João Paulo Borges Coelho João Paulo Borges Coelho is a Mozambican historian working at the University Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo. Born in 1955, he grew up Beira, in the centre of Mozmabique. He studied at University in Maputo and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Bradford on ‘State Resettlement Policies, Development and War’ (1993). His academic work has focused on nationalism, war, demobilisation, reintehyphen;gration, and peace resolution.
Since 1995, João Paulo Borges Coelho has written seven novels (As Duas Sombras do Rio, 2003; As Visitas do Dr. Valdez, 2004; Índicos Indícios I. Setentrião, 2005; Índicos Indícios II. Meridião, 2005; Crónica da Rua 513.2, 2006; Campo de Trênsito, 2006; and Hinyambaan, 2007) and won the Craveirinha prize of the Mozambican writers’ association in 2006. His novel Campo de Trânsito deals with a controversial episode in posthyphen;colonial history, namely the deportation of thousands of sohyphen;called unproductive people in the countryside in an operation named ‘Operation Production’.
This text was presented at a workshop held in Maputo in August 2007 in the memory of Ruth First, one of the founding editors of the Review of African Political Economy. The workshop was entitled: ‘Moçambique no Contexto da África Austral e os Desafios do Presente: Repensando as Ciências Sociais’ [Mozambique in the context of Southern Africa and the challenges of the present: rethinking the social sciences].
Introduction and translation by Eric Morierhyphen;Genoud (University of Oxford) and Rosa Williams (University of Chicago).
What brings us together today is the memory of Ruth First. The memory above all of her role as an intellectual and an academic and of the time she spent in Mozambique as a part of our University and our Centre of African Studies. Her stay of five years began in 1977 and came to an abrupt end on 17th August 1982 with her sudden death, 25 years ago today (August 2007).
The five years Ruth First spent here were an important period in the history of the region and of this country. In line with the logic of the world in those days, Southern Africa was divided into two irreconcilable zones which were in intense conflict – the region that we called the Southern White States (Rhodesia and South Africa) and the countries ruled by their majority. In 1977, this conflict had two years before been aggravated by the independence of Mozambique and Angola. For us the most concrete expression of the conflict was the frontier war conducted by Smith, the man we called the ‘tobacco farmer Smith’, who was fighting ferociously to maintain his access to the Beira Corridor for the export of his tobacco and fighting, above all, for the survival of his anachronistic regime. Seen from this angle, the recent fate of Zimbabwe appears both ironic and tragic: a country ruled by anachronistic regimes desperately fighting for their survival. A little further south the looming conflict with apartheid South Africa, muted up to that point, was about to start to claim its first victims in Mozambique. It would eventually claim Ruth First's own life.
Those five years were also a time when many profound transformations were taking place within the nation under the influence of the most important event in our recent history: the Third Frelimo Congress. This congress in some sense put an end to a relatively ‘liberal’ period of transition characterized by confusion but also by enthusiasm, and aimed to outline and implement a socialist order.
We could not of course see things in 1977 with the clarity with which we see them today. Only the past can be arranged in the drawers of our analytical categories. The present must be lived through its own forms of clarity and obscurity. And thirty years ago this past which I am talking about was our present. A difficult present, one in which we were slowly coming to feel the tempering of the euphoria of independence. Gradually we were seeing the rehyphen;establishment of wartime life, along with its rationing of food, gas and so on.
How did we at the University live this past which was then our present? We lived it in a rather messy way, with some confusion, but above all with great enthusiasm . Though still an elitist arena, our university simmered with ideas. We did not have much of a guilt complex in relation to the past; we looked for ways to participate in the great transformation which had begun. Everything was urgent; the need to build a defence against the aggressions waged against us was mixed with the need to think about development. Not forgetting the need to put food on the table.
The building which we now call CEA (Centre of African Studies) used to belong to the Mozambican Institute of Scientific Investigation (IICM) which comprised the cream of academia in the last phase of colonialism. It is a building which summed up neatly the spirit of the period, serving a space in which the old, dying, structures confronted the emerging ones, a struggle which was just about managed by the director, Pedro Alcântara.
