Re-education centres in Mozambique (1975-1985): memories, silences and journalistic speeches

Abstract

In the post-independence period, Frelimo’s goal was to “free Mozambican society from damage related to the colonial, bourgeois and capitalist world, towards the creation of a New Mankind that would necessarily go through a process of ‘re-education’, pursuant to which individuals would be inserted into a new order” (Thomaz, 2008, p. 179). This new order implied “disciplined work, material detachment, overcoming old loyalties (ethnic, religious, class, racial, regional) and unassailable moral behaviour” meaning the “ideal of a New Mankind” (Thomaz, 2008, p. 179). Articles published in Mozambican newspapers at the time contrast with international media texts. In Entre as memórias silenciadas [Between silenced memories] (2013), Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa portrays Mozambique in the first years of post-independence through fiction, alerting to the need for challenging and retrieving the silenced memories of the re-education camps, implemented by Frelimo’s leaders, to build/educate a “new Mankind”. Ba Ka Khosa (2013) seeks to demystify and exorcise the history of a recent past with a work that (re)visits Mozambican reality in the post-independence period, which, to the re-educated, was synonym of violence, suffering and exclusion from history and memory. As one of the most provocative authors of Mozambican contemporaneity, Ba Ka Khosa “blurs the past with the present, fantasy with reality, transforming literature into a live space for political debate” (Gallo, 2013, p. 293). This paper has the purpose of analysing the work of Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa and, simultaneously, the pieces published in national and international mass media.