Eduardo Mondlane: The lifelong learner, adult educator, and African scholar-revolutionary HiA Network

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Cossa, J. (2023). Eduardo Mondlane: The lifelong learner, adult educator, and African scholar-revolutionary. International Journal of Lifelong Education. DOI: 10.1080/02601370.2023.2262152. [Publisher offer: free access for first 50 to click here]

José Cossa
College of Education, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

Abstract
Anchored on Mondlane’s biological mother’s advice that he ought to ‘go to school in order to understand the witchcraft of the white man, thus being able to fight against him’ and on the argument that what he learned as a child informed his learning as an adolescent and as an adult, this study developed a profile of Eduardo Mondlane as a lifelong learner, adult educator, and African scholar-revolutionary. The study is based on a critical documentary analysis of primary sources found in the archives of Northwestern University, Syracuse University, and Oberlin College, and corroborates the fact that most of Mondlane’s education in Western academic institutions took place during his adulthood. For instance, he completed high school already as a 27-year-old adult, began higher education in his late 20s and completed a bachelor’s degree at the age of 33, a master’s degree at the age of 36, and a Ph.D. at the age of 40. The study concludes that the trajectory of Eduardo Mondlane provides insight into the complexity and richness of the lifelong learning journey for ordinary people, especially those from communities around the globe whose education is relegated to informal, therefore inferior status.

Narratives about Eduardo Mondlane are often confined to his political role in the Frente Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) and absent in discourses on Africa, Global Africa, and overall global politics. Moreover, the significance of the humane and intellectual contributions of Mondlane are yet to be grasped in full by those concerned with education and its role in society. Therefore, to contribute insight into the magnitude and significance of Mondlane, this article offers a profile of Eduardo Mondlane as a lifelong learner, adult educator, and scholar-revolutionary by anchoring such a profile on his biological mother’s advice, as a testament that the foundations of education and learning are often laid in years preceding formal schooling, and the fact that what he learned as a child informed his learning in adolescence and adulthood. The study provides a biographical synopsis; discusses the archival research and the resources examined; discusses Mondlane as a lifelong learner, adult education, and scholar-revolutionary and concludes that the trajectory of Eduardo Mondlane provides insight into the complexity and richness of the lifelong learning journey for ordinary people, especially those from communities around the globe whose education is relegated to informal, therefore inferior status.

Biographical synopsis

Eduardo Mondlane was born on 20 June 1920 in Mozambique, province of Gaza, district of Mandlakazi (Mondlane, Citation1961), and was educated as a shepherd before pursuing Western formal education. Unfortunately, an education as a shepherd was not acknowledged as an education, yet discrimination laws in colonial Mozambique made it almost impossible for Black Mozambicans to pursue the latter. However, a sponsorship from the Swiss Mission allowed him to embark on a remarkable yet challenging educational journey that started in Mozambique and took him to South Africa, Portugal, and the United States.Footnote¹ In an interview with Helen Kitchen (Citation1967), Mondlane attests that he started his primary education at the age of 11, attended mission school at the age of 16, completed a course in dry-land farming at an agricultural school, learned English, taught dry-land farming for 2 years in Mandlakazi, and then attended secondary school in Transvaal. However, his biographical notes (Mondlane, Citation1966b) only corroborate the account on learning by stating that ‘between primary and secondary school, I completed a two-year agricultural course at an American Methodist Mission School where I learned to farm in areas with little rain’, but not the account on teaching. He further reveals that, in 1948, at the age of 28 he entered the Jan H. Hofmeyr School of Social Work and then from 1949 to 1950 attended the University of Witwatersrand (also known as Wits) in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he was introduced to the Social Sciences. It was in this context, of an adult student at a South African university, that Mondlane might have had his first taste of direct colonial persecution when he was arrested and interrogated by the Portuguese for his alleged efforts to organise a Mozambican Students Association. Nonetheless, the letter of recommendation written by Darrell D. Randall (Randall, Citation1953)Footnote² for his Oberlin University application, which was addressed to Dorothy Smith, the Director of the Bureau of Appointments at Oberlin College, attests to the political challenges he faced while a student at Witts. In the letter, Randall reveals that Mondlane’s expulsion from South Africa was thrusted by Mondlane’s appointment to represent the Jan Hofmeyr Social Work department at a national students’ conference in Cape Town. The appointment of a black student for what was considered a high-profile role in the racially divided country led the Department of Immigration to order Mondlane to leave South Africa; an order that was enforced by Prime Minister Malan’s government despite the appeals to revert it brought forth by various organisations and individuals such as the then distinguished Statesman Jan Smuts.

Mondlane argues (Mondlane, Citation1966a) that the Portuguese government thought that sending him to study in Portugal at the Universidade de Lisboa, funded by the Phelps-Stokes Fund of New York under highly political supervised terms, would cure him of his nationalist spirit. However, it was during this time when Mondlane met fellow students such as the Angolans Agostinho Neto and Mario Pinto de Andrade, the Cape Verdean Amílcar Cabral, and the Mozambican Marcelino dos Santos who would contribute to his lifelong learning and partner in the fight against colonialism. Consequently, it was not until 1953, at the age of 33, that he obtained his BA degree at Oberlin College. Mondlane contributed his ideas at Oberlin College as a nontraditional adult undergraduate student of Sociology, Northwestern University as a master’s and doctoral student in Urban Sociology, and Syracuse University (SU) as a professor of Anthropology and an active member of the Eastern African Studies pioneered by colleagues like Marshall Segall, a former colleague at Northwestern University.

