Mozambique

The Republic of Mozambique (República de Moçambique) is situated on the southeast coast of Africa. Washed by the warm Agulhas current that comes all the way across from Western Australia along the equator, Mozambique's beaches on the Indian Ocean were long the attraction of numerous tourists who flocked there from neighboring countries. The capital, Maputo (formerly Lourenço Marques), situated on Delgoa Bay, is the country's chief port. Probably hunters and gatherers, ancestors of the Khoisan peoples, lived in what is now Mozambique since about 4000 B.C., and Bantu-speaking people settled there before A.D. 100. Before the fourth century A.D., the southward and eastward migrations of iron-working Bantu peoples absorbed these original nomadic peoples. During the eighth century A.D., Arab merchants settled on the Mozambican coast trading in gold, ivory, and slaves. In 1497 the Portuguese navigator Vasco Da Gama landed on the coast of Mozambique, and in 1505 Portuguese settlers occupied the Muslim settlement on the Ilha de Moçambique, making it a slave-trading center and part of its maritime empire. The Portuguese brought gold from the mines on the Zimbabwe plateau to India to purchase the spices that ensured Portugal's prosperity during the sixteenth century. In 1884, when Africa was divided among various European powers, Angola on the Atlantic Ocean and Mozambique on the Indian became recognized as Portuguese colonies.

During the early years of Portuguese activity and expansion into the African interior towards the Kingdom of Munhumutapa, which assured the supply of gold and slaves, the Roman Catholic Church, too, gained access to the region. In 1561 the Jesuit missionary Gonçalo de Silveira baptised the Munhumutapa Negomo. Silveira was later accused of being a spy for the Portuguese and was killed. The Jesuits, however, continued to be missionaries and an educational presence in the area until they were expelled from Portuguese territory in 1759; the Jesuit school at Sena, the depot established on the trade route between the coast and Tete, had to be closed, thus terminating the cultural ties the prazeros (originally Portuguese recipients of land leased from the Portuguese crown who later became Africanized) had with Portugal.

During the 1780s the prazeros expanded slaving operations in Mozambique, and by 1790 approximately 9,000 slaves were being exported each year—primarily to Brazil, but also to Yao and to Swahili traders who worked the Indian Ocean markets. This figure rose to 15,000 slaves per year during the 1820s and 1830s. The slave trade became Mozambique's most important business and resulted in the depopulation especially of the coastal areas. The slave trade drew to an end only after the publication of reports on the conditions in Mozambique by the missionary-explorer David Livingstone. A decree of total abolition was published in 1878.

Despite the abolition of slavery, Africans were forced to work long hours with very little pay for the Portuguese colonists. Often food was withheld so people were compelled to work. Cotton and other cash crops, grown for sale to the Chartered Companies—which had been granted concessionary rights to develop land and natural resources, forced labor, and the sale of labor to other parts of Africa—resulted in the retardation of development in Mozambique. The construction of the railroad linking the port of Beira with the present-day Zimbabwe, the settling of Portuguese families, and the building of schools and hospitals did not benefit the African population at all. Neither education nor health-care was available to those who were not Portuguese. A massive flight to the neighboring colonies resulted in further depopulation.

In 1891 a treaty establishing the boundaries between British and Portuguese holdings in southeast Africa was negotiated and, in 1910, the status of Mozambique changed from that of Portuguese province to Portuguese colony. In 1962 several nationalist groups united to form the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique or FRELIMO) under the leadership of Eduardo Mondlane, who was assassinated in Dar es Salaam in 1969. After 1964 FRELIMO initiated guerrilla warfare in northern Mozambique and by the early 1970s controlled much of northern and central Mozambique. In June 1975, a year after a military coup overthrew the government in Portugal, Mozambique became an independent nation. The exodus of Europeans after independence brought about a tremendous brain drain. FRELIMO established a single-party socialist state and instituted health and education reforms. Many of those who disagreed with the new direction taken in Mozambique formed the Mozambique National Resistance Movement (RENAMO or MNR). The actions of RENAMO led to a 16-year war that killed millions and destroyed 50 percent of the primary schools in the rural areas and several teacher-training centers. Since the Peace Accord signed in 1992, specific rehabilitation and restructuring programs attempt to make education more available at all levels.

Political, Social, & Cultural Bases of Education During Colonialism: During the more than 300 years of nominal and actual colonization, Mozambique was seen primarily as a source of trade with Europe and of cheap labor for the European plantations, the construction of ports and roads in Mozambique, and the mines in South Africa. During the time of Portuguese colonialism, the Bantu-speaking peoples were forced to work on European-owned land. Colonial policy, based on the egalitarian theory of assimilation, stated that if an African was fluent in Portuguese, was Christian, and had a good character, he was to be given the same status as a Portuguese citizen. Very few Africans qualified for citizenship, mainly because educational opportunities were inadequate or non-existent. In fact, the colonial powers had no interest in educating the Mozambican indigenous population beyond their usefulness to the needs identified by the authorities. Consequently, little effort was made to provide meaningful education.

