Rodríguez de Almeida was born in Catete, Angola, on 10 February 1939. Her Methodist parents were schoolteachers, and she was a middle child, with four other siblings. She moved to Luanda and lived with her cousin, the poet Agostinho Neto, who went on to become the first president of Angola. Though she was educated in the Methodist Missionary schools and taught writing and translating while a young girl, by the late 1950s she had begun to question the paternal attitude of both the government and the church. In 1956, Rodríguez joined the MPLA as a translator. While a sociology student on scholarship at Methodist University of São Paulo in 1959, she exchanged correspondence with Martin Luther King Jr. Fearing she would be extradited from Brazil because of the Portuguese Imperial relationship between its colonies and her support of the growing Angolan Independence movement, Rodríguez de Almeida moved to the United States the following year and studied at Drew University. Because she wanted to be an active participant in Angola's independence, Rodríguez did not finish school and decided to leave the U.S. In February 1961, she was recruited to participate in the MPLA attack on "Fortalesa", later gaining the honorary title of "Mother of the Revolution".