The legacy of Eduardo Mondlane

Despite his incredible scholarship and foresight about education and overall global affairs, Mondlane is primarily remembered as a revolutionary and such memory carries mythological proportions projected and sustained by Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) and the Government of Mozambique since independence in 1975. In such context, Mondlane has been invoked as an almost divine figure whose memory is used as a constant reminder to the Mozambican people of the sacrifice that a man has made for the country and serves as a palliative that obscures the current reality of the people (e.g. the people’s victimisation and exclusion from benefiting from capitalist-driven policies and practices). Unfortunately, little is known about Mondlane’s actual ideas, his vision for Mozambique and Global Africa, and his contribution as a Christian intellectual with a heart for Africans and humanity in general. Therefore, it is crucial to highlight the distinction between remembering Mondlane as a political myth – a hero of unwavering courage and indisputable integrity – and remembering Mondlane as a human being whose role in the fight against Portuguese colonialism depended on the encouragement and support from other human beings such as family, friends, and colleagues. The latter Mondlane was able to distinguish what was good for Africa and what was not, which was evidenced in part by his lack of affinity to Che Guevara’s views (Shore, Citation1992) and by his personal conviction that, ‘we Africans do not have to be either capitalistic or communistic. Can Western Christians give us the credit of being capable of choosing our own ways of structuring our societies?’ (Mondlane, Citation1963, p. 15). Edward Hawley (Citation1979) asserted so poignantly that ‘to have known Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane was to have known the human spirit at its best’ (p. 24) and attested to his influence as an adult educator by asserting that ‘others of us were changed, if less dramatically: fellow students, faculty, church leaders at top-level conferences, workers and farmers and businessmen and housewives at countless local churches’ (p. 23). Hawley’s outlined demographic displayed the diversity of Mondlane’s loci for teaching and learning as an adult educator and adult learner, respectively.

The legacy of Eduardo Mondlane

of the total 30 years of schooling, the author spent almost one half of it in a purely traditional environment, in which he acquired most of his basic education. In that first period, his education was given against the background of his people’s historical, mythical, religious, and customary influences. Everything fitted into a world picture that had coherence. (p. 7)

A note on methodology and method

I employ textual criticism through critical documentary analysis of primary sources found at Northwestern University Archives, Syracuse University Archives, and Oberlin College Archives. Examples of such primary source data comprise correspondence between Eduardo Mondlane and Melville J. Herskovits, his then professor at Northwestern University and mentor; interviews with Marshall Segall, his former colleague at Northwestern University and colleague at Syracuse University; Mondlane’s unpublished manuscripts; and newspaper clippings of interviews with Eduardo Mondlane. Validity was established by means of internal evidence to determine the authenticity of the documents and external evidence to determine the historical context and meaning of the documents. I analysed each document in the context of its history considering the date of authorship and events around the date, the reasons and intentions of the author implicit in the text, the disposition of the receiver (e.g. student, teacher, monitor, and colleague), and the meaning attributed via an interpretation of the documents in general. Table 1 provides the list of archival sites and the holdings consulted.

Table 1 Archival sites and holdings — Eduardo Mondlane: The lifelong learner, adult educator, and African scholar-revolutionary 1

Mondlane revealed that his pursuit of formal Western education was due to his biological mother’s persistence in conveying the message that he ought to ‘go to school in order to understand the witchcraft of the white man, thus being able to fight against him’ (Mondlane, Citation1966a, p. 2). He further revealed to have learned about the negative impact of colonialism on black people from his mothers (i.e. this might refer to his father’s three wives or include the women in the community). Mondlane’s heeding the wisdom and advice of the elderly women in his life, whose influence led him to focus on ‘fighting the white man and liberate my people’, constituted the foundation of his early schooling on education and politics. It seems safe to say that there would be no Eduardo Mondlane, the educator and scholar-revolutionary, without the influence of these phenomenal women from Mandlakazi.Footnote³ Albeit the powerful impact of this formative and core wisdom, learning the ‘magic of the white man’ was not an easy journey nor a seamless transition towards fighting ‘the white man’; the meaningfulness of the continuum would only be possible with the elimination of the following dissonance between the foundational contextual education he received and the modernist colonial education he was subjected to later in the Western schooling system (Mondlane, Citation1962):

But when he entered European controlled schools, he found himself overwhelmed by philosophies and practices which had little relevance to his life. It took him longer than normal to enter into the logical structure of the culture which composed the educational milieu in which he had to learn. In this new cultural environment, he was forced to downgrade a large part of the wisdom of his ancestors, the meaning of his religious traditions had to be watered down into superstitious beliefs; his concept of his people, and therefore of himself, had to shift into a much lower category than was good for him. (pp. 7–8)

The adult learner, adult educator, and scholar-revolutionary

Since most of Mondlane’s education (even lato sensu) took place while an adult, I herein provide an interwoven narrative about Mondlane as an adult learner, adult educator, and scholar-revolutionary because a clear linear delineation of these aspects of Mondlane’s legacy would confine its interlinked non-linear nuance. Consequently, the transitional points in the narrative must be understood within this perspective of interlinkage and non-linearity. Maribel Meisel (Burghardt, Citation1957), in a letter to Du Bois, wrote the following about Mondlane:

