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Intellectual Legacies, Political Morality, and Disillusionment: Connections Between Two Mozambique Research Institutions, 1976–2017
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 February 2023
Abstract
States and institutions often narrate their histories in one of two ways: underscoring continuity with the past or proclaiming rupture from it. This article studies the case of two research institutions in independent Mozambique to show that the history of rupture that some postsocialist political and academic actors claim has a more complex history. That history is related to other African independence struggles and newly independent states and is also embedded in the shape of postsocialist life. Focused on a brief period in time and on two research institutes, this article sheds light on wider processes in African history related to institution building, postcolonial universities and education, and the networks of the global 1960s, as well as those of socialist states during the Cold War.
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References
1 This material is not yet ready to be explored in depth. We are still in the process of rescuing and organizing all that was found there.
2 CEA's senior researcher and leader, 17 Aug. 2017. This conversation happened during one of CEA's regular meetings with all researchers.
3 C. Darch and J. Head, ‘Medium term strategic plan for 2008–2011: mid-term evaluation’, IESE, Aug.–Sep. 2010, 61, https://www.iese.ac.mz/lib/MidTermReview.pdf.
4 Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (Mozambique Liberation Front), founded in 1962 in Tanzania.
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19 Interview with Teresa Cruz e Silva, Maputo, 10 Aug. 2019; and conversation with Yussuf Adam, Maputo, 22 Oct. 2022.
20 It was published in 1976 as a research report: ‘Zimbabwe: alguns dados e reflexões sobre a questão Rodesiana’. In 1978 it was published as a book, CEA, Zimbabwe – A Questão Rodesiana (Lisbon, 1978).
21 Interview with Marc Wuyts, via email, 17 July 2009.
22 Ivaska, A., ‘Movement youth in a global sixties hub: the everyday lives of transnational activists in postcolonial Dar es Salaam’, in Jobs, R. and Pomfret, D. (eds.), Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century (London, 2015)Google Scholar.
23 Ibid.
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25 Leo Zeilig discuss also the mobility from Dar to Maputo. See, L. Zeilig, The Walter Rodney story, a revolutionary for our time (Chicago, 2022).
26 CEA, O Mineiro Moçambicano – Um estudo sobre a exportação de mão-de-obra (Maputo, 1979), 220. For IESE researcher Luís de Brito, O Mineiro Moçambicano is ‘the mother of social sciences in Mozambique’. See, L. Brito, ‘Para uma sociologia sem fronteiras - o exemplo do mineiro Moçambicano’, Aula Pública de Sociologia, Associação Moçambicana de Sociologia (Maputo, 2011), manuscript provided by L. Brito.
27 CEA, 14/SCA/94, Eduardo Mondlane University, ‘Direcção científica, comunicação interna’, 20 July 1994. Sida-SAREC did not impose a research agenda and themes. Their desire was only that CEA could pursue independent, critical, systematic, and rigorous research. I could not find any document that gives information on the exact budget allocated to CEA.
28 Interview with António Sopa, Maputo, 11 Aug. 2010.
29 Officially called ‘Post-graduation Diploma in Development Studies’. It was a course equivalent to a Licenciatura (Honors degree). However, the degree was never accepted by Eduardo University Mondlane, because it allowed the admission of students with high school diplomas, former liberation combatants, and officials from the state public services. See CEA,‘Notes for the rector of UEM concerning the graduation ceremony of the CEA and the meeting with students enrolled for the 1981 development course’, 28 Mar. 1981, 3.
30 See, Kamola, I., ‘The African university as global university’, PS: Political Science and Politics, 47:3 (2014), 604–7Google Scholar; Omer-Cooper, J. D., ‘The contribution of the University of Ibadan to the spread of the study and teaching of African history within Africa’, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria, 10:3 (1980), 23–31Google Scholar; Adesina, O. ‘Teaching history in twentieth century Nigeria: the challenges of change’, History of Africa, 33 (2006), 17–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 G. Arrighi, ‘The African crisis: world systemic and regional aspects’, New Left Review, 15 (2002), cited by Kamola, ‘The African university’, 606.
