Overview

The key objective of the project EDU-AM - Revolutionary pedagogies: history of educational projects in Angola and Mozambique (1960-1980) - is the study of revolutionary pedagogical experiences in Southern Africa, focusing on the roots, conflicts and impacts associated with the attempts to implement considerable projects of public education and a revolutionary education for citizenship.

The novelty of this project, interdisciplinary by nature, is structured around two questions, aiming:

1. to expose the course of education and political thought in Angola and Mozambique, taking into account both the specificity of the context and the vernacular sources, beyond the dominant Anglophone and Francophone narratives;
2. to understand the multiple political inspirations, meanings, as well as conflicts and impacts entailed in these revolutionary projects within the context of political emancipation of southern Africa.

These questions will help to unveil experiences of citizenship that have created 'new' subjects in postcolonial societies, and, in terms of history writing, to deepen the meaning of post-imperial lives, including struggles for radical ruptures with colonial heritages, from a historical, cultural and political perspective.

At a time when the public history of Angola and Mozambique is still dominated by retellings of the colonial past and the anticolonial nationalist struggle, and when the international lens remains focused on the Cold War/post-independence civil violence, this project seeks to understand the political scope of the educational options within the revolutionary projects developed in this part of the world, also seen as an alternative, vernacular project of citizenship. Angola and Mozambique, which achieved independence in 1975 in the aftermath of bloody nationalist struggles, were part of the regional colonial-capitalist subsystem in Southern Africa; throughout this struggle, political connections were established, theorisations deepened and political innovations promoted. The roots of the new educational projects in Angola and Mozambique can be traced back to the armed liberation struggle, and included support from progressive forces from different contexts and collaboration with socialist countries (European, Asian and Cuba).