Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane is Assassinated

On 3 February 1969, a book containing a bomb was sent to Eduardo Mondlane at the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO) Headquarters in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It exploded when he opened the package in the house of an American friend, Betty King, killing him instantly. Theories were advanced that implicated “Mondlane’s rivals inside FRELIMO, Tanzanian politicians, international actors and the Portuguese secret service, especially Aginter Press, a clandestine Portuguese anti-Communist organisation” (Wikipedia).

Former Portuguese International and State Defence Police (PIDE) Agent Oscar Cardoso claimed that PIDE Agent Casimiro Monteiro planted the bomb that killed Eduardo Mondlane. Mondlane’s death was mourned at a funeral in 1969 which was officiated by his Oberlin College classmate, in Ohio, and friend, the Reverend Edward Hawley, who said during the ceremony that Mondlane “…laid down his life for the truth that man was made for dignity and self-determination” (Wikipedia).

For Mondlane, the imperialists help each other. “This is what we’re up against. The Imperialists are in an alliance to stop the advance of freedom to Southern Africa. Our struggle is crucial, and our people as a whole have decided to fight.” – Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane: 20 January 1969 (quoted in Sechaba, Vol. 3, No. 4, April 1969).

Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane was born in “N’wajahani”, district of Mandlakazi in the province of Gaza, in Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) in 1920, as the fourth of 16 sons of a chief of the Nguni-speaking Tsonga. He worked as a shepherd until the age of 12. He then attended several different primary schools before enrolling in a Swiss-Presbyterian primary school near Manjacaze. However, he ended his secondary education in the same organisation’s church school at Lemana College at Njhakanjhaka Village above Elim Hospital in the Northern Transvaal (Limpopo Province), South Africa. He then spent one year at the Jan H. Hofmeyr School of Social Work before enrolling at the Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg.

Mondlane was expelled from South Africa after only a year, in 1949, following the rise of the apartheid regime. In June 1950 Mondlane entered the University of Lisbon, at Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. By his request, he was transferred to the United States, where he entered Oberlin College in Ohio at the age of 31, under a Phelps Stokes scholarship, in 1951. He started as a junior, and in 1953 he obtained a degree in anthropology and sociology.

Mondlane continued his studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and earned a Master of Arts Degree in 1955, and then a PhD in 1960. In 1956 he married Janet Rae Johnson and began working in 1957 as research officer in the Trusteeship Department of the United Nations (UN) which enabled him to travel to Africa and work on a PhD dissertation at Northwestern University. After he concluded his PhD in 1960, Mondlane resigned from his UN position in 1961 and took up a teaching position at Syracuse University and in 1962, he moved to Tanzania to engage in the liberation struggle with FRELIMO, becoming the President in June 1962.

FRELIMO was composed of elements from smaller Mozambican liberation groups, and in 1963 Mondlane settled at the Movement’s headquarters in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as the liberation front began a guerrilla war in 1964. At that time FRELIMO was supported both by several Western countries and the Soviet Union, as well as by many African states.

In FRELIMO’s early years, its leadership was divided into two factions, and the faction led by Mondlane wanted not merely to fight for independence but also for a change to a socialist society. The socialist position was approved by the Second Party Congress, held in July 1968, wherein Mondlane was re-elected party President, and a strategy of protracted war based on support among the peasantry was adopted. For Mondlane, the source of genuine transformation was the continual growth of the power of the people. He argued that “A revolution and its leaders must trust the people. They must know the people.” – Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane, quoted in Herbert Shore, “Remembering Eduardo: Reflections on the Life and Legacy of Eduardo Mondlane”. Africa Today, Vol. 39, No. 1/2, 1992.

By the early 1970s, FRELIMO’s 7,000-strong guerrilla force had wrested control of some countryside areas of the central and northern parts of Mozambique from the Portuguese authorities. The revolutionary guerrilla force, the FPLM (the People’s Forces for the Liberation of Mozambique), was engaging a Portuguese military force of approximately 60,000 soldiers.

In Mondlane’s own words, he maintained that “There is guerrilla war in one-third of Mozambique. One-fifth of the country, in the north-west provinces, is under our control. The Portuguese have moved out completely and we run our own schools, hospitals and agricultural co-ops there. We administer the area, in fact. And the second FRELIMO congress to be held – it took place in July 1968 – was held in Mozambique itself.” – Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane: Interview, Cairo, Egypt, 20 January 1969 (quoted in Sechaba, Vol. 3, No. 4, April 1969).

According to the Editorial of The African Communist (No. 37, Second Quarter 1969), “Eduardo Mondlane’s death is a heavy blow, not only to the people of his own country but also to the entire national liberation movement. But his spirit lives on to inspire the brave patriots of Southern Africa to fight on still harder to win the goals for which he gave his life; to avenge his murder and bring justice to the imperialist assassins who were responsible, to build the free Mozambique for which he lived and died.”

Mondlane’s “revolutionary thought was channelled toward four goals: the formation of a political movement capable of military conflict: independence from Portugal; fostering national consciousness among Mozambicans; and the restructuring of society to insure true equality with an end to exploitation.” – Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane, “The Struggle for Independence in Mozambique” (quoted in Thomas H. Henriksen, The Revolutionary Thought of Eduardo Mondlane, Genève-Afrique, Vol. 12 No. 1, 1973).

Castro Khwela
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