Now I would like to tell you about my friend. You may have heard of him already. He was the first person ever to come to the U.S. from Mozambique. He went to school at a white university in Johannesburg till Dr. Malan made him leave. Then he went for a year to the University of Lisbon and spent a summer at Sorbonne in Paris. He came to this country the summer of 1951 and went to Oberlin College for two years. Last year and at the present he is at Northwestern working on his doctorate in social psychology. He has given hundreds of speeches since he came to this country and was a youth consultant at the World Council of Churches. He is co-author of ‘Chitlangu, Son of a Chief’, which has been translated into five languages. He himself, Eduardo C. Mondlane, speaks seven … I know that if you are ever in the vicinity of Chicago he would enjoy very much talking with you.

Misel’s recommendation of Mondlane is evidence of the excellent impression he had on those whose path he happened to cross. An impression corroborated by long-term Syracuse University figures such as Louis Krisberg (Citation2011), an Emeritus professor who met Mondlane during his 1962 farewell reception prior to his departure to lead FRELIMO, an organisation of which he was a founding member. Until recently, Krisberg was one of the few witnesses, if not the only witness, of the presence and contribution of Mondlane at Syracuse University who was still active at the university, albeit serving as Emeritus Professor. Other witnesses were Clive Davis and Marshall Segall, also their contemporaries at Syracuse University, whom Krisberg was able to recall. While Krisberg recalled Mondlane as a charismatic person, Mondlane, however, did not see himself as such; in fact, he once confessed to his mentor Melville Herskovits, founder of Northwestern University’s Department of Anthropology and often labelled as founder of the African Studies programme in the United States, his inability to communicate effectively. Allow me to digress for a little context in regard to Herskovits: Considering the current problematising of disciplines such as African and African-American Studies, we must contend that the creation of African Studies could not be attributed to non-Africans, less we agree with the formulation of African Studies as only confined to Western University context. In other words, Africans had been engaged in African Studies long before colonialism. What Herskovits did was revolutionary in the Western context by challenging the status quo but should not be (and perhaps never consciously, in the ‘woke’ sense, intended to be) a replacement of the valuable contribution of our ancestors and his African predecessors, and even contemporaries, who systematically studied Africa and issues pertinent to Africans.

The adult learner

In response to Herskovits’ invitation on 23 March 1952 (Herskovits, Citation1952a) for Mondlane, then at the age of 32, to speak to his students at a seminar on 28 April 1952, during his undergraduate studies at Oberlin College, Mondlane (Citation1952b) said, ‘I am sure that your students will stimulate me. As you know, I’m not a good speaker, so I’ll be happy to answer questions than make a formal speech’. What was later revealed by Herskovits was the importance of Mondlane’s perspective as this intervention would follow Lord Hailey’s presentation in the same series. Lord Hailey brought an intellectual contribution of enormous significance around the question of the independencies of the African countries (Hailey, Citation1944, Citation1952), in which it highlighted the following:

In terms of strict constitutional idiom, the future of units attaining self-government can be expressed either as complete autonomy, or as autonomy only in their internal affairs. It would be polite, even were it not also politic, to let them know now which of these alternatives we propose for them.
(1952, p. 123)

Melville Herskovits was the person behind Mondlane’s arrival at Northwestern University and played a particularly significant role in the beginning of his political career. On 11 December 1952, Herskovits (Citation1952b) wrote to Mondlane informing him of his plans to visit West Africa with his wife for 2 months, and then Southern and Eastern Africa, and asked for recommendation letters to use in Mozambique, both for members of Mondlane’s family and for people he thought it would be advantageous to know; however, he promised to discuss with Mondlane, after returning, some of the problems he would come to know firsthand – an indication that Mondlane was teaching Herskovits about the situation in Mozambique and that the two had discussions about it.

In a letter to Herskovits on 12 December 1952, Mondlane (Citation1952a) expressed interest in doing his master’s degree at Northwestern University and faced with the financial obstacle, turned to Herskovits to write a letter of recommendation to the university’s management and the Department of Sociology. By then, Mondlane was already gaining a good reputation as a speaker on Africa’s problems. However, it was in this letter that Mondlane made a profound confession about his political awakening regarding the problems of the African continent, a confession that highlighted a deep introspection and reflection on his origins as an African as well as his present and his future in relation to the problems of the African continent. Mondlane’s interest in Northwestern University was based on his perception that a sociology degree could offer a better understanding of, and positioning towards a solution to, Africa’s problems. Additionally, Northwestern offered a dual degree in Sociology and Anthropology and the bonus of housing an Institute for African Studies. He argued the following:

This semester I’ve divided my time between studies and lectures across this state [Ohio]. Many organizations are becoming more and more interested in South Africa’s problems. I’m trying very hard to be as objective as possible. The more I talk about Africa, the more I need to study her problems; for though I am fresh from Africa, as I would like to believe, there are many things about which I am not yet clear.
(Mondlane, Citation1952a, p. n.p.)