There were a very limited number of schools scattered along the coast; attendance was minimal. By 1900 only 1,195 African and mulatto children attended schools. Approximately 607 of these were in missionary schools, 146 in government schools, 412 in municipal schools, and 30 in private institutions. By 1909 there were 48 primary schools for boys and 18 for girls, the great majority run by missionaries, along with some trade and agricultural schools. Reports compiled during the 1920s by the High Commissioner to Mozambique, Brito Camacho, by the African Education Commission under the auspices of the Phelps-Stokes Fund and the foreign mission societies of North America and Europe, had nothing positive to say about education in Mozambique. Education deteriorated even further when the Salazar regime came into power in Portugal in 1926 and made it almost impossible for anybody who was classified as indigenous to obtain education, instruction, and Christianity, as well as the distinction to be reclassified as civilized and thus be assimilated and given the rights of Portuguese citizenship—the criteria for which was the almost unobtainable school certificate. This state of affairs was ironic and racist as late as 1966, when 90 percent of the African population was found to be illiterate. It was also found that 40 percent of white settlers from Portugal were illiterate.

The Salazar Era & Education: Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, the Portuguese dictator who ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1968, was intent on repressing opposition in Portugal's African colonies. Thus, the programs of state-sponsored schooling established by the Salazar regime created a schooling system available for the children of settlers. This was a duplication of the primary and secondary schooling system operating in Portugal, directed by the Ministry of National Education in Lisbon, which included within it a Department of Overseas Education. Until the 1950s enrollment was small. Between 1954 and 1956, with the influx of settlers from Portugal, enrollment increased by 30 percent, and it tripled by 1964. These schools were open only to "assimilated" Africans and, as late as 1954, only 322 Africans were enrolled in the government primary schools. By 1954, there were 71 primary schools, 12 elementary professional schools, 2 government technical schools, 1 government high school, and no government teacher training institutions in the public schooling system.

Schooling for Africans denied more access than it created and failed more students than it passed. The first stage, a three-year rudimentary education, was designed "gradually to lead the 'Indigenous' from savage life to civilization. . . ." It included subjects such as Portuguese language, arithmetic, history and geography of Portugal, design and manual work, physical education and hygiene, moral education, and choral music. The six-year primary school program, which led up to entrance to secondary school, was fraught with enormous hurdles and age restrictions, making it almost impossible for African students to succeed. Unlike in South Africa where the Roman Catholic Church was perceived as an agency of social justice and transformation, the Catholic educational missions in Mozambique were very much an instrument of the Portuguese government's strategy of nationalization. From the 1940s to the 1960s, Roman Catholic missions, which worked in close collaboration with the Portuguese government, expanded their field of operation dramatically from 296 missions in 1940 to 2,000 in 1960. In these schools Africans were taught mainly by rote, their chief focus being the Catechism. By contrast, the Protestant foreign missions, which were accused of validating African languages and culture and encouraging education for Africans in a way to give them a tendency to be "uppity," were viewed with great suspicion by those in authority and declined from 41 in 1940 to 27 in 1960.

After 1964, with the forming of FRELIMO, the launching of the armed struggle for national independence, and the change in the Portuguese economy, Salazar's colonial educational policies came under review. Primary school was made compulsory for all children between the ages of 6 and 12; secondary schools were expanded and technical schools were created. Agricultural education was stressed. General studies offered during the 1960s later became the Faculty of General Studies, which was then designated as part of the university.

FRELIMO, the Liberation Struggle, & Education: In Mozambique, as in countries such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Vietnam, and Somalia, a national mass literacy campaign was undertaken soon after the revolutionary movement began enjoying widespread popular support; in this case FRELIMO acceded to power. The incoming FRELIMO government declared that education was a right for all people and that all education should serve and defend the interests of the majority, the workers and peasants—those who had been most disadvantaged by the discrimination and elitism of the previous centuries. Adult literacy projects were a means to mobilize the people in the liberated areas, to bring new freedom to people who had long been derided for their ignorance yet had been prevented from access to the educational system. Despite its association with the oppression of the colonizers, and because of its potential to unite diverse populations, Portuguese became the language of the liberation struggle. New knowledge and increased access to education empowered the Mozambican people to fight for their liberation.