32 Interview with Angolan sociologist Cesaltina Abreu, via video call, 29 June 2021.
33 Mamdani, ‘Higher education’, 5.
34 See, Mamdani, M., Scholars in the Marketplace – the dilemmas of neo-liberal reform at Makerere University, 1989–2005 (Cape Town, 2007)Google Scholar; Sifuna, D., ‘Neoliberalism and the challenging role of universities in sub-Saharan Africa: the case of research and development’, Journal of Higher Education in Africa, 12:2 (2014), 109–30Google Scholar.
35 CEA, ‘Curso de desenvolvimento de 1981’, mimeograph, 27 Aug. 1981.
36 Ibid.
37 This binary model was present even before Mozambique's independence. During Frelimo's liberation war in the 1960s, tensions arose at the Instituto Moçambicano (Mozambique Institute, a school founded in Tanzania by Frelimo) around issues about the dominance of expatriate teachers, as well as racial and ethnic cleavages. The students claimed that Frelimo's leadership privileged people from the South in all the matters concerning education and military action. The official narrative also framed this conflict in terms of two opposing ideological views: the revolutionaries versus new exploiters or revolutionaries/counter-revolutionaries/reactionaries. For further details on the history of the institute see, T. Sellstrom, ‘FRELIMO of Mozambique: clearing a way’, JSTOR Primary Sources, 1 Jan. 2002, https://jstor.org/stable/al.sff.document.naip100053; Samuels, M., ‘The FRELIMO school system’, Africa Today, 18:3 (1971), 69–73Google Scholar; Panzer, M., ‘The pedagogy of a revolution: youth, generational conflict, and education in the development of Mozambican nationalism and the state, 1962–1970’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 35:4 (2009), 803–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38 Interview with a former student from 1981's Development Course, via video call, 29 July 2021. I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for calling my attention to these extra-ideological dynamics. Cooperante was a term coined by Machel to designate foreigner workers who came to Mozambique in the 1970s and 1980s to help with socialist national reconstruction. They were key in filling the posts left vacant by the Portuguese exodus. See, for instance, S. LeFanu, S is for Samora, A lexical biography of Samora Machel and the Mozambican dream (London, 2012). Another term used was ‘internationalist’. The latter was indeed what Ana Maria Gentili, an Italian historian and CEA researcher in the 1980's, called herself: ‘Os Africanos Face aos Desafios do Seculo XXI’, panel discussion at CEA's Second International Conference, 28–9 Nov. 2012.
39 LeFanu, S is for Samora.
40 The food supply card was Frelimo's strategy for dealing with the shortage of food in shops and controlling the price market. The cards entitled households to buy a certain amount of food and other goods once a month. See, Zamparoni's talk, ‘Mesa redonda 8: um olhar sobre Moçambique de ontem, de hoje e do amanhã’, 24 June 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSFTB99K5l0.
41 Interview with Dan O'Meara, via email, 10 Aug. 2007.
42 Hollander, O Fim do Compromisso.
43 It was not, in fact, a unified and single faculty. The idea was that in every course — across the humanities and in natural and social sciences — it was mandatory to teach historic and dialectical materialism and other elements of Marxist-Leninist ideology. Interview with Luís de Brito, Maputo, 9 Oct. 2018.
44 Interview with João Paulo Borges Coelho, Maputo, 3 Sep. 2009.
45 Interview with Luís de Brito. After having been a member of Frelimo during the liberation struggle in the 1960's, Ganhão returned to Mozambique from Poland in 1975 after earning a PhD in history. Interview with Fernando Ganhão, Maputo, 3 June 2007.
46 Interview with Luís de Brito.
47 For more on these incarceration sites, see Machava, B., ‘Reeducation camps, austerity, and the carceral regime in socialist Mozambique’, The Journal of African History, 60:3 (2019), 429–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
48 Dinerman, A., Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Revisionism in Postcolonial Africa: The Case of Mozambique, 1975–1994 (New York, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49 Francisco's statement at IESE's internal seminar, 10 Aug. 2017, when I presented the first draft of this paper.
