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File photo / Eduardo Mondlane at 23 years of age
Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi declared on Monday that the life and work of Eduardo Mondlane, the founder and first President of the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo), constitute a school from which Mozambicans can learn that it is possible to find solutions to the enormous problems facing the country.
Nyusi was speaking in Mondlane’s home village of Nwadjahane, in the southern province of Gaza, where thousands of people had gathered to celebrate what would have been Mondlane’s 96th birthday.
Mondlane founded Frelimo out of a merger of three nationalist groups on 25 June 1962. Slightly more than two years later, after all attempts to achieve peaceful decolonization had failed, Frelimo launched its armed struggle to secure independence from Portuguese rule.
In 1968, when Frelimo held its Second Congress in a liberated area of the northern province of Niassa, Mondlane was re-elected President of the liberation movement. But on 3 February he was assassinated in Dar es Salaam by a parcel bomb sent by the Portuguese secret police, the PIDE.
Several of Mondlane’s comrades-in-arms attended the Monday ceremony. Veteran guerrilla commanders such as Alberto Chipande and Raimundo Pachinuapa spoke of their memories of Mondlane.
Visiting Nwadjahane, Nyusi said, was always “a renewed pleasure” since this was the birthplace of the man whose ideals eventually led to the birth of a free and independent Mozambique. “To speak of Mondlane is to speak of the Mozambican state, of its dreams and its longings”, he declared.
The story of Mondlane’s life, he added, teaches that “nothing is impossible” and that through persistence people can achieve what they desire in their battles against day-to-day adversities.
Nyusi warned that all will have been in vain “if we do not succeed in keeping Mozambique independent and united, as Mondlane dreamed”. He added that Mozambicans should always turn to dialogue to solve any differences amongst them.
“It is not violence that solves problems”, said the President. “Just as Mondlane did, we have to be ever more united to find the best solutions for our economic and political concerns”.
He recalled a metaphor of Mondlane, that “an eagle should not be raised like a chicken”, since one day it will spread its wings and fly to another destination – which Mondlane did, to study abroad, taking his mother’s advice to learn “the spells of the white men”. He became the first black Mozambican with a doctorate, and obtained a job at the United Nations.
But he understood that his post at the UN could only be temporary, and he returned to Africa, to found Frelimo and launch the Mozambican liberation struggle.
Pachinuapa recalled that, shortly before his assassination, Mondlane remarked that, should he die, other Frelimo militants must not hesitate, for “the struggle goes on” (in Portuguese, “A luta continua”). This was the origin of the most famous of Frelimo slogans.
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