Até quando as máscaras brancas? Educação e racismo em Moçambique

Until when the white masks? Education and racism in Mozambique

Abstract

Mozambique is a former Portuguese colony. Portuguese colonization was sadly famous for its assimilationist character, that is, it sought to convert Mozambicans into Portuguese citizens, and the school played a central role in this aim. Therefore, it was a school deeply permeated by racism and the social consequences was the loss of self-esteem of Mozambicans. Mozambique is currently an independent country. The Mozambican nationalists who carried out the anti-colonial struggle have made combating racism one of their main flags. The interest of this article is to argue around the idea that with Independence, the Mozambican school was not transformed in its racist ideology, namely the inferiority of the black, without culture and without history. More specifically, it will seek to understand, using the theoretical contribution of Fanoz, Freire and African libertarian thinkers Biko (1990), Mondlane (1995) the process of transforming the European white school into an African indigenous school taking the category of race as a historical creation and not exactly a biological essence. Law 4/83, which created the first national education system in Mozambique, will be examined. Mozambican authors who were concerned with the theme from other concepts (CASTIANO; NGOENHA; BERTHOUD, 2005; MAZULA, 1995), will deserve a bibliographic review, while we will ask ourselves, from the perspective of race, if the Mozambican school is multicultural, a place of deconstruction of ideology racist and, thus, the production of a citizen proud of his black identity.