[2][3] The fourth of 16 sons of a chief of the Bantu-speaking Tsonga, Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane was born in N'wajahani, district of Mandlakazi in the province of Gaza,[4] in Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) in 1920.

He ended his secondary education in the same organisation's church school at Lemana College at Njhakanjhaka Village above Elim Hospital in the Transvaal (Limpopo Province), South Africa.

One of António de Oliveira Salazar's most important advisers, Adriano Moreira, a political science professor who had been appointed to the post of Portugal's Minister of the Overseas (Ministro do Ultramar), met Mondlane at the United Nations when both were working there and, recognising his qualities, tried to bring him to the Portuguese side by offering to him a post in Portuguese Mozambique's administration.

Supported both by several Western countries and the USSR, as well as by many African states, FRELIMO began a guerrilla war in 1964 to obtain Mozambique's independence from Portugal.

In FRELIMO's early years, its leadership was divided: the faction led by Mondlane wanted not merely to fight for independence but also for a change to a socialist society; dos Santos, Machel and Chissano and a majority of the Party's Central Committee shared this view.

[9] Various parties have been implicated as potentially responsible for his assassination, including rivals within FRELIMO, Tanzanian politicians, the Portuguese secret service, and Aginter Press.

By the early 1970s, FRELIMO's 7,000-strong guerrilla force had wrested control of some countryside areas of the central and northern parts of Mozambique from the Portuguese authorities.

[11] Syracuse University's Africa Initiative hosts the Eduardo Mondlane Brown Bag Lecture Series that invites speakers worldwide to participate in Africana studies.