August 1962: A Time for Optimism
Our car arrived at the home of Syracuse University social anthropologist Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane at mid-afternoon on Saturday, August 4, 1962. It was stuffed with students and sleeping bags. I had recently learned from one of the Mozambican participants in the scholarship program for African refugee students that I directed at Lincoln University that Mondlane had returned from Dar es Salaam, where he had just been elected president of the newly formed Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo) . I wrote to congratulate him and volunteered to drive a group of students from Portuguese Africa up to Syracuse to meet with him. The students were studying English and preparing to be placed at various American colleges and universities. They were eager to learn firsthand about the creation of Frelimo from its designated leader. Mondlane enthused at the opportunity to recount the drama of Dar es Salaam. With characteristic verve, he played the dual role of didactic professor and visionary nationalist.
It was a warm summer weekend when we barged into the accommodating hospitality of the Mondlane household, which include Dr. Mondlaneâs American wife, Janet , and their three young children. In an atmosphere of optimism, Mondlane provided a blow-by-blow account of how he had outmaneuvered competitors and claimed leadership of Frelimo in a lopsided vote (116 to 19) of Mozambican exiles in Dar es Salaam. The newly independent government of Tanganyika had assembled and prodded representatives from fledgling, quarrelsome nationalist movements in exile to merge within a common front. Our two-day meeting in Syracuse provided a megaphone through which Mondlane could broadcast his aspirations and expectations via a group from the first wave of what would develop into several hundred students from Portugalâs African colonies studying at US institutions.
Acutely aware of his status as the sole African with a doctoral degree in a country where illiteracy persisted at over ninety five percent, Mondlane viewed the expansion of educational opportunity at all levels as the most critical need facing the future of Mozambique. And in the immediate term, he confronted a paucity of educated persons among the approximately 800,000 Mozambican exiles living and laboring in neighboring African countries and elsewhere from which to draw and build the cadres of an effective independence movement. The educational deficit would persist as a treacherous issue for Mondlane as he moved from academia into the turbulence of exile politics, the cauldron of Cold War rivalry, and finally anti-colonial insurgency.
There appeared to be solid reasons for Mondlane to exude optimism at our informal weekend palaver in the summer of 1962. Portugalâs colonial authority had swiftly crumbled in December 1961, when Indiaâs army invaded and annexed Goa. An anti-colonial insurgency that had erupted in Angola in early 1961 was continuing at a low level with support from neighboring Congo-Leopoldville despite Lisbonâs efforts to wipe it out. And, although internal political and economic problems preoccupied newly independent African states and dampened their commitment to Pan-African outreach, the specter of colonial rule and white supremacy in southern Africa continued to generate fervent calls for collective action. Mondlane was also encouraged by developments in Washington. The very presence of the African students at his home in Syracuse seemed to signal a major shift in American policy toward Africa.
In August 1960, as I was nearing the end of a summer stint directing a student work program, a Crossroads Africa project to build a one-room school house in Rufisque, Senegal, I received a phone call from New York. Averell Harriman was making an exploratory trip to Africa on behalf of Senator John Kennedyâs presidential campaign. I was asked if I would like to join as an advisor? And I answered, âOf course.â
Our small team traveled by private plane down the West African coast that September listening to the hopes and aspirations of the leaders and people of colonies emerging into independence. 1 Sometimes Harrimanâs Cold War instincts took hold, as, for example, when he tried to sway Ghanaâs President Kwame Nkrumah with accounts of how the Soviets bugged the seal in the American embassy in Moscow. But mostly he listened and learned. He reported back to Kennedy that the USA needed to appreciate the anti-colonial sentiment of Africa and give the continent a higher level of attention.
The first appointment to the new Kennedy Administration was Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Governor G. Mennen Williams of Michigan, a leading figure in the liberal internationalist wing of the Democratic Party. As his deputy, Williams chose J. Wayne Fredericks , a former Ford Motor Company executive and Ford Foundation official with substantial experience and contacts in Africa.
In the early days of the Kennedy administration, Fredericks initiated a new approach to African policy. He took the unprecedented action of appointing a non-governmental advisory body on African affairs that incorporated a wide range of academic and financial perspectives. 2 As the former Belgian Congo struggled toward independence, the new administration took a strong stand against the secession of the Congoâs Katanga region. And Washington seemed ready to take on the unyielding colonial policy of Portugal, a small NATO ally.
In March 1961 the American ambassador in Lisbon was instructed to inform Prime Minister Antonio Salazar that he should not expect support during the forthcoming United Nations Security Council debate on self-determination for Angola. The American government believed that âstep by step actions were now imperativeâ for âpolitical, economic and social advancementâ toward self-determination in Portugalâs African territories âwithin a realistic timetable.â 3
Motivated by a combination of anti-colonial sentiment, political vision, and Cold War competition, the Kennedy administration also authorized the State Departmentâs Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs to launch a scholarship program for students fleeing the repression of Portugalâs colonies. That program was based at Lincoln University, and I was chosen to direct it. Mondlane lent his support to the program by helping to persuade refugee students arriving in Europe to opt for scholarships in the USA over rival Communist bloc educational grants. The program soon expanded to include students from white-minority-ruled Rhodesia, South Africa and South West Africa and even southern Sudan and Spanish Guinea, as well as all the Portuguese territories.
