5 April 2008
Maputo — One of Mozambique's top intellectuals, Fernando Ganhao, died in his home in Maputo, of an unspecified illness, on Friday.
As a young man, Ganhao abandoned the brilliant career he could have enjoyed under Portuguese colonial rule. His anti-fascist and anti-colonial convictions led him instead to join the liberation movement, Frelimo. He worked to train Mozambicans in the secondary schools Frelimo set up in Tanzania, in the 1960s and early 70s.
Immediately after independence, in 1975, the country's first president, Samora Machel, appointed Ganhao Vice-Chancellor of the country's sole university. Known under the Portuguese as the General University Studies of Mozambique, it was renamed as the Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM), in honour of the founder of Frelimo.
Ganhao entered an institution that was in meltdown. Under colonial rule, the university had catered almost exclusively for the sons and daughters of the colonial elite - and they were now fleeing the country. With most of its staff and many of the students abandoning Mozambique, the university seemed in imminent danger of closing.
Ganhao helped pull it back from the brink, recruiting staff sympathetic to the Mozambican revolution from all over the world, and eventually establishing the UEM as a credible institution.
In the last decade of his life, Ganhao moved into the flourishing sphere of private education. He became Vice-Chancellor of the Technical University of Mozambique (UDM), a private university set up in 2000.
Ganhao was also passionate about sport, and became chairperson of the Mozambique Olympic Committee when it was set up in 1979. At the time of his death, Ganhao was the Committee's Honorary President.
Ganhao was also a member of the Frelimo Central Committee, and in the 1980s he served on the Standing Committee of the country's parliament, the People's Assembly.
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