Eduardo Mondlane: Hope Destroyed

Eduardo Mondlane was an extremely promising, able, well-educated, charismatic scion of an impoverished aristocratic Tsonga family in southern Moçambique. He was strongly backed by the Kennedys, “the best and the brightest” of their State Department, their CIA, and the Ford Foundation. He enjoyed significant support in Portugal and was universally supported by the Western Democracies and by influential Africans like Nyerere and Bourguiba. How could Mondlane lose control, and the West lose its influence, in the nationalist movement he had so capably founded? The letter bomb Mondlane opened on Feb. 3, 1969 ended his campaign for a moderate, democratic, prosperous, socially responsible, unaligned Mozambique and swept his unfortunate country, as he had feared, into the destitution of a proxy Cold War. How could this happen? José Duarte explains the national and international factions surrounding Mondlane that led to his destruction and the destruction of his country.