All of this encouraged Mondlane to expect American support in the struggles that lay ahead. And, after being elected president of Frelimo , one of the Americans Mondlane was most eager to see was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Fredericks .
Mondlaneâs Personal Journey
Born on June 20, 1920, in a small village (Machecahomie, Chibuto) in the Gaza District of southern Mozambique, Eduardo Mondlane was the son of a Tsonga chief and his third wife. At age ten he was still illiterate, herding livestock with his brothers in the Limpopo Valley bush. But in 1931, at age eleven, thanks to what he later described as the decision of a âvery determined and persistentâ mother that he should be educated, Mondlane entered a government school at Manjacaze in southern Mozambique, a ten-mile hike from his village. He was the only member of his family to embark on the path of formal education.
You see my father had fifteen children. My father and mother and all my brothers were illiterate. I was the youngest. My mother died when I was 13. She was dying of cancer and had to go away to hospital. I wanted to stay with her but she wouldnât let me. She said I must get an education. I must learn the white manâs magic. 4
From this late beginning in life, Mondlane mounted the rungs of a narrow and rickety ladder of educational opportunity provided by the few foreign Protestant missions permitted in the country. From the Manjacaze government school, Mondlane proceeded to the Swiss Presbyterian mission school of Mauzes, Manjacaze, where Calvinists took an interest in him and arranged for him to complete a primary school certificate in Lourenco Marques. At that time, this was the highest level of general education open to Africans within the Portuguese colonial system. But Mondlane was not willing to settle for that. He âsnatched at the strawâ of a training opportunity at an American Methodist mission agricultural school at Kambine (Cambine), gained admission, and completed a course in dry farming. Importantly, he also seized the opportunity there to learn English. He followed this with two years teaching dry farming techniques to peasant farmers in the Manjacaze region. Then, buttressed by his English and a new scholarship, and with the support of a Swiss missionary, AndrĂ© Clerc, who tutored him, he proceeded across the border with South Africa to a Swiss Presbyterian secondary school at Lemana in the Northern Transvaal. He had become a protĂ©gĂ© of Clerq, for whom he wrote the preface and inspired the âchildhood notebooksâ of a book edited, fictionalized, and published by Clerc as Chitlangou: Son of a Chief (Butterworth Press, 1950). 5 This was followed with a year at the Jan H. Hofmeyr School for Social Work in Johannesburg, and in 1948 Mondlane enrolled at the University of Witwatersrand. He was the first African Mozambican to be admitted to a South African university. 6
Just days before final examinations in 1949, Mondlaneâs quest for a âWitsâ degree crashed. The newly installed National Party government in Pretoria declared him under apartheid law to be an illegal âforeign nativeâ in a white university. His student permit was revoked and he was deported. After returning to Lourenco Marques, Mondlane directed his energy into efforts to organize a local student association, NĂșcleo dos Estudantes SecundĂĄrios Africanos de Moçambique (NESAM). This led to his arrest and interrogation, but did not end his educational journey. 7
Mondlane later recounted that the Portuguese authorities concluded that his âembryonic spirit of black nationalism might be cured by sending [him] to a university in Portugal.â Seizing the opportunity with a scholarship from the Phelps Stokes Fund in New York, Mondlane sailed in mid-1950 to Lisbon, where he enrolled at the University of Lisbon. There he socialized with a handful of other âAfrican intellectualsâ (some twenty-five out of a student body of approximately three thousand). They included future leaders of Angola (Agostinho Neto and Mario de Andrade) , Cape Verde/Guinea-Bissau (AmĂlcar Cabral), and Mozambique (Marcelino dos Santos). But, after a year of harassment by the Policia Internacional e da Defesa do Estado (PIDE)âthe Portugalâs secret police unitâMondlane prevailed upon the Phelps-Stokes Fund to transfer his scholarship to the USA.
In the fall of 1951, Mondlane entered Oberlin College as an undergraduate (junior) at age 31. 8 He swiftly adjusted and thrived at Oberlin. With a supplemental college scholarship and summer work at a cement works in Elyria, an industrial suburb of Cleveland, he graduated in 1953 and moved straight on to graduate work in sociology and anthropology at Northwestern University. There he studied with Professors Kimball Young and the celebrated anthropologist and Africanist Melville J. Herskovits. He earned an M.A. in 1956 and then pushed on to complete a Ph.D. in 1960. He capped his doctoral studies with a year as a visiting scholar at Harvard, where he worked under the mentorship of Professors Samuel Stouffer and Gordon Allport. 9
To appreciate what he had achieved in the improbable journey on which his mother had launched him two decades earlier, one needs to consider that, as of 1955, in a Mozambique population then approaching six million, there were as few as ten Africans attending academic high schools (liceus) and just over 200 enrolled in technical schools and seminaries. Colonial rule was rooted in and assured by a system of educational deprivation. Mondlaneâs graduate school mentor, Herskovits, underscored the deliberately exclusionary nature of the colonial education system. It kept the number of Africans in Mozambiqueâs few secondary schools at a negligible level by capping entry eligibility at age thirteen. At that age Africans had not yet completed primary school, so they were blocked from educational advancement. Herskovits also cited statistics indicating the fact that, as of 1950, in the Sul do Save district, the location of the capital, Lourenco Marques, after centuries of imperial claim, 1% of the male population could speak Portuguese and 1% of that cohort could read and write it. The co...