The Conference therefore takes on special significance, for bloodshed and sacrifice lie behind it. It was made possible
by the clarification and consolidation
embarked on amid our ranks.
We must therefore carry on the work
that has just been started and avoid
patting ourselves on the back for victories
achieved, forgetting the very great deal
that remains to be done.
Because our Education has been born of
bloodshed, it is only right that we should
pay tribute to those who have fallen for
our country. More than anyone else,
Eduardo Mondlane symbolised our struggle to free Man from the colonial yoke
and from obscurantism.
I therefore request that we observe a
minute of silence in his memory and in
memory of all the comrades who have
laid down their lives.
This Conference has set itself the task of
analysing the work achieved, discovering
the errors and shortcomings in our activity and, based on our principles, promoting the implementation of the tasks
entrusted to the Department by FRELIMO's leading organs.
Other documents to be submitted to the
Conference contain detailed analyses of
the work done, of the great deal that has
been done and the vast amount we still
have to do. Here we wish simply to put
forward a few themes for reflection
which, as they express the preoccupations
of FRELIMO's leadership, will help to
guide us in our work.
After demonstrating the harmfulness of
both traditional and colonial education,
we should like to explain the educational
goals we have set ourselves in relation to
the new society we are struggling for.
At the same time, it is essential that we
establish guiding lines which take into
account the immediate imperatives of the
situation, the need to unite the people, to
deepen our knowledge of our country's
society and environment, to advance the
war and to reconstruct the nation.
Finally, we wish to formulate what seem
to us the most correct methods of facing
problems successfully within a revolutionary perspective.
I. EDUCATION AND SOCIETY
Each society always seeks to ensure its
survival through new generations, passing
on its accumulated knowledge and experience. However, since society exists
within the framework of its structures, its
survival obviously involves the perpetuation of these structures, however oppres
sive they may be. In this context, the
education that is passed on, because it is
a reflection of an actual society, serves to
justify that society: its economic structures, its social customs, its ethical and
artistic concepts, in short, the culture of
that society.
In the present phase m Mozambique, there
are three antagonistic types of education,
two of them reflecting societies which
are on their way out and the third directed towards the future.
a) Traditional education
Although the colonialists dealt a powerful
blow to traditional society, traditional
education is still the dominant form of
education in Mozambique.
Owing to their superficial knowledge of
nature, members of traditional society
conceive of it as a series of forces of
supernatural origin which are to varying
degrees hostile to man. Hence the fact
that superstition takes the place of science
in education. Furthermore, the poor
development of the traditional economy
based on subsistence agriculture results in
the isolation of the community.
Taking advantage of the superstition a-
mong the masses and the community's
isolation, certain social groups are able to
maintain their retrograde rule over society.
In this context education aims at passing
on tradition, which is raised to the level
of a dogma. The system of age groups
and initiation rites is intended to keep
the youth under the sway of old ideas, to
destroy their initiative. All that is new,
different and foreign is opposed in the
name of tradition. Thus all progress is
prevented and the society survives in a
completely static way.
Women are regarded as second class
human beings, subjected to the humiliating practice of polygamy, acquired
through a gift made to their families, inherited by the husband's family on his
death, and educated to serve man passively.
b) Colonial education
Whereas innovation and science are seen
to disrupt the fossilised structures of the
past, conversely capitalism uses them to
exploit men more.
The more traditional society fights individualism, the more capitalism promotes
it, in that it creates in the exploiter the
required mentality for exploiting his victim and prevents the exploited from
uniting with their comrades to overcome
oppression.
In Mozambique, a colonial country, social
discrimination in education is accentuated
by racial discrimination. Education is
reserved almost exclusively for the children of settlers, and particularly higher
education, which is for the children of
rich settlers.
In addition to its overall purpose of
reinforcing bourgeois oppression, colonial education seeks particularly to depersonalise the Mozambican. Removed
from his people whom he is taught to
look down upon, isolated by the individualism instilled in him, with no dimension in time provided by his own history,
ignorant of the space determined by his
own geography, living on imported ideas,
deformed by the decadent attitudes of
colonial society, the Mozambican is supposed to become a black-skinned Portuguese, a docile tool of colonialism whose
highest ambition is to live like the settler
in whose image he is created.
c) Revolutionary education
When we took up arms to defeat the old
order, we felt the obscure need to create
a new society, strong, healthy and prosperous, in which men free from all exploitation would cooperate for the progress of all.
In the course of our struggle, in the tough
fight we have had to wage against reactionary elements, we came to understand our objectives more clearly. We
felt especially that the struggle to create
new structures would fail without the
creation of a new mentality.
Creating an attitude of solidarity between
people to enable them to carry out
collective work presupposes the elimination of individualism. Developing a
healthy and revolutionary morality which
promotes the liberation of women and
the creation of a new generation with a
collective feeling of responsibility requires the destruction of inherited corrupt ideas and tastes. In order to lay the
foundations of a prosperous and advanced
economy, science has to overcome superstition. To unite all Mozambicans, transcending traditions and different languages,
requires that the tribe must die in our
consciousness so that the nation may be
born.
What I mean by this is that to us education does not mean teaching how to
read and write, creating an elite group of
graduates, with no direct relationship to
our objectives. In other words, just as one
can wage an armed struggle without
carrying out a revolution, one can also
learn without educating oneself in a
revolutionary way.   We do not want to
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