Frelimo’s protracted denial
One of the central points of Chimbutane’s thesis is to highlight the positive impact that bilingual education in Mozambique, limited though its scope remains, has had on the speakers’ own perception of the value of their language and culture (p 13 & 15 & 106), triggering a dramatic turn about of the dominant ideological discourse.
It is undeniable that part of the programme&’s popularity in rural areas stems from the novelty that it represented, after a protracted history of negation of African languages and values and might be taken as an illustration of the tendency to adhere to policies adverse to what was propounded during the colonial or pre-independence period, demonstrated à contrario by the example of South Africa (Lafon 2011). However Chimbutane passes very briefly (p3 & seq.) over the Frelimo pre-1990 policy of modernism which attempted to relegate African languages to (at best) families (for instance Matusse 1994:545), conversely emphasizing the anecdotal use of African languages by President Samora Machel himself (p44, 160). Still this legacy, which invites itself inadvertently in a later passage (p124), is crucial to gain an understanding of attitudes which remain dominant, namely its popularity with rural communities and the reluctance of the administration to fully embrace the programme, which, if this were a clue to Chimbutane’s discretion, would only prove my point further.
In Mozambique, not only were local languages systematically denigrated from the 1930s during colonial rule to the extent of being called ‘dog’s languages’ according to a testimony (p110), but, as in few other places, they were further marginalized for a good 20 years after Independence, when they were referred to, as they still are, as ‘dialects’, thus denying them the status of a language.
This came as a consequence of the Portuguese ‘assimilation’ policy, by means of which a small minority of Black and mulattoes (mixed-blood people, mestiços) were elevated almost to the level of the Portuguese settlers in terms of rights and privileges, including access to education, provided they adhered to Portuguese Christian values and attitudes (Mondlane 1979). The administrative unification of the whole indigenous population in 1961 with the rescission of forced labour and other vexing measures resulted, in urban areas, in further spreading assimilation as a desired model. At Independence in 1974 Frelimo adopted a Marxist discourse that espoused many ideological tenets of ‘assimilation’ for the sake of national unity and ‘progress’. ‘The project of national unity’ (p99) echoed the 19th century ‘classical ideal of a centralised nation state’ (Kamwangamalu 2008:174) in its Stalinist embodiment, which required one unique language for a nation to exist (Rocha 2006:19). If such concern in a country with no common history except that of suffering under the same colonial master (Mondlane 1979:96) is self-explanatory, especially as, due to the geo-political environment, it combined with a fear of being overpowered by English (Rothwell 2001), the obsession with the pursuance of ‘progress’ is not. Progress implied, for the Frelimo leadership, bringing forth a ‘new man’ (Mugomba 1981). For this to happen, it was deemed essential to relinquish the very same African practices deemed ‘pagan’, ‘barbarian’ or ‘backwards’ in the previous age and replace them by so-called ‘modern’ (viz., European-centred) ones, moreover uniform across the country. Language-wise, this meant the abandonment of the local languages seen as divisive in favour of the proclaimed national one, Portuguese, that extensive education programmes were disseminating. Local languages were prohibited in official places (Firmino 2005: 142). This strategy however was self-defeating: how could the new revolutionary schools attain “a rich interaction with surrounding peasant communal villages” (Mugomba 1981: 216), a condition for their sustainability, without interacting with them in their own language and acknowledging their values? Since Geffray&’s 1990 pioneer study, this scenario has been widely exposed. Such disdain for time-tested engrained practices already encroached upon by colonial rule nurtured support for Renamo, an armed opposition movement triggered by the neighbouring racist states of Rhodesia and South Africa. I argue elsewhere (Lafon 2008 & 2013) that one underlying reason for Frelimo’s attitude culture-wise lies in the appropriation of the assimilation ideology by cadres most of whom emanated from this very minute strata. With very few exceptions, only former assimilados and mulattoes had had access to secondary schooling, and those who had not were fascinated by its trappings and had longed for the status.
It took the promulgation of a constitution allowing for multiparty democracy in 1994 in the wake of the peace agreement to give clearance to adult education programmes relying on local languages; and another ten years to see them considered, with extreme caution, in formal education.