Under this same confession and argument, Mondlane showed determination to join the Northwestern University programme, without abandoning the possibility of returning home to Mozambique to work for a few years, if it were not possible for him to join Northwestern University. There was no doubt in his mind that the solution to Africa’s problems lay in the direct study of sociology, and more specifically, focusing on ‘social change’ and ‘rural and urban problems’. Interestingly, these are issues that the social sciences are still grappling with today (i.e. in 2023). Within this context of exchange with Herskovits, Marshall Segall’s comment that Mondlane never gave him the impression of being a revolutionary is pertinent (Segall, Citation2011b).

Marshall Segall met Mondlane at Northwestern University as a classmate. Years later, when Segall was the director of East African Studies at Syracuse University, he invited Mondlane to Syracuse University to join the faculty. They were colleagues at Northwestern University in the late 1950s during graduate studies and spent time with him in Dar Es Salaam, where FRELIMO was headquartered, shortly before Mondlane was assassinated. According to Segall, Syracuse University was the only university in the United States of America to give ‘leave of absence’ to a faculty member to lead a revolution. Segall characterises Mondlane as ‘charming, kind, intelligent, warm, sincere, and friendly’ and someone who ‘did not serve the stereotypical image of a fiery revolutionary, i.e. the rebellion stirring type…’ a characteristic that might have influenced FRELIMO’s direction and the possible divisions within it.

Segall bears witnessed to the fact that Herskovits, whom he credited as the founder of the first African Studies programme in the United States of America, had a major influence on Mondlane’s entry into Northwestern University. The programme was funded by the Ford Foundation. Segall says Herskovits organised a seminar on Africa and chose as the venue for the seminar a building whose donor had categorically expressed that Jews and Africans were not allowed to enter it. Herskovits was Jewish, the theme of the seminar was ‘Africa’ and some of the students were Africans and African-Americans. The president of the university opposed the use of the facility, but as Herskovits threatened to withdraw the millions of dollars from the Ford Foundation funding, the president had no other choice but to let the seminar take place. Northwestern University records (Northwestern University Archives, Citationn.d..) report the following, which indirectly corroborates with Segall’s observation regarding President Miller’s convictions for racism and xenophobia:

Miller’s presidency also saw the turbulent protests of the late 1960s. While he was forced to contend with groups of activist students looking to take issues to him directly, he avoided the extreme conflicts that arose at many other schools. Though Miller was personally conservative, he defended the right of faculty members to hold whatever political positions they wished during this time as well.
(n.p.)

Mondlane’s focus seemed more academic than political, but it was via further exposure to African affairs during classes, discussions in lectures, related activities, and encounters with activists and politically conscious people that the interest in an intentional pursuit of the liberation of the African continent emerged. Herskovits seemed very instrumental in this process of transition to politics, per the reference letter to support Mondlane’s enrolling for the master’s programme at Northwestern University in which he prophesied that Mondlane’s role will be ‘of great significance, both from the point of view of the service he will provide when he returns home and the contribution he can make to the dynamic situation that characterises sub-Saharan Africa’ (Herskovits, Citation1952c). As a result, Mondlane received a USD750.00 Carnegie Scholarship for the 1953–1954 academic year, which includes USD225.00 in net cash and USD525.00 in tuition. After completing his master’s degree and still determined to see his academic dream realised, Mondlane applied for a doctoral scholarship.

The scholar-revolutionary and adult educator

Mondlane’s role as a scholar-revolutionary began to unfold clearly after his graduation from Northwestern University and seems to have been influenced by his direct interest in analysing Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique and the struggle for independence. In a letter he wrote to Herskovits on 9 September 1957 (Mondlane, Citation1957), after completing his doctoral studies and taking a job at the Trusteeship Division of the United Nations, Mondlane informed Herskovits about the visit to Chicago by his very good friend Mr Joseph Biroli-Baranyanka, whom Mondlane described as the son of an important and supreme head of the region of Rwanda-Urundi. A brief historical framing of the region and some key geopolitical concepts might offer valuable insight into Biroli-Baranyanka’s plight. ‘Rwanda-Urundi’ was a Belgian suzerainty from 1916 to 1924, Class B Mandate of the Society of The Nations from 1924 to 1945 and then Territory of the United Nations until 1962, when it became the independent states of Rwanda and Burundi (Ruanda-Urundi, Citation1960; Samson, Citation2018).

Mondlane’s association with Biroli-Baranyanka, a fellow Christian who embraced (American) democracy as a political line, is also insightful in terms of the confidence that Mondlane later deposited in the Rev. Urias Simango, whom he later suspected of ambition for power, and in the Rev. Mateus Ngwengere, who was later perceived as ‘a thorn’ in Mondlane’s political career (Manghezi, Citation1999). Ned Munger states that Mondlane was strongly influenced by the West and Christianity, and Luís Serapião argues that Mondlane was a nationalist who maintained strong ties with the West (Serapiao, Citation1985). Mondlane incidentally accused the Angolans of the MPLA of hiding their spiritual-material connection with the United States behind an ‘anti-Americanism’ (Manghezi, Citation1999). According to FRELIMO, this position of FRELIMO only changed after the ‘Gang of Algiers’ (McGowan, Citation1979) influenced FRELIMO’s policy towards the anti-West in favour of Marxism-Leninism.

