Thinkers Timeline

Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane was a Mozambican anthropologist and revolutionary who founded FRELIMO, the movement that led Mozambique's independence struggle against Portugal. He was born in 1920 in N'wajahani, in the Gaza province of southern Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony. He was the fourth of sixteen sons of a Tsonga chief. The colonial school system was almost only for Europeans, but Mondlane gained entry through Swiss Presbyterian mission schools. He worked as a shepherd as a boy. Education in his country was almost impossible; he had to leave to get any. His academic journey was extraordinary. He studied in South Africa at Witwatersrand University, but was expelled in 1949 for opposing the new apartheid regime. He went briefly to Lisbon, then to Oberlin College in Ohio in 1951, then to Northwestern University in Illinois, where he earned a PhD in sociology in 1960. He worked at the United Nations from 1957, then taught anthropology at Syracuse University in the early 1960s. He married Janet Johnson, a white American woman from Indiana. In 1962 he left academic life. He went to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania to help unite three Mozambican exile groups into a single movement. The result was FRELIMO, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique. He became its first president. Under his leadership FRELIMO began the armed struggle against Portuguese rule in 1964. He wrote his book The Struggle for Mozambique while leading the war. On 3 February 1969, in Dar es Salaam, he opened a parcel addressed to him. It contained a bomb. He was killed instantly. The Portuguese secret police, PIDE, is widely believed to have been responsible. He was 48. Mozambique gained independence six years later, in 1975.

Noémia de Sousa was a Mozambican poet and journalist who is widely called 'the mother of Mozambican poetry'. She was born Carolina Noémia Abranches de Sousa Soares in 1926 in Catembe, a coastal village just across the bay from what was then Lourenço Marques and is now Maputo. Her father was of mixed race and her mother had Portuguese roots; she grew up between worlds, neither fully accepted by colonial European society nor straightforwardly identified with the African majority. The position shaped her writing. Her father died when she was eight. Two of her brothers were already studying in Lisbon. She finished her own studies at a commercial school in Lourenço Marques. By her late teens she was already writing poetry and political journalism for O Brado Africano, the most important pro-African newspaper in colonial Mozambique. She edited the women's pages. Her poems began to circulate in literary circles across the Portuguese-speaking world. She wrote her major poetic work in just three years, between 1948 and 1951, when she was in her early twenties. In 1951 the Portuguese colonial authorities exiled her to Portugal. She was 25. She would never live in Mozambique again. She lived in Lisbon from 1951 to 1964, then in Paris from 1964 to 1973, working as a translator and journalist throughout. She returned to Lisbon after the 1974 Carnation Revolution. Her single poetry collection, Sangue Negro (Black Blood), circulated in samizdat form for decades. It was finally published in book form by the Mozambican Writers' Association in 2001, when she was 75. She died in Cascais, Portugal, in 2002. Her body was returned to Mozambique.