In Effects of Wording – The Mozambique Archives Series (2014) a video presented in this room, Catarina Simão (Lisbon, Portugal, 1972) focused on documentation and traces of Mozambique’s colonial past and anticolonial process, in Africa. Mozambique gained its liberty through armed struggle, begun in 1964 by the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), which freed the country from Portuguese domination, in 1975. To narrate part of this process, with an eye to the ambiguities of the period, Simão gathered photographs, newspaper clippings and passages from interviews to convey the story of a bold project for national liberation, which took the education of the local populations as an essential focus.
The video’s format alludes to the microfilm system. The use of this resource, much used in libraries and research centers, seems to invite the spectator to a recapitulation of facts. The video’s first minutes feature a close-up view of successive pages of a book for teaching people to read and write in Portuguese, as someone pages through it. This is followed by, the phrase “A luta do povo é justa” [The People’s Struggle Is Just], read aloud by enthusiastic and disciplined voices.
Although the Portuguese language was a tool of the colonizer, it was also used as a strategic point of resistance of the colonized populations. It is in this context that the Instituto Moçambicano was founded in Tanzania, an educational and political project conceived by the first president of FRELIMO, Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane (1920–1969) and by his wife, Janet Mondlane, aimed at fostering the education of young expatriate Mozambicans.
The Instituto Moçambicano’s literacy project relied on the collaboration of Paulo Freire (1921–1997), a pioneering Brazilian educator. Freire emphasized the importance of everyday life in the process of learning to read and write, seeking expressions and objects of daily use, valorizing knowledge that was practical and already familiar to the student. With a teaching method similar to Freire’s, the Instituto Moçambicano’s school taught Mozambican students based on the experience of the zones freed from colonial domination, and the teachers could choose words that had to do with that context, such as catana, which means “weapon.”
Later in the video, Simão presents documents that show that the Instituto Moçambicano was supported financially during its first year of operation by the Ford Foundation, of the United States of America. This relationship reveals the contradictions of the political scenario of the Cold War and of the disputes for colonial power in Africa. On the one hand, the United States government had a formal alliance with Portugal, still under the Salazar dictatorship. On the other, it financed through third parties the education of Mozambican youths, with the aim of boosting US influence in the region and preventing the communists from taking power in other African countries.
By using colonial archives and historical records, and contrasting opposite narrators, Simão constructs a large mosaic about the participants and the circumstances that led to the independence of Mozambique. Education and popular organization were united as resources for achieving the country’s freedom in a context where the students experienced their educational process hand-in-hand with the struggle for freedom.
CURATED BY Horrana de Kássia Santoz, Assistant of Mediation and Public Programs, MASP.