The letter to Herskovits (Mondlane, Citation1957) was accompanied by a document entitled ‘A Study Group of Congo African Problems: An Introduction to the Principles and Programme of the Organization’, which described the political agenda of the Alfred Marzorati Study Group, named after Alfred Marzorati, a former Belgian administrator in Africa. In the document, the group expressed interest in a smooth and passive transition process and the freedom of Africans and the creation of a new political relationship through constructive programmes; this as an alternative to what the group designated as ‘the desire of African peoples to take their destinies into their own hands’. Two objectives characterised the agenda: the creation of the study group and the development of leaders of the future. It is likely that some ideas of this group had profound effect on Mondlane’s political line, or just resounded with the ideas it already embraced, as the group aimed at the inclusion of Belgians and Africans, as well as individuals of any race and religion. Moreover, as a Christian scholar-revolutionary, it would not be surprising if the academic and Christian appeal were the reason for Mondlane’s enthusiasm about Biroli-Baranyanka’s stance that our intention is to make a contribution to the growth of mutual understanding between the various groups in Africa and to the proper appreciation of the complexities of particular problems we face on the continent. Our perspective is at the same time African and Christian – a harmony between African and the West, which we are committed to protecting against the dangers of communism or any other invasion of freedom from democracy. (n.p.)

The study group’s intention was clear, both theoretically and ideologically, and in practical terms – the higher education of Africans in the United States of America would be the solution for Africa in the face of the dangers of communism and the inevitable growth of the masses’ discontent with colonialism. Unfortunately, Herskovits was not in Chicago at the time when Biroli-Baranyanka was supposed to be there and did not even hear about his coming. Instead of focusing on Biroli-Baranyanka, Herskovits turns Mondlane’s attention to Alioune Diop, then the editor of Présence Africaine magazine, and commends Mondlane for his position at the United Nations, expressing an optimism in the strategic position regarding emerging issues on ‘Portuguese Africa’. I was unable to establish from the letter whether the lack of engagement about Biroli-Baranyanka was an indication that Herskovits had reservations or indifference to Mondlane’s enthusiasm about Biroli-Baranyanka’s Agenda or if it was merely a way to turn Mondlane’s attention to what he considered to be more important intellectual-political work (i.e. Diop’s magazine and the United Nations). The other possibility is that Biroli-Baranyanka categorically expressed that his agenda was a Christian one, while Mondlane was less dogmatic in that regard, albeit very clear about his faith (Hawley, Citation1979) – perhaps for Herskovits, as a Jewish person, Mondlane’s stance was more appealing and leaned more towards what they had in common (i.e. interest in Africa and contribution to scholarship), thus was to remain the focus of their relationship.

Despite Herskovits lack of interest in Biroli-Baranyanka, his study group and his friendship with Mondlane might be very insightful to the adult education of early African scholars and political leaders. Due to the lack of accessible data, assuming that such data exist somewhere, it was not possible for me to trace the history of Biroli-Baranyanka to verify the legitimacy of the information in Mondlane’s letter pertaining to him being the first African at a Belgian university and to further learn about the study group. What was possible was the fact that in 1949 and 1950 a group of illustrious native figures visited Belgium for the first time and that part of the benefits was the education of several members of the middle class and young people in Belgium (Ruanda-Urundi, Citation1960). However, I could not find a single fact on the Internet in general, at the website of the Université Catholique de Louvain, and at the website of St Anthony’s College at Oxford which corroborates Mondlane’s description of Biroli-Baranyanka in the letter to Herskovits (Mondlane, Citation1957). The traits I could find were in relation to (a) the fact that one Joseph Biroli, one of Chief Baranyanka’s two sons (the other, his twin, was called Jean-Baptiste Ntidendereza), co-founded the Parti Démocrate Chrétien (PDC) that fought against Ragwasori’s party, l’Union et du Progres National (UPRONA) (Lemarchand, Citation1970), a rivalry inherited from the hatred that the Hutus had for his father due to the Belgian favouritism he enjoyed as a chief (Lemarchand, Citation1996); and (b) the fact that Biroli-Baranyanka had studied in Belgium, although the institution cited by Lemarchand (Lemarchand, Citation1970) is L’Institut Universitaire des Territorre d’Outre-Mer, instead of the University of Louvain. Lemarchand tends to extol Joseph Biroli-Baranyanka, by stating that he attended Oxford and Harvard, to assert his intellectual superiority over his political rival Ragwasori. Mondlane, on the other hand, provides more details by naming St Anthony College at Oxford as the institution where Biroli-Baranyanka was completing his Ph.D. at the time and by naming the nature of business at Harvard, ‘he came to this country [United States of America] at the beginning of this summer for the Harvard University Institute of International Economic and Political Sciences’.

On 22 May 1958, Herskovits reacted to an article entitled ‘Eduardo Mondlane, Um Português Moçambicano’ that Mondlane sent to him, which had been written by Simões de Figueiredo and published in the Diário de Notícias de Lourenço Marques on 16 May 1958. Herskovits, perhaps to Mondlane’s disappointment, points to two instances in the first paragraph to express that he could hardly recognise him in Figueiredo’s article, but assumed that such a thing (e.g. image or publicity) would not harm him. Once again, Herskovits then turns his attention to the recent visit of a Teixeira who had difficulty answering some questions about Mozambique that were asked during lunch. The letter ends with a reminder for Mondlane to finish his thesis, which emphasises the priority of his role as a student, especially as an adult student with responsibilities to family and country.

