Eduardo Mondlane

Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane was born in Manjacaze, Portuguese East Africa, on the twentieth of June 1920, the son of a Tsonga chief. He took a degree at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa — one of the very few Africans of his generation to do so — and a doctorate in sociology from Northwestern University in Illinois in 1960, the first Mozambican to earn a doctorate from any university.

He served three years as a research officer at the United Nations in New York. In June 1962 he resigned from the UN and the Syracuse University faculty to found, in Dar es Salaam, the Mozambique Liberation Front. FRELIMO — through political coordination and armed struggle — would force Portugal to relinquish Mozambique in 1975. Mondlane did not live to see independence.

His seven years as FRELIMO president were the foundation of everything that followed. He built the political framework — a coherent national front incorporating ten different ethnic communities and several rival movements — and the diplomatic relationships, with Tanzania, Algeria, the Soviet Union, China, Sweden, and the Scandinavian solidarity movements, that supplied the war. His book *The Struggle for Mozambique*, published the year of his death, remains the canonical analysis of Portuguese colonialism in Africa.

He was assassinated on the third of February 1969 at the FRELIMO office in Dar es Salaam by a parcel bomb opened in his hands. The book was wired to detonate when opened. The Portuguese secret police PIDE is universally believed to have placed it. He was forty-eight.

His widow Janet Rae Mondlane, an American, continued FRELIMO solidarity work until her death in 2007. The Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo bears his name.

He is honored here as the founder of FRELIMO and the architect of Mozambican liberation.