50 Interview with António Francisco, Maputo, 24 Sep. 2018.
51 Ibid.
52 Hollander, O Fim do Compromisso, 10.
53 Ibid.
54 Interview with António Francisco.
55 This pronouncement was made through a post on the Facebook page of Egidio Vaz, a Mozambican media consultant, 16 Feb. 2015.Vaz criticized the role and place of Marxism and socialism today in Mozambique. Available at https://www.facebook.com/egidio.v.raposo?fref=ts.
56 Pitcher, A., ‘Forgetting from above and memory from below: strategies of legitimation and struggle in postsocialist Mozambique’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 76:1 (2006), 106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
57 M. Wuyts, ‘Inflação e pobreza - uma perspectiva macroeconómica’, in IESE, Desafios para Moçambique (Maputo, 2016), 108.
58 See, for instance, I. Shivji, ‘From liberation to liberalization: intellectual discourses at the University of Dar es Salaam’, Journal fur Entwicklungspolitik, 18/3 (2002), s.281–94. This commitment was also stressed during the symposium ‘Biographies of Liberation’ organized by CEA, Graduate program in Ethnic and African Studies (POSAFRO) of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) from Brazil, and the University of Bayreuth (Germany) 30 Oct.–3 Nov. 2022.
59 In addition to people like José Luís Cabaço, discussed in this article, we might examine the case of the Mozambican economist Mário Machungo, who, during the socialist years, occupied the position of Minister of Planning (1984–6) and Prime Minister (1986–94), and was influential in the later creation of IESE. In 2006 he became general assembly board president of the association from which IESE was born the following year. IESE's website states that ‘in the formation process of IESE, [Machungo's] influence and action were decisive in helping to overcome countless bureaucratic and political obstacles and raise the Institute's credibility, especially in its initial stages’. IESE, 19 Feb. 2020, https://www.iese.ac.mz/kanimambo-m-machungo/. Cabaço and Machungo are two political figures who encapsulate the complexities of the past in the present, as they both seem to be against the path that Frelimo's new leadership is taking but have nonetheless remained members of the party.
60 Ferguson, J., Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, NC, 2006), 38Google Scholar.
61 Baldursdottir, S., Gunnlaugsson, G., and Einarsdottir, J., ‘Donor dilemmas in a fragile state: NGO-ization of community healthcare in Guinea-Bissau’, Development Studies Research, 5 (2018), s27–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
62 Ibid., 27.
63 Ferguson, Global Shadows, 39.
64 Interview with Teresa Cruz e Silva.
65 Lebeau, Y. and Mills, D., ‘From “crisis” to “transformation”? Shifting orthodoxies of African higher education policy and research’, Learning and Teaching: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences, 1:1 (2008), 66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
66 M. Mamdani, Scholars in the Marketplace; P. Kanyegere, ‘The NGO-ization of academic research’, trans. S. Weschler (Blog post, Governance in Conflict Network, Bukavu series, 28 June 2019), https://www.gicnetwork.be/the-ngo-ization-of-academic-research/.
67 Interview with António Francisco.
68 In Sep. 2007, Carlos Nuno Caste-Branco, Jose Sulemane, Marc De Tollenaere and Luis de Brito founded IESE. Sulemane and Tollenaere were not working at IESE as researchers. Some months later, Antonio Francisco was invited to be part of the founding team.
69 According to Francisco, Tolenaere was crucial in getting funding. Interview with António Francisco.
70 IESE receives funding from international bilateral organizations with the aim of ensuring that these institutions maintain their credibility and scientific autonomy. While CEA has had, for a long time, exclusive support from the Swedes of Sida-SAREC, IESE has support from various organizations such as Switzerland's Agency for Development and Cooperation, the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), and the embassies of Denmark, Norway, Ireland, Sweden, and Finland. See, Darch and Head, ‘Medium term strategic plan’, 6.
