Remembering Fallen African Liberation Leaders
Hage Geingob and Eduardo Mondlane
When President Hage Geingob of Namibia died on February 4 at the age of 82, media around the world featured obituaries recalling his career as liberation leader before Namibia's independence in 1990 and as government leader in the following decades. He was praised not only in The Namibian, the country's leading newspaper, but also in the New York Times, Al Jazeera, and a host of other publications.
Hage Geingob, President of the Republic of Namibia, addresses the general debate of the General Assembly’s seventieth session. 29 September 2015. United Nations, New York
I did not know him personally. But through many mutual friends, I learned that he was much respected for his personal presence as well as his public record. The date of Geingob´s death was for me a sharp reminder of the death 55 years earlier of another highly respected African liberation leader.
Eduardo Mondlane, the leader of the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO), died on February 3, 1969, the victim of a letter bomb in a plot organized by the Portuguese secret police. Eduardo, as many knew him, was one of the most influential persons in my life. I learned of his death the day after, just after arriving back at my parents´ home in Tucson, Arizona from two years in Tanzania working under his leadership as a teacher in the FRELIMO secondary school in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Photo: Eduardo Mondlane's funeral, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, February 1969. Janet Mondlane stands with the couple's children, Chude, Nyeleti, and Eddie. President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania is at left with arms crossed. Source: Wikipedia.
I first met Geingob and Mondlane in New York City in the mid-1960s, when they were representatives at the United Nations of the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) and FRELIMO, respectively. Geingob at the time was also pursuing his education at Fordham University. Mondlane was coming from Dar es Salaam, to which he had returned to lead FRELIMO from teaching at Syracuse University.
This issue of AfricaFocus Notes includes brief excerpts from (1) videos of President Geingob and articles about him, and (2) excerpts from an article in Africa Today by Herbert Shore on Remembering Eduardo.
Bill (William) Minter
Hage Geingob
The video clip is part of an extended interview with President Geingob by Fordham students Bernard C Moore and Matthew Ecker in 2012. An article in Fordham University News, excerpted below, explains more about the Fordham connection.
It was his nation’s discriminatory policies in education under apartheid that spurred Geingob to seek schooling in the United States in the mid-1960s.
At the time Fordham had a burgeoning African and African-American studies program, born out of the United States’ own civil rights struggle. Geingob began studies at two colleges before a position at the U.N. brought him to New York, and finally to Fordham, where he finished his bachelor’s.
“I was complaining that they [other colleges]were just teaching me Greek history, Greek philosophy, and Greek literature—but I didn’t come for that,” he said. “Someone said to me, ‘You’re in the wrong place. Go to Fordham.’”
...
Under the tutelage of Tildon Lemelle, PhD, Geingob began to understand the continent. “Fordham introduced me to African studies,” he said. “I brought Africanism back with me to Africa from here. And I’ve been an Africanist since then.”
...
Geingob said that in addition to learning about Africa, he also was keen to observe American democracy at work. He said that protests of the late 1960s profoundly influenced him.
As part of the “New Africa” his nation is no longer a one-party system, he said, but a place where debate plays out: Systems are in place to make sure that each vote is counted.
“It’s one thing to fight to free the country; it's another to govern the country,” he said. “What we’ve established is a democratic architecture. With electoral democracy there must be processes, systems, and institutions.”
As stability has taken hold in Namibia since it gained its independence in 1990, new challenges have come to the fore. But, he said, a developed sense of democracy has caused Namibians to take ownership of their government.
Eduardo Mondlane
Remembering Eduardo: Reflections on the Life and Legacy of Eduardo Mondlane
By Herbert Shore
[Full article available here.]
On a sunlit Dar-es-Salaam morning in February 1969, in a small cottage facing the Indian Ocean, Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane was murdered, his life torn away by the explosion of a plastic bomb planted in a book that he opened with the morning mail. On that fateful day, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, Frelimo, lost its leader, Africa lost a great statesman and revolutionary, and I lost a friend and brother, a man closer to me than any other I had known in my lifetime.
Eduardo Mondlane was gone, but he had transformed despair into hope, fear into understanding and courage for the people of Mozambique. Today, throughout the country you can hear the echo of his voice. Into the seven years from his election in 1962 as first President of Frelimo to his assassination in 1969, Eduardo Mondlane crowded achievements usually associated only with a long and active lifetime.
He founded Frelimo from three diverse exile organizations and forged them into a unified movement with space for differences of opinion, views and approach, but focused and concentrated on clear common goals-the liberation of Mozambique from Portuguese colonialism and the creation of a new non-exploitative society. ...
Mondlane was a world statesman and a diplomat, a teacher, and at times, like so many others in the leadership of Frelimo, a poet and a short story writer. He was indefatigable, leaving his mark on everyone with whom he came into contact. He seemed equally at home on the field of guerrilla battle, in circles of military planning, in the centers of political and economic leadership, in revolutionary councils, in the United Nations, and in the atmosphere of the great universities. It is entirely appropriate that Mozambique's first university should bear his name. In the first Eduardo Mondlane Memorial Lecture at Syracuse University in February 1970, Amilcar Cabral said that Mondlane's "principal merit lay in being able to merge himself with the reality of his country, to identify with his people and to acculturate himself through the struggle which he directed with courage, determination and wisdom."
I remember you talking of your work with him, but wasn’t aware of the timing So glad YOU made it home , big brother 💙
Indeed Bill.
Mondlane, like few others, had the courage of his convictions. He and his family could have lived a comfortable life divorced from struggle. He, and they, chose the struggle. My heart breaks for Janet, the children, and all who knew and loved him.