He attended a Congregational Mission school in Beira, followed by studies at Mount Selinda and Lovedale.

[2] During this time, in April 1922, he participated as a dancer in the play Taboo, presented at the Sam H. Harris Theater in Harlem.

As a Vandau intellectual, he collaborated with many anthropologists and Africanists, such as Melville Herskovits, Henri-Philippe Junod and Dora Earthy.

[5] After she died unexpectedly from appendicitis in 1924, he married Kathleen's cousin, Christine Cousey (in September 1925), with whom he had three children.

The couple worked as missionaries in Angola and Mozambique from 1926 to 1936;[6] they then moved to Ghana where they opened a hotel and later ran a Portuguese language radio station.