Marcelino dos Santos

Marcelino dos Santos (20 May 1929 – 11 February 2020) was a Mozambican poet, revolutionary, and politician. As a young man he travelled to Portugal, and France for an education. He was a founding member of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO—Mozambican Liberation Front), in 1962, and served as the party's deputy president from 1969 to 1977. He was Minister of Economic Development in the late 1970s, FRELIMO Political Bureau member in charge of the economy in the early 1980s, chairman of the country's parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, from 1987 to 1994, and, as of 1999, remained a member of the FRELIMO Central Committee. He represented the left wing of the party, remaining an avowed Marxist-Leninist, despite the party's embrace of capitalism in recent decades, an embrace which dos Santos declared was temporary.

Under the pseudonyms Kalungano and Lilinho Micaia, he published his early poems in O Brado Africano, and his work appeared in two anthologies produced by the Casa dos Estudantes do Imperio in Lisbon. Under the pen-name Lilinho Micaia, a collection of his poetry was published in the Soviet Union. Under his real name, he had a book published by the Associação dos Escritores Moçambicanos (Mozambican Writers' Association) in 1987, entitled Canto do Amor Natural.