Simango, Kamba (1890-1966)

Born in Mozambique in 1890, Kamba Simango was an ethnographer, missionary, musician, performer and activist. In 1914, under the auspices of the missionaries of the American Board of Missions, he was sent to the United States to study at the Hampton Institute and, later, to the Teacher College in Columbia, where he would remain until 1923. After his arrival in Columbia, he met the anthropologist Franz Boas, with whom he would become a collaborator and friend. Simango’s years in New York coincided with the start of the so-called Harlem Renaissance, a time when the incipient voices of Pan-Africanism co-existed with a whole host of Black writers, poets, painters, sculptors and musicians. During this period, he would also become friends with Pan-Africanist W. E. B. Du Bois. As a Vandau intellectual, he collaborated also with many anthropologists and Africanists, such as Melville Herskovits (1895-1963), Henri-Philippe Junod (1921-1966) and Dora Earthy (1874-1960). He died in Ghana, in 1966.

Keywords: Ethnography | Missionary | Mozambique | Ndau | Harlem Renaissance