Mozambique

Printer-friendly versionThe Portuguese appeared in the 16th century. Until the middle of the 18th century their hold on the territory was tenuous, and epic battles with local kingdoms were fought, not always successfully. Meanwhile, the east coast slave trade, controlled primarily by the Arab traders and their local partners, 42 had burgeoned into a fundamental element of the Mozambican economy.

Having established control over the territory in 1752, the Portuguese showed little inclination to do anything with it. They established the prazo system of land grants to settlers, to cheapen the cost of possession. When that system failed, the power of the prazeros being finally broken by local power in the late 19th century, they left the administration of large sections of Mozambique in the hands of private companies. By 1940, the whole country was back under Portuguese control, being administered directly from Lisbon. In 1951, Mozambique became an overseas province of Portugal – but within ten years the struggle for independence began with the formation by local people of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo). Eduardo Mondlane was elected the first president, but by 1969 he had been assassinated.

Fighting between Frelimo and the colonial power erupted in September 1964, and Portugal dispatched more than 70 000 troops to restore order. These attempts were overtaken by events in Lisbon where a coup d’état in 1974 finally forced Portugal out of Africa. Within a year they had vacated Mozambique (and Angola) and independence was declared in June 1975.

But independence did not bring peace. Civil war, fuelled by apartheid South Africa’s support of Frelimo’s adversary, Renamo, dragged on until 1992 when an accord was finally signed between the two groups. By then a multi-party constitution had been introduced, but it seemed an arbitrary measure in a country that had been smashed by nearly 30 years of war, her people reduced to (or retained as) some of the poorest on earth.

Nevertheless, the espousal of democracy (in favour of the one-party socialist state established by Frelimo in 1975) encouraged foreign investment, not least from South Africa in its post-1994 democratic manifestation; and, in spite of widespread suspicions of corruption, economic recovery in Mozambique proceeds apace. There can be little doubt that this has been underwritten by an explosion in educational activity.

An undeniably shameful colonial legacy in Mozambique was a national illiteracy rate of over 90 percent at independence. In an effort to improve the  situation, the new Frelimo government opened the delivery of education to all-comers. However, by the end of the civil war, school enrolments had slumped again. So the new democratic government once again put policies into place that were designed to promote education as a pivotal factor in economic recovery. Vast improvements have taken place, but national illiteracy still languishes at 60 percent.

This is the background against which the country’s four public universities should be viewed.