The Mozambican educator and nationalist Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane (1920-1969) was the leading figure in his country's independence movement from 1962 to 1969.

Eduardo Mondlane was born on June 20, 1920, in the Gaza district of southern Mozambique. The son of a Tsonga chief and the only member of his large family to receive even a primary education, he later attributed his educational drive to the vision of a "very determined and persistent" mother. The colonial school system was almost exclusively for Europeans, but Mondlane gained entry into a Swiss mission school and went from it to an American Methodist agricultural school. He then served for 2 years instructing African peasants in techniques of dry farming.

Next Mondlane obtained a scholarship and admission to a Presbyterian secondary school in the Transvaal, South Africa, and in 1948 he was admitted to Witwatersrand University of Johannesburg, the first African from Mozambique to enter a South African university...