After the beginning of the armed struggle in Cabo Delgado province in northern Mozambique in 1964, a network of "bush schools" was established and, by 1967, more than 10,000 children were enrolled in FRELIMO primary schools. In the years that followed, teachers set up schools in other provinces, carrying on FRELIMO's vision, which saw education not as the creator of a national elite, but as a means to serve the people. By 1974 more than 20,000 children were enrolled in the four-year primary school program in the various provinces. More than 300 people were enrolled in the fifth to eighth year classes and training courses for primary teachers that had been running since 1972, and more than 100 students were doing postsecondary level courses abroad on FRELIMO scholarships.

The transitional government established on September 25, 1974, set up countrywide Dynamizing Groups that were to provide literacy activities throughout the country. Literacy, defined here as the ability to read and write Portuguese, was seen as the primary means to liberate the creative initiative of the Mozambican people and empower them to attain complete independence and work towards national reconstruction. In 1975 the transitional FRELIMO government identified an illiteracy rate of about 90 percent. By the end of the 1990s, illiteracy rates were estimated at 60 percent. Unfortunately, Mozam bique's move to greater freedom and prosperity through education was beset by obstacles resulting from its geopolitical position in southern Africa; the effects of racial capitalism; the hostility of members of the international community to its socialist option; and the concerted challenge to its attempts to free the creative energies of its people through education.

Rhodesia, South Africa, RENAMO, & Education: During the war between the white regime and both the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) and the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) in Zimbabwe, the former British colony of Rhodesia, the people of Mozambique, (especially those in the Tete province, the area in northern Mozambique wedged between Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi) were drawn into the conflict. When Samora Machel's FRELIMO party came to power, he had established a government based on the principles of scientific socialism and committed himself to actively engaging in the elimination of white minority governments. The white government in Rhodesia, which once regarded the neighboring government as an ally, now saw it as an enemy, especially when Mozambique provided a haven to ZAPU and ZANLA forces and the base for guerrilla operations against the country. Zimbabwe's military strikes and hot pursuit operations into the Tete province were devastating not only for ZANU and ZANLA camps but also for the villages that were inhabited by civilian refugees seeking to escape the fighting.

The situation in Tete was compounded by South Africa's political and economical interest in the region. The giant hydroelectric complex at the Cahora Basa Dam on the Zambezi River had been constructed by a consortium largely financed and assisted by the South African government in Pretoria. The Cahora Basa scheme provided electrical power for South Africa that sold some of it back to users in southern Mozambique, especially Maputo. Supported by right-wing elements in the United States, both the Rhodesian and South African regimes supported the Mozambican National Resistance (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana, also known as RENAMO), made up of dissidents opposed to FRELIMO and Portuguese people who had fled Mozambique when FRELIMO came to power.

The Education of Refugees & Displaced People: The effects of war, terrorism, torture, and other atrocities committed in the area were horrendous, especially on education. Many fled to neighboring Zambia where they were held in refugee camps. One such refugee camp was Ukwimi. Members of the International Catholic Child Bureau worked with teachers and children in eight preschools in different villages within the Ukwimi Settlement. Both the children and the teachers had witnessed the most horrendous killings, which affected both teaching and learning. Teachers were first taught how to come to terms with their own distress and then, using the mechanisms of Mozambican culture, to devise methods to help the children cope with their memories, with the loss of family members and of their homeland, and with the pain they had seen inflicted on others or had experienced themselves. Teachers were then taught to move away from the rigid rote system they had used before and to adopt new methods of teaching, involving the children in the learning process. Primary school teachers accompanied their pupils through a similar process, with the one difference that here the teachers were Zambian nationals who first had to learn to understand the concept of stress and recognize its symptoms. In 1994 the Ukwimi refugees repatriated to Mozambique, bringing their newfound knowledge and confidence back to a country where education plays a vital role in addressing the need for reconstruction of personal lives and societal structures.

Since the 1992 Peace Accord, more than 1 million other refugees from neighboring countries have been repatriated and reintegrated into Mozambique. Of these, there are thousands of adolescents who were once functionally literate in Portuguese but have now lost the ability they once had to read and write. Thousands of other returnees were born in refugee camps and are preliterate, which means unable to read and write and too old to be integrated into the preprimary and lower primary educational mainstream.

Distance education programs sponsored by the Mozambican government, the UNDP, the World Bank, and the government of the Netherlands attempted to train unqualified primary school teachers to improve the quality of education, to cope with the influx of nationals of school age returning from exile from neighboring states, and to enable them to be part of the reconstruction of a country whose political experience had led to the devastation of the fabric of life for the majority of its people.