In 1958, Mondlane applied for a teaching position in Ghana, and the Inter-University Council for Higher Education Overseas sent a request, dated June 17, to Herskovits to write a letter of recommendation because Mondlane had listed him as a reference (Maxwell, Citation1958). Herskovits’ recommendation once again underscored Mondlane’s intellectual capacity, although he acknowledged that he was not aware of the state of his Ph.D.‘s dissertation. It was not possible to establish the impact of Herskovits’ mention of the lack of knowledge of the state of the dissertation in the correspondence, but in January 1968, the then Dr Eduardo Mondlane appeared as one of the guests to speak at the symposium to examine ‘violence’ organised and funded by Northwestern University students. This event might have served as a stamp of his scholarly-revolutionary role. The speakers comprised the following: Charles Hamilton; Stanley Milgram, professor of psychology at the City College of New York; Ernest Chambers, barber and spokesperson for black militancy in Omaha, Nebraska; Staughton Lynd, professor at Illinois State Teachers College; Vincent Harding, President of the History Department at Spelman College; James Lawson, Vice President of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a religious pacifist organisation, and former adviser to Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.; Robert Theobald, author; Leslie Fielder, author–critic–educator; and Bosley Crowther, a former New York Times employee. It is likely that Mondlane participated in other similar symposia – in 1964–65 the theme was ‘Rebellion’; in 1965–66, ‘Diminishing Man’; and, in 1966–67, ‘The New Urgency’ – and that such would have influenced him. The Mondlane session in the 1968 symposium on ‘violence’ was on the theme ‘Violence as Outlet’ and he argued, as president of FRELIMO, that the use of violence in a revolution is accepted only when it is imperative. A year earlier (i.e. in a letter on 10 April 1967), Mondlane acknowledged to Gwendolyn Carter that the rare opportunity they had at Northwestern to be influenced by ‘strict’ professors who forced them to look at the basic facts of human behaviour was being useful in the harsh armed struggle. Another evidence that the atmosphere of Northwestern University’s programme influenced Mondlane for a scholar-revolutionary career that culminated in his vision and his role in the liberation of Mozambique.

It might be insightful to make a few observations about Mondlane’s writings from the dissertation until the 1968 symposium. The dissertation (Mondlane, Citation1960) offers a perspicacious look into Mondlane’s social theory positioning that might have contributed to his scholarly interpretation of colonialism and even independent Mozambique (or Africa, in general) via an added understanding of racial (i.e. black and white) and regional (i.e. Southern and Northern) reference groups and role conflict in post-slavery United State. Following predecessors in social theory circles, such as his own mentor Herskovits, Mondlane wished to develop an integrated theory of social structure and social change. He stated the following goal for his research:

My hope, in undertaking to do this research, was that a knowledge of some of the variables which determine social influence in the formation of attitudes may assist in the formulation of specific hypotheses, which, in turn will lead to further clarification of reference group theory, and finally help develop an integrated theory of social structure and social change.
(p. 20)

While the dissertation may not seem directly linked to his scholar-revolutionary engagement, it seems plausible to infer that understanding the relationship between racial and regional reference groups and individual behaviour was instrumental in predicting the course of race and regional reference group behaviours in a country ruled by a fascist colonial government which encouraged regional differences and tribalism by stripping the nations within Mozambique of their status of nations. We might also infer that the anti-racism and anti-tribalism policies adopted by FRELIMO were unlikely to have been adopted without Mondlane’s nuanced understanding of reference groups and the complex cultural context of Mozambicans. Perhaps Mondlane’s vehement advocacy for cohesion as a group and an articulated defiance of racism, tribalism, and regionalism within FRELIMO, and consequently within independent Mozambique was rooted both in his mission to understand the witchcraft of the white man and in his scholarly understanding of race and regional reference groups. He needed to understand how reference groups work and the influence of generally accepted societal norms on such, before he could understand role expectations and role conflict among FRELIMO freedom fighters, Mozambican refugees in Tanzania, the Portuguese, and Mozambicans in Mozambique. The study led him to the following conclusion:

An individual’s conception of the role he is expected to play in the group with which he is identified does often determine the extent to which he will conform or deviate from certain generally accepted norms of his society.
(p. 99)

One conclusion I came to after the interview with Segall and our email conversations (Segall, Citation2011a) was the fact that the human element is often lost in political narratives – Mondlane was primarily an adult learner who was open to learning from the social contexts of the United States, Africa, and Mozambique. Politics were an inevitable arena for a critical scholar and human being who knew and abhorred injustice anywhere it manifested. One such evidence was Mondlane’s critical engagement with Woodrow Wilson’s self-etermination Footnote⁴ (Mondlane, Citationn.d.). A telegram from the U.S. Embassy in Tangayika (Citation1964) is an example of how the United States Government viewed self-determination differently from the way Mondlane did. This critical stance was evidence of his lifelong learning about justice, which started with the learning from everyday life about Portuguese colonialism and the Apartheid, their ties with NATO and American imperialism, and their outright disregard of the non-white human. According to Mondlane, Woodrow Wilson and General Jan SmutsFootnote⁵ were instrumental in the provision ‘to place the former colonies and possessions of Germany and Turkey under the common trusteeship of the member states of the League of Nations’ (Mondlane, Citationn.d.., p. 11). Mondlane argued that Wilson’s self-determination was directed to, peoples who were at this time considered civilized and whose national status had been generally recognized by most of the powers of that time. More specifically it meant the rights of nationality groups, such as the Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, etc. to political independence and freedom from controls by any outside powers and only remotely the rights of the peoples of Africa and Asia. (p. 11)

