Eduardo Mondlane

Eduardo Mondlane founded FRELIMO and was killed by a bomb in a book two years into the war he had started. He was born in Gaza province to a family of minor chiefs, herded cattle as a boy, and got an education through mission schools at a time when Portuguese colonial policy classified almost the whole African population as uncivilised and denied it secondary schooling. He was expelled from South Africa in 1949, studied in Lisbon under surveillance, and took a doctorate in sociology at Northwestern before working as a research officer at the United Nations trusteeship department, which took him back to Mozambique in 1961 as an international official - and made plain to him that Portugal would not negotiate. He unified three exile movements into FRELIMO in 1962 and launched the armed struggle in 1964 from Tanzania. His distinctive argument was that the war had to build something as it went: schools, clinics and cooperatives in the liberated zones, on the reasoning that a movement which only destroys will inherit nothing. He was assassinated in Dar es Salaam in February 1969 by a parcel bomb, almost certainly the work of the Portuguese secret police, possibly with help from inside the movement. Mozambique became independent in 1975, and the university in Maputo carries his name. His widow Janet Mondlane, an American he had married in the United States, ran the movement's education institute and stayed in Mozambique afterwards. Who sent the bomb has never been established in court, and the plausible candidates include both Lisbon and a faction within FRELIMO that opposed his line. Samora Machel succeeded him and took the movement in a more explicitly Marxist direction than Mondlane had.

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