“Schooling”: Path from Indigenous to Assimilated?

Rudimentary primary schooling is designed to civilize and nationalize the indigenous people of the colony, spreading the Portuguese language and Portuguese customs among them. The colonial school was a powerful ideological symbol, compelling in its promise of a path out of misery and backwardness yet at the same time, provoking revulsion and alienation by its denial of Mozambican culture and history. With regard to mission schools, the late nineteenth century saw a predominance of “foreign” Protestant missions carrying out activities of education and evangelization. By the time the Salazar regime established a state-sponsored schooling system in the colony, debate on education had increased. The work of the Salazar regime to reorganize time and space in a way that legitimized a world of the “civilized”, separate in every respect from the world of the “savage,” became the more imperative as voices contesting the colonial regime and its claim to rule emerged more strongly.