Eduardo Mondelane
Revolution in Africa was a risky business, and often the greatest danger lay less at the hands of the colonial authorities than fellow revolutionaries. The Portuguese were in every respect the senior colonists of Africa, making landfall early in the 15th century as they pioneered the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. They were the first around the Cape of Good Hope, and the first to pioneer a sea route to India, arriving on the west coast of the Indian sub-continent in 1498. They founded two major colonies in Africa, East and West, respectively the modern nations of Mozambique and Angola.
Eduardo Mondelane was born in rural southern Mozambique in 1920. He was one of twelve children of deeply traditional parents, and in the heavily prejudicial environment of Portuguese Africa, his first years were spent in the humble pursuit of herding the family flock. As was often the case, however, as a child of rare perception and intelligence, he attracted the attention of local missionaries, and despite the objections of his father, he began his education.
This journey would take him from a humble missionary school in rural Portuguese East Africa, largely by his own efforts, to various schools and institutions in South Africa, and eventually to the University of Lisbon. At the age of 31, he was able to gain entry to the Oberlin College in Ohio, under Phelps Stokes Scholarship, obtaining eventually degrees in anthropology and sociology. From Oberlin he advanced to Northwestern University, winning a Masters and a Ph.D.
In 1953, he married a white woman from Indiana, settling for a time in the suburbs of Chicago. Soon, however, he moved to Syracuse to take up a position of Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Syracuse University. This extraordinary right of passage of a boy from rural Africa to the higher echelons of American academia is in itself an amazing tale, but in 1963, he turned his back on it all and returned home to engage in the Liberation Struggle that was just then beginning to gather momentum in Mozambique.
The Portuguese held on to their colonies with unusual tenacity, even after other European powers were divesting. This had much to do with the prestige that an overseas empire offered a comparatively impoverished European country, and the wars of liberation in Mozambique and Angola were among the most bitter in Africa.
Mondelane’s qualities attracted the attention of Portuguese officials in Mozambique, and preferring him in than out, they offered him a place in the administration. This he refused, and moved instead to Tanzania, taking over the leadership of the newly formed Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, an umbrella group of exiled independence movements.
His political ideas were basically intellectual socialist. Not by any means a radical utopianist, he nonetheless pictured an egalitarian society built on practical social ideals. This, however, did not go far enough for many of his more radical peers. In 1969, he opened a package mailed to him at his headquarters in Dar es Salaam, and was killed outright by the subsequent explosion. No one has ever been brought to book for his murder, and while inside the movement, blame has always been leveled at the Portuguese, most historians acknowledge that Mondelane was murdered by his own.