Chapter 12: Representations of European Colonialism, African Resistance, and Liberation Struggles in Mozambican History Curricula and textbooks¹

Even though we live in formally postcolonial times, the colonial past impregnates the present in many different ways. It is embodied in material and immaterial culture, in archives, monuments, museums, toponymy, arts, and media. It shapes economics and migration flows, linguistic practices, politics, identity processes, and intergroup relations. It also informs the global media flows and education practices. Nowadays it is still a challenge to supplant the colonialist paradigms on which our worldviews and the scientific knowledge were (are) constructed (L’Estoile, 2008; Quijano, 2000; Wallerstein, 1997).

The difficulties in representing the colonial past contribute often to social and political tensions both within and between formerly colonizing and formerly colonized nations. Disagreements over how the colonial past should be interpreted and how it should be taught in schools arise debates among academics of different fields, researchers, and practitioners. As underlined by Licata and colleagues (2018), social representations of colonialism are “polemic” (Moscovici, 1988). Actually, even an apparently simple question—the time-framing of European colonialism—is in fact a very complex one and arise debates. Indeed, “periodization itself is often a vehicle of power and site of contest for agents of history” (Hirschler & Savant, as cited in Lorenz, 2017, p. 211).