71 Interview with António Francisco.
72 O'Laughlin was in the 1980s Castel-Branco's undergraduate supervisor and teacher for the Development Course.
73 IESE, ‘Relatório anual de actividades (1 de Janeiro - 31 de Dezembro 2011)’, 13 Mar. 2012, 15.
74 Pronouncement made on 10 Aug. 2017 when I presented a draft of this study at IESE's seminar, and repeated during an interview with the author on 24 Sep. 2018. In other words, for Francisco, these two ‘scientific sharks’ were invited to IESE not only to produce knowledge, but also to ‘control’ and counterbalance his liberal views with Marxist analysis.
75 C. N. Castel-Branco, ‘Reflectindo sobre acumulação, porosidade e industrialização em contexto de economia extractiva’, in IESE, Desafios para Moçambique (Maputo, 2013), 107.
76 C. N. Castel-Branco, ‘Novas questões e caminhos de investigação’, in IESE, Desafios para Moçambique (Maputo, 2017), 308.
77 Liberals who, according to Quinn Slobodian, believed in ‘redesigning states, laws and other institutions to protect the market’. See, Q. Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, 2018).
78 Darch and Head, ‘Medium term strategic plan’, 61.
79 In Portuguese, ‘O grande capital’. In the view of Castel-Branco it means capitalism with capital ‘C’. Castel-Branco also equates it, in Marxist terms, to the last phase of imperialism, hegemonically controlled by big financial corporations, multinationals, and the bourgeoisie. This term, ‘o grande capital’, is used profusely by Castel-Branco in his works. Because of space constraints, I cite only three: C. N. Castel-Branco, ‘Dependência de ajuda externa, acumulação e ownership - contribuição para um debate de economia política’, in IESE, Desafios para Moçambique (Maputo, 2011), 401–66; C. N. Castel-Branco, ‘Desafios da sustentabilidade do crescimento económico; uma «bolha económica» em Moçambique?’ in IESE, Desafios para Moçambique (Maputo, 2015), 157–99; C. N. Castel-Branco, ‘Contribuição para o método de investigação da economia política de Moçambique’, in IESE, Desafios para Moçambique (Maputo, 2017), 83–97.
80 T. Vieira Mário, ‘O caso Carlos Nuno Castel-Branco ou a crítica política como um risco’, Civil Info (Mozambique Civil Society News Agency), https://www.civilinfo.org.mz/files/O%20caso%20Carlos%20Nuno%20Castel-Branco%20ou%20a%20cri%CC%81tica%20poli%CC%81tica%20como%20um%20risco.pdf
81 ‘“Queremos que o tribunal diga aos moçambicanos e ao mundo em que país é que nós vivemos”, numa Democracia ou numa Ditadura’, A Verdade, 1 Sep. 2015, https://verdade.co.mz/queremos-que-o-tribunal-diga-aos-mocambicanos-e-ao-mundo-em-que-pais-e-que-nos-vivemos-numa-democracia-ou-numa-ditadura/. Translation by author.
82 Conversation between C. N. Castel-Branco and Egidio Vaz, Moçambique Terra Queimada, 20 Aug. 2018, https://ambicanos.blogspot.com/2018/08/lembras-te-quando-pensavas-e-advogavas.html.
83 A. Nhantumbo, ‘Guebuza arruinou o país’, Jornal Savana (Maputo), 1341 (20 Sep. 2019), 2–3.
84 Hollander, O Fim do Compromisso, 26.
85 Ibid.
86 For a description of the political and social meaning of the accord: Manghezi, N., The Maputo Connection: ANC Life in the World of Frelimo (Johannesburg, 2010)Google Scholar.
87 A. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 132.
88 Ibid.
89 IESE, S. Forquilha, ‘Discurso de abertura’, Fifth International Conference, Maputo, 19 Sep. 2017, 10. Translation by author. These binary categories were recently revisited when Mozambique's current president, Jacinto Nyussi, called on journalists to produce ‘patriotic journalism’, in a clear maneuver to manipulate and control everything that is written about the ongoing insurgency in the Cabo Delgado province. See, ‘Profissionalismo deve começar dentro das próprias FDS’, Jornal Savana, 1404 (4 Dec. 2020), 2–3.
90 Forquilha, ‘Discurso de abertura’, 10.
91 I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for bringing up this point.