Eduardo Mondlane

Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane was born on 20 June 1920 in the village of N'wajahani, in the Manjacaze (Mandlakazi) district of Gaza Province, in what was then Portuguese Mozambique. The son of a Tsonga chief, he herded cattle as a boy before beginning the long climb through mission and colonial schooling that his intellect demanded, becoming one of the very few Africans of his generation in the Portuguese territory to reach a university.

His education carried him across three continents. He enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, but after about a year the apartheid government revoked his permit as an "unwanted foreign native" and expelled him in 1949. Undeterred, he studied briefly in Lisbon, then made his way to the United States, earning a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College in 1953 and a doctorate in sociology and anthropology from Northwestern University in 1960. He taught at Syracuse University and served at the United Nations.

In 1962 he helped unite scattered exile movements into the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) and was elected its first president. Under his leadership the movement launched the armed struggle for independence in 1964, and he worked to bind together the many peoples of Mozambique into a single national cause.

On 3 February 1969, at Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Mondlane was killed by a parcel bomb concealed in a book — struck down three years before the independence he had summoned into being. He did not live to see the free Mozambique of 1975, yet its birth was his work. May the father of a nation rest in the honor of the country he called into life.