Columbus Kamba Simango

Columbus Kamba Simango (1890–1966), often known as Kamba Simango, was an ethnographer, missionary, musician, performer and activist of Vandau ethnicity.

Biography Simango was born in 1890 in Machanga District, Mozambique of Vandau ethnicity. He attended a Congregational Mission school in Beira, followed by studies at Mount Selinda and Lovedale.

In 1914, he went to the United States to study at the Hampton Institute, under the auspices of the American Board of Missions. After this he went to the Teachers College at Columbia University, graduating in 1923. He also worked with Natalie Curtis.

Kamba Simango on his wedding to Kathleen Easmon He was married first to missionary poet Kathleen Mary Easmon Simango on 1 June 1922. They had met in New York. 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; they then moved to Ghana where they opened a hotel and later ran a Portuguese language radio station. Simango died in a hit and run accident in 1966.

In 1934–1935 he helped found the Mozambican organization Grémio Negrófilo de Manica e Sofala; the Grémio lasted until 1956 (under the name of Núcleo Negrófilo) when it was outlawed for connections to an anticolonial uprising in the Machanga and Mambone regions.

A street is named after him in Maputo. « Tales and Proverbs of the Vandau of Portuguese South Africa », Franz Boas & Kamba Simango, 1922