ABSTRACT
The school classroom with its particular organization of time and space was firmly embedded in a set of inter-locking organizational hierarchies that constituted the social relations of the factory and, indeed, of the larger society beyond it. The nationalist movement had brought radical shifts in the discourse around knowledge and power. The nationalist discourse of the liberation struggle had challenged the colonial regime’s cultural superiority profoundly. In Mozambique, the institutions of people’s power soon became a distant memory. The all-pervasive state left little room for civil society. Within the mosaic of power relations in which the literacy students were integrated, literacy was also differentially experienced according to race and class. The expectations of what literacy could do for their lives were influenced by the spaces opened up by literacy.