While the inertia suffered within the old structures was discernible in the dress and habits of faculty and staff, it is only fair to recognize that the representatives of the former era did their best to respond to changing times. We see this in the number and quality of the issues of the Institute's publication Memórias piled in the cellars of the Documentation Centre. In 1974, for example, Ritahyphen;Ferreira published his Etnohyphen;história e cultura tradicional do grupo angune (Nguni) [Ethnohyphen;history and traditional culture of the Angune (Nguni)]. The following year Leonor Correia de Matos translated and annotated Henrihyphen;Alexandre Junod's Cantos e Contos dos Rongas [Ronga songs and stories].
At the time we were not the least prepared to accommodate these contributions, which we would consider laudable today, in what could have been one of the most productive dialogues of the transition period. We loftily declined from engaging in such a dialogue, which gave us some satisfaction, but left us without the benefit of the experience of well respected social scientists – those I have mentioned and others. Consequently, Luís Polanah passed by us in his straw hat, Ritahyphen;Ferreira still gave a few classes, Leonor Correia de Matos arrived in her little car, beige if I remember correctly (maybe a Simca or a Morris, cars no one drives today and which were becoming rare even then) and no one seemed to notice them anymore. Sitting on the padded chairs of a relatively luxurious bar (the colonial academics’ bar where even alcoholic drinks were unremarkable), we would see them pass by and, to us, they looked like ghosts from the past.
Meanwhile new structures appeared. In early 1976, where the CEA library stands now, the Centro de Técnicas B´sicas para o Aproveitamento dos Recursos Naturais (TBARN) [Centre for basic techniques for the use of natural resources] was established, the true precursor to the debates over the best models of development for the country. Run, intellectually and administratively, by the painter and writer António Quadros, we went there to read René Dumont and Leroihyphen;Gourhan while studying ways to store cereals, to build effectively and cheaply with the materials at our disposal, to use animal traction and to use waterhyphen;power in small dams and hydraulic ram pumps. In other words we were trying to outline, in a perhaps somewhat naïve but very enthusiastic way, a material solution for a new society, just and horizontally organized, where men lived ‘with nature at their side’. What my brief account cannot convey of the spirit of TBARN is more clearly captured in the verse of Mutimati Barnabé João, the occasional heteronym of António Quadros:
(…) EuoPovo Vou aprender alutar do lado da NaturezaVou ser camarada de armas dos quatro elementos[a terra, o ar, a ´gua e ofogo]. 1 (…) I the PeopleI will learn to fight with Nature at my sideI will be comrade of arms with the four elements‐[earth, air, water and fire].
At the same time, next door, the Centre of African Studies was also taking its first steps under the direction of Aquino de Bragança. You could not have anything more different from TBARN than this Centre of African Studies, attentive to the recent history of Mozambique's liberation, attentive to geopolitics, attentive to the regional political economy, and to the larger questions of the Cold War. This was the period when the first generation of CEA researchers produced the study Zimbabwe: alguns dados e reflexões sobre a questão rodesiana [Zimbabwe: some facts and reflections about the Rhodesian question].2
The differences in the nature of the two centres, as well as the differences in the character of their mentors, were the basis of the tension between the two places. Indeed, there could not be two more different individuals than António Quadros and Aquino de Bragança. While the former spent the day dealing with bees and designing commendable things with soil under his fingernails, smoking a pipe which helped him think, Aquino de Bragança was a man of society with a fine sense of humour, always whispering a new secret in our ears about those in power, or, in more public moments, finding a witty saying appropriate to each situation, preferably in French. While António Quadros would leave the drawinghyphen;board where he spent the day to go and check on a detail, taking brisk small steps and hidden behind his dark glasses, Aquino de Bragança remained seated in a sofa with his hand extended to underscore an idea and with his leg balanced across him, thus making his belly balance, in a gesture so characteristic that all those who knew him remember it well. It is not surprising then that Aquino de Bragança referred to TBARN as ‘the crazy man's project’ while António Quadros talked about CEA as ‘that setting of the international plotters’.