Further, Mondlane argued that it is apparent that Woodrow Wilson did not even think of including such minority groups in the United States as the American Negroes and the American Indians in his concern for freedom. While Wilson’s campaign for the rights of the oppressed peoples did include such non-European peoples as the Mexicans and the Filipinos, he did not indicate any concern for the rights of the peoples of Africa and parts of Asia who were at the turn of the century under the control of European powers. (p. 8; footnote)

Mondlane noted Wilson’s resenting of the interference of wealthy people in university policy, during his presidency of Princeton University, in favour of a democratic system that favoured public opinion and Wilson’s maintaining that ‘no human group should be allowed to take away another peoples’ [sic] freedom for perpetuity, no matter what the reason’ (Mondlane, Citationn.d.., p. 10). Nonetheless, Wilson’s stance evaded the freedoms of Native Americans and Africans.

This analysis of self-determination might have added a nuanced analytical outlook into the problems of Africa and Mozambique, in particular. His analysis of education in colonial Mozambique offered a cogent argument about the controlling nature of the Portuguese agenda for Black Mozambicans (Mondlane, Citation1963). In it, Mondlane argued that European imposition in the 1930s led Africans to be observant and learn quickly about the techniques of control employed by Europeans, which included education and economic systems that allowed them strategic positionings in local and global power structures. According to Mondlane, the Europeans’ argument that their imposition of authority over Africans was because the latter were primitive incited Africans to believe that learning European techniques might be the means to liberation, a belief that led many Africans to send their children to Christian mission schools. One cannot stop wondering if this might have been the reason Mondlane’s mother encouraged him to pursue formal Western education. Initially, the Portuguese government saw this interest as a tool to advance the civilising mission rather than a strategy adopted by the African people to infiltrate European socioeconomic and political ranks. It was after the Portuguese began to sense the political significance of such mobility that they instituted a special education for the natives called Escolas de Adaptação to guarantee the continuation of white authority and emphasise that Black people needed spiritual growth, not material gain. The Salazar government in the early 1940s heeded the plea of white settlers (e.g. farmers, businessmen, and plantation owners) to change the educational policies to restrict black people’s access to education and, using the 1940 Concordat between Portugal and the Vatican, signed the 1942 Missionary Agreement with the Vatican to place the education of Africans under the responsibility of Roman Catholic Church missions and the education of Europeans and Asians to the Portuguese government. This, observed Mondlane, distinguished Portugal from other colonisers in Africa by making Portugal the only one to limit the education of Black people to primary education and to completely relinquish the responsibility for the education of Black people to a religious organisation while under-subsidising it to limit the numbers of students it could serve.

In addition to his cogent analysis of education in colonial Mozambique, Mondlane (Mondlane, Citation1962, p. 14) argued that education in Africa has old roots and precedes Western education and posits that such old roots are not ‘remote ideas gleaned out of ancient texts; they are the ideas and sentiments which guide the lives of millions of people today. They are the ideas and sentiments which served as motivating forces for millions of people over centuries’. He called for Africa’s vindication against a century of downgrading and discrediting African ideas and sentiments, especially before the youth, as an attempt to colonise the minds and hearts of the African youth. In other words, it was the agenda of colonialism to downgrade and discredit African contribution to education, thus imperative that Africa regains her intellectual and cultural self-respect through political independence. While praising the fact that African scholars interpreting of their own cultural heritages would nurture the youth intellectually and spiritually, he acknowledged that the re-emergence of the old roots of African education will inevitably result in a fusion between the western European, Christian, and African systems of thought. This, he reiterated, called for a commitment by African educators, not non-African scholars, to understand their culture, point out the old roots, generate contextual knowledge that reflects a merging of Western and African knowledge, and lead the conceptualisation of the present and future of Africa. It was without a doubt for Mondlane that the present and future of Africa should be the responsibility of Africans, not non-Africans, who have had the privilege of studying African culture as an unbroken line and the only legitimate heir of tradition in Africa. He posited the following:

Let it not be concluded that we are pleading for the renewal of an educational philosophy that would fit the African to an outdated way of life. Far from it. All we are insisting upon is that no educational philosophy is worth its salt if it ignores the main elements of the way of life of the people if purports to serve. If it has to be admitted, it must be, that the environment of the African is being radically changed by influences emanating from various directions, then his education must be designed not only to equip him to deal with these changes, but also to enable him to find a base upon which to orient himself. Logic alone would dictate that that base should be as close to the African soil as possible.
(p. 13)

