[1] Born in Matalana, a village in the south of Portuguese Mozambique, Ngwenya spent his early life attending mission schools and helping his mother on the farm, while his father worked in the Transvaal region as a miner.

[4] In 1958, Ngwenya attended some functions of Nucleo de Arte, a local artists' organization,[4] and received support from the painter Ze Julio.

[5] In 1964, Ngwenya, who had joined the nationalistic FRELIMO guerrilla, was detained by the PIDE, the Portuguese secret police of the Estado Novo regime, and spent 18 months in jail.

In 1979 he participated in the exhibition Moderne Kunst aus Afrika, which was organised in West Berlin as part of the program of the first Horizonte - Festival der Weltkulturen.

A large mural by him decorated the stairwell of the original building housing the Africa Centre, London, in King Street, Covent Garden.

He was awarded the Nachingwea Medal for his Contribution to Mozambican Culture, and was made a Grande Oficial da Ordem do Infante D. Henrique.

[14][15] Malangatana revived African indigenous aesthetics, performing an anti-colonial identity, dialectically opposed to the imposed colonial structures present in 1960’s Mozambique.

[5][16] Exhibiting this is his employment of surrealist imagery, using bright and contrasting colors to depict supernatural scenes populated by coexisting monsters and people.

[18] A black background has been overlaid with a series of figures, some realistically human-looking, the rest on a spectrum of metamorphosis, with some having transformed so far that the original human referent cannot be recognized.

[19] By approaching activism through art, he made politics accessible to the vast majority of the population unable to engage in the written discourse of the time.

The mother nurses the vivacious child, holding a flower symbolizing emergent growth, showing how the soldier’s sacrifice is for the nation’s future children.

"[5] Through this painting, Malangatana articulated a vision of Mozambique growing beyond the colonial past through the process of independence, and in the context of the fermenting revolution, this work was an overt call to arms.