The Pedagogy of Revolution: Youth, Generational Conflict, and Education in the Development of Mozambican Nationalism and the State, 1962-1970

Journal of Southern African Studies, Volume 35, Number 4, December 2009

 

MICHAEL G. PANZER

(State University of New York at Albany)

  

This article addresses a lacuna in analyses of FRELIMO’s nationalist development during the 1960s.  Specifically, the article examines the impact of generational tensions between Mozambican youth and FRELIMO party ‘elders’ that emerged during the anti-colonial war at the FRELIMO secondary school in Dar es Salaam.  The main argument is that under the auspices of the Mozambique Institute, which operated almost exclusively in Tanzania, the FRELIMO secondary school was a site of significant intergenerational tensions that affected the liberation movement during a particularly critical moment of its anti-colonial war against Portugal.  This analysis is particularly relevant for the issue of generational tensions and may help to encourage historians of contemporary Africa to (re)consider how African nationalist groups, operating within another nation’s sovereign space, could build legitimacy and establish hegemony.  This article, then, also indirectly argues that FRELIMO was able to utilize sovereign space within Tanzania and was, therefore, able to construct institutional bodies (schools, hospitals, military camps) that garnered hegemonic legitimacy in such a way to allow the nationalist movement to act as a proto-state.  

 

“Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray

it.” (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth)

 

“Educate man to win the war, create a new society and develop our country.” (Samora Machel, from a Speech at the Second Conference of the Department of Education and Culture, September 1970)

 

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