Perhaps being close to African soil as possible, for Mondlane, manifested in the start of the liberation struggle in Mozambique while also keeping a foot in the United States through the network of colleagues, friends, church communities, and those who desired freedom for Africa. After attempts to negotiate liberation with the Portuguese, it became noticeably clear that the liberation struggle was inevitable if African education was contingent on African independence. Consequently, his role in the liberation struggle continued to be that of a scholar-revolutionary, a lifelong learner and adult educator; separating education from the struggle for independence would be counterintuitive – after all, their interdependence was core to the apostolic mission per his mother’s wisdom and charge. An article in the Christian Science Monitor highlights Mondlane’s focus on educating adults in FRELIMO, ‘Mr. Milas has now gone to Algeria to arrange for the arming and military training of Mozambique exiles while Dr. Mondlane concentrates on propaganda and on organising the intensive education of future Mozambique administrators’ (Kyle, Citation1963). In 1963, a group of friends and colleagues of the Mondlane family in Syracuse, NY, founded the Committee for Education of Mozambique Refugees (Burke, Citation1963) because of Mondlane’s plea for help to provide education for Mozambican expatriates in Tanganyika. The Committee’s project was approved by the African American Institute in New York City, which subsequently administered the funds. The Founding Officers were Dr Robert S. Laubach, Chairperson; Mrs Gloria Keim, Vice Chairperson; Dr Fred Burke, Treasurer; and, Mrs Jean Nanavati, Secretary.

Conclusion and implications for lifelong learning and adult education

The trajectory of Eduardo Mondlane provides insight into the complexity and richness of the lifelong learning journey for ordinary people, especially those from communities around the globe whose education is relegated to informal, therefore inferior status. If Mondlane’s experience shows that his mother and the women of his community with no Western education could understand the power of infusion of educational systems (e.g. African and Western), we ought to wonder if the categorisations and consequent hierarchization of formal, nonformal, and informal education in the lifelong learning continuum should continue to be endorsed in speaking, writing, and teaching about lifelong learning. We learn from Mondlane’s arguments and experience that unless we take seriously the sociocultural and educational context of the learner from childhood into adulthood, our efforts to make sense of lifelong learning as a discipline and practice is rendered meaningless.

While Mondlane does not escape the modernist dilemma of classification and hierarchization, his drawing from what he labelled ‘purely traditional environment’ is in line with our attempt to challenge the hegemonic discourse on lifelong learning. Such discourse disregards non-Western ontologies and epistemologies as integral to the lifelong learning process, and whenever it evokes them, it does so in a hierarchical manner with Western as the compass. The classification and hierarchization have obvious implications on our perception of ‘the educated’, ‘the educator’, ‘the learner’ and ‘the learned’; in other words, whose knowledge counts as knowledge in lifelong education and whose learning counts as learning in lifelong learning? While I did not find any specific mention of lifelong learning and/or adult education in the archives, the content of the materials therein taught me a lesson about Mondlane’s lifelong learning and adult education, which I hope will inform my own learning and practice as I try to make fellow learners and educators aware of their journeys, make sense of what is deemed less important as knowledge and learning, and ultimately contribute to shaping the conceptualisation of the field – its philosophy, the social theories it adopts as frameworks, the methodologies it deems acceptable and perhaps imperative to knowing about the field, and the ontologies and epistemologies that characterise it.

If there is one bottom line to this lifelong learning and adult education story is this: what Mondlane learned as a child informed his learning as an adolescent and as an adult. What he learned in the fields as a shepherd informed his learning in the classroom of the Swiss Presbyterian Bush Schools, when learning and teaching about dryland farming, studying at Jan Hofmeyer School, at Wits, at Oberlin, at Northwestern, conducting research at Harvard, teaching at Syracuse University, working in the United Nations, drafting and publishing scholarly papers and technical reports, and leading FRELIMO. In the end, we might conclude that Mondlane’s experience as a lifelong learner and as an adult student at Oberlin and Northwestern was instrumental in FRELIMO’s prioritising of the education of adults in struggle against colonialism as they sought to train leaders who could read and write in the colonial language perhaps to better understand the ‘witchcraft’ of the enemy and to become conscientized about basic ideological nuances of the Cold War. It was without a doubt that the Apostolic commissioning of Mondlane by his mother to go forth and learn the witchcraft of the white man materialised in his lifelong learning journey and culminated in the struggle against colonialism that had education as an indispensable centrepiece. Mondlane’s vision may have been cut short by the tragedy of his assassination in Tanganyika on 3 February 1969, but his spirit remains alive as we present-day scholars and activists seek to unpack the richness and complexity of his vision while dreaming about future possibilities for the Global Africa community in the arena of lifelong learning and education, without neglecting its global political freedom. A Luta Continua!

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For his autobiography, see Chitlangu & Clerc, André D. (1950). Chitlangu, Son of a Chief. Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press.

2. For some insight about Randall, see this letter of Dr. King to Randall, which includes a brief biography of Randall.

3. Also spelled as Manjakazi.

4. On ‘self-determination’ see, ‘Woodrow Wilson, A Message to Congress, May 27, 1916, Washington, D.C’.; ‘A Speech at Columbus, Ohio, September 4, 1919’; ‘A Speech in Billings, Montana, September 11, 1919’; and ‘From Empire to Nation, The Rise to Self-Assertion of Asian and African Peoples’.

5. Who, as seen in earlier parts of this text, once advocated in the South African Parliament that Mondlane’s expulsion from the country be revoked.Previous article

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