We, as disciples of one and students of the other, were in the privileged position of being able to benefit from both ways of thinking about the world: one which some saw as too political and another that others saw as too poetic. We learned from those who, in spite of living within University, would not for a moment hesitate to contemplate the world beyond it. In those days (and I say this without modesty), we believed in learning from masters.
It is around this time, in the first half of 1977 if I am not mistaken, that Ruth First arrived. When I think of her, the first image that comes to my mind is auditory: her highhyphen;heels furiously hammering the corridor floor. Only after that do I recall her arched legs capable of that vigorous walk, her aquiline nose and strong chin, her dark glasses, her always impeccable matching skirt and jacket. And then finally her powerful and authoritarian voice. In my memory, she always appears surrounded by researchers. Or rather, she always has researchers at her disposal, in offices where she bursts in and comes out hurriedly with some papers in her hand.
It seems to me that this was the CEA's most prosperous period, so to speak. In part, in good part in fact, this prosperity was due to the work of Ruth First. Her biographies have shown what her brilliance and intellectual sharpness were capable of when combined with an organising spirit forged in the struggle against apartheid.
I daresay that Ruth First accepted the invitation to come to Mozambique because she would be closer to her own country and she could more effectively direct from here the work begun at what I think was known as the Nucleus for the Study of Southern Africa, a sort of observatory of the geopolitical and economic evolution of the region, and of South Africa in particular – if need be providing academic support to the ANC. But once here, she not only continued to develop this work but also ably organized and directed research projects and social and economic analyses of life in Mozambique, the best known, without a doubt, being the 1977 study of the Mozambican miner.3 Other important projects followed, producing reports which still support my teaching on this period today. These included research on rural transformations in Gaza (1979), on the transformation of family agriculture in Nampula (1980) and several others on agrarian commercialization (1980/81), to cite only those from that period.4 In 1980 the first issue of the journal Estudos Moçambicanos on the subject of underdevelopment and migrant work appeared, reflecting the two sides of life in Mozambique and its connections with the larger region. Finally, I must mention her role in the organization of the Course on Development which still marks a generation of Mozambicans, and which in turn reflected back on her own research, empowering and enriching it.
I think however that to attribute the success of CEA during this period only to Ruth First, however deserved and just, would be somewhat incorrect. It would be the same as attributing it only to Aquino de Bragança and to his own, particular, manner of directing CEA, pulling unseen strings. In my view, in the same way as the strength and creativity of IICM emerged from the tensions between different departments during the transition, the success of CEA had much to do with the creative tensions which developed as a result of the meeting of diverse forces, with different ways of putting reality in perspective. We might say that there were several CEAs: the Centre on Southern Africa, the Course on Development and the projects supervised by Ruth First, the History Workshop directed by Jacques Depelchin and closely connected with Aquino de Bragança (aimed at rethinking the recent history of the liberation of the country), and yet other small ideas of projects such as those which Aquino de Bragança was always recruiting us for (a study of Mozambican nationalism in the manner of Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, a programme of interviews of former combatants, etc., etc.).
On balance, it is fair to reserve a share of the credit for Aquino de Bragança, in view of the skill that he deployed in negotiating the activities of CEA within the sphere of politics and government, at a time when there was usually little room to manoeuvre. He not only accomplished what we would today call marketing, promoting the considerable services which the centre had to offer to those at the highest levels of the circles of power. He also managed, at the same time, to absorb some of the shockwaves emanating from any research which expressed too heterodox an opinion.
At this point, it is appropriate to pause and ask the purpose of this incursion into the past, one which crosses terrain which others in this room know far better than I, merely a neighbour to the CEA and its occasional collaborator. The past, of course, does not exist; it evaporates with each day that passes. What do exist are discourses about the past, discourses with intentions, all fed by that past so as to operate in the present.
The French historian Le Goff once observed that memory only tries to capture the past so as to serve the present.5 And, in spite of our seeing the past in the light of the present, in spite of the fact that we use the past as a weapon in the struggles of the present, it is often forgