MAPUTO, Oct 24 (AFP) - In a villa overlooking the Indian Ocean, Teresa Simoes Ferreira grew up in the segregated privilege of Portuguese-ruled Mozambique where she accompanied her father on medical rounds in poor rural areas.
Now free from 500 years of colonial rule and emerging from a brutal 16-year civil war, Mozambique hopes that its famous daughter will bring an African connection to the White House if her husband John Kerry is elected to the US presidency on November 2.
The wife of the US Democratic presidential contender was born on October 5, 1938 in Maputo, then called Lourenco Marques, and lived in colonial Mozambique until the age of 14 when she was sent to South Africa to continue her studies.
If Kerry wins the US presidency, Teresa would become the first African-born first lady.
"My roots are African," she has repeatedly said. Teresa also calls herself a "child of Africa" and has raised some controversy by referring to herself as an "African-American."
"The birds I remember, the fruits I ate, the trees I climbed, they're African," she has recalled.
Her father Jose Simoes Ferreira, who emigrated from Portugal in the 1930s, is still remembered for his work as a radiologist at Miguel Bombarda Hospital, now Maputo Central Hospital.
Jose Simoes also worked in a rural hospital in Mandlakaze, north of Maputo, and Teresa has recalled accompanying him when he took time from his family at his weekend vaction home in Bilene, also north of the capital, to provide free treatment to the locals.
Teresa's father was "very kind although discrimination against black Mozambicans was widespread at the hospital and there were areas where you could not enter," said retired hospital worker Joao Nacutove, now in his 80s.
"It was their hospital and not ours," he said of the segregation in Mozambique under Portuguese colonial rule that ended in 1975. "But today, everyone can go there for treatment."
In the plushest parts of Maputo, Jose Simoes and his Mozambican-born wife Irene Thierstein lived in a big house by the sea with Teresa and her two siblings between the presidential palace and the presidential office.
Now the house is home to the ambassador of Finland.
Teresa's parents sent her to attend high school in South Africa in 1952 and she only returned to her birthplace when she took her three sons to visit their grandparents in 1974, a year before they left Mozambique.
"I've written a letter to her to tell her about the school and where it is now. I mentioned to her that we'vet got an incredibly strong social outreach at the school," said Eleanor Hugh, head mistress of the Maris Stella Convent High School in South Africa.
"She's quite involved in that kind of thing and it sort of fits in with what our school is about," Hugh told AFP.
Teresa completed a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where she once, in 1959, participated in an anti-apartheid march.
"I witnessed the weight of apartheid everywhere around me. And so, with my fellow students, we marched against its extension into higher education," Teresa told a Democratic Convention.
"I learned something then, and I believe it still. There is a value in taking a stand whether or not anyone may be noticing and whether or not it is a risky thing to do," she said.
Although Teresa has talked much about her taking part in the march, former activists interviewed in South Africa cannot remember her and say thousands of students participated in the demonstration.
She has also made frequent references to the poverty and discrimination she witnessed while in Mozambique, and many hope that as first lady, she will rekindle her relationship with the poor southern African country.
"Many important people born here and now living abroad do not even talk about the country where their umbilical cords were cut," said Eduardo Lauchande, an official with the ruling Mozambique Liberation Front.
"With Teresa in the White House, many, including US tourists would want to know where the first lady is from."

10/24/2004 13:09 GMT - AFP