Modern Mozambique: Today Mozambique remains one of the world's economically poorest countries. There is mass illiteracy in a primarily agricultural economy based on farming. The high international debt by which Mozambique has to service the exorbitant interest rates imposed on foreign loans made by the international banks and the restructuring demands made by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund call for priority to be given to financial needs rather than to the immediate survival needs of the country's population; this affects the country's ability to provide essential health and education services. In the year 2000, despite devastating floods that destroyed roads and 140 school buildings in three flooded provinces, Mozambique had to pay $62 million to foreign creditors, and only $32 million of the budget was set aside for education. In a country of 16 million people where 11 million live below the poverty line and 10 million people do not have adequate drinking water, the education sector can only be revived with the recovery of the agricultural sector, as well as with investment in the country and in the infrastructure; this will provide the resources and the expertise the government needs to put into effect its will to reform the education system.

Children's rights and welfare are a priority of the Mozambican government; however, many children are in trouble. Although more than 1,000 new primary schools were opened during 1999, they were overcrowded and often parents had to bribe teachers so that their children could be given a place in school. The 1997 census estimated that 50 percent of children aged 6 through 10 are in primary school, and only a fraction of these go on to secondary school.

Girls have less access to education than boys above the primary level, and about 76 percent of females over 15 years of age are illiterate. Girls made up 42.0 percent of students in grades 1 through 5, 40.0 percent of students in grades 6 through 10, and 48.4 percent in grades 11 and 12. Outside the main cities, secondary schools are fewer and, where boarding is required for attendance, the number of female students drops significantly, especially when local residents, who blame schoolgirls for immoral behavior in the community, demand the exclusion of girls from dormitories.

An estimated 3,000 street children live in the Maputo metropolitan area, and during 1999 NGOs and the government took some steps to protect and reintegrate them into families or other supervised conditions. One NGO, the Association for Mozambican Children (ASEM), opened two alternative learning centers for more than 900 children who were not able to return to their regular schools after being expelled from their homes or because they had left school to work. ASEM was supplied with textbooks by the government. The Maputo City Social Action Coordination Office, through its program of rescuing orphans and assisting single mothers who head families of three or more persons, offered special classes in local schools to children of broken homes. Other NGO groups sponsor food, shelter, and education programs in all major cities. In May 1999 an Africa-wide conference on child soldiers was held in Maputo. The "Maputo Declaration" called for an end to the use of child soldiers, for pressure to be placed on nations in violation, and for the reintegration of child soldiers into civil society.

Language Policy: No one indigenous African linguistic group in Mozambique ever gained control over the whole territory. This process was cut short by the double colonization imposed by the Portuguese and the English. Furthermore, the forms of colonialism were such that as there was no widespread education for African people, no one European language became predominant. Criticism of the Portuguese included a denunciation of their inability to use Mozambique's indigenous languages. However, in the early 1960s FRELIMO decided to adopt Portuguese as the language that would unite nationalist freedom fighters with different language backgrounds in the national independence struggle. This decision was made as there are at least four major Bantu languages, possibly eight, spoken in Mozambique. The four major languages are Makua, Tsonga, Nyanja-Sena, and Shona; the four minor languages are Makonde, Yao, Copi, and Gitonga. Kiswahili, Shangaan (or Tsonga), Zulu, and Swazi are also spoken. People in neighboring countries share all these languages. In order to unite a country with such a linguistically diverse population, Portuguese, which is the mother-tongue of only 3 percent of the nations citizens, has today been declared the official language of the Peoples' Republic of Mozambique and is thus the medium of communication in administration, religion, and education. It is also the language of literacy that was used even during the period of armed struggle (1964-1974) for national independence when FRELIMO spearheaded adult literacy activities. Thus, in Mozambique, literacy is equated not with the ability to read in the mother tongue, but to be in command of Portuguese and English, the language of the former colonial powers, and the languages of communication with the outside world. In many multilingual countries the mother tongue or a local vernacular are the medium of instruction during the first school years, and there is a shift to the national or official language only in later years.

In Mozambique, however, Portuguese is the exclusive medium of instruction from first grade onwards and is also a subject in primary and secondary education. English is a compulsory subject at the secondary level, and English for Academic Purposes is also a compulsory subject in the first two years of most courses administered by the Department of English of the Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM). The Bantu languages are taught only at the UEM. Since 1993 the National Institute for Education Development has been carrying out a bilingual project, which involves using a Bantu language as a medium of instruction in the initial years of primary schooling and gradually making the transition to Portuguese. Even though Portuguese is the national and official language, cultural policy is working towards the valorization of Mozambican indigenous languages and their increased inclusion in the educational process. This move does not, however, deny the fact that Mozambican Portuguese is becoming a language in its own right and that several Mozambican novelists and short-story writers have put Mozambique on the map of Portuguese literature, similar to what has happened to English in India or English in South Africa.