Eduardo Mondlane - Early Life

Early Life

The fourth of 16 sons of a tribal chieftain of the Bantu-speaking Tsonga tribe, Mondlane was born in "Nwajahani, district of Mandlakazi in the province of Gaza," in Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) in 1920. He worked as a shepherd until the age of 12. He attended several different primary schools before enrolling in a Swiss–Presbyterian school near Manjacaze. However, he ended his secondary education in the same organization's church school at Lemana in the Transvaal, South Africa. He then spent one year at the Jan Hofmeyer School of Social Work before enrolling in Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg but was expelled from South Africa after only a year, in 1949, following the rise of the Apartheid government. In June 1950 Mondlane entered the University of Lisbon, at Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. By Mondlane's 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 . Mondlane enrolled at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio in 1951, starting as a junior, and in 1953 he obtained a degree in anthropology and sociology. He continued his studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Mondlane earned an MA from Northwestern University and married Janet Rae Johnson, a white American woman from Indiana who then lived in the Chicago suburbs. He obtained his PhD in Anthropology from Harvard.