almost bloodless. Nobody came onto the streets to defend Prime Minister Marcelo Caetano. Within 24 hours, the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) was in full control of Portugal. Independence Frelimo's immediate warning was that there was no such thing as democratic colonialism, and that nobody should imagine that Mozambicans would tolerate Portuguese rule just because there had been a change of government in Lisbon. Frelimo's fears were well-founded. The MFA allowed General António de Spínola to become the first post-coup President. He had been commander of the Portuguese forces in Guinea-Bissau, then Portuguese Guinea, and was believed to be deeply implicated in the assassination of the Guinean nationalist leader, Amílcar Cabral. Spinola had no intention of letting Mozambique and Angola go. He dreamed of a Lusophone commonwealth run from Lisbon, and wanted a referendum on independence. Machel rejected such plans with the pithy remark: "You don't ask a slave if he wants to be free, particularly when he is already in revolt, and much less if you happen to be a slave-owner". Initial discussions between Frelimo and the new Portuguese government, held in Lusaka in June 1974, proved fruitless. It was clear to Machel that the Portuguese foreign minister, Socialist Party leader Mário