Chapter 3: Colonialism and Liberation Struggle in Mozambican History Textbooks: A Diachronic Analysis

In this chapter, we examine the textbook narratives of the colonial past and nation-building process in Mozambique, a multicultural and multilingual country (Lopes, 1998), which gained independence in 1975. Located in Southern Africa, Mozambique inherited a particularly difficult situation from its colonial past, with high rates of poverty and illiteracy, and today has one of the world’s lowest levels of human development (UNDP, 2020). Soon after independence, one of the priorities was to rewrite history and disseminate a narrative that aimed to “rescue dignity” and foster “national cohesion.” As in many other national contexts, the need to establish a “usable past” (Wertsch, 2002) that legitimized the new political order, led to the construction of an “official” narrative of national history. Far from offering a neutral or objective representation of the past, tales of national history usually follow a basic “schematic narrative template” which provides a way of grasping together a set of events and people, in a creative “process of invoking an imaginary coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure, narrative also introduces a moral order into the picture” (Wertsch, 2002, p. 124). The efficacy of narrative is grounded in a “moralizing impulse,” which operates often in binary oppositions between good vs. evil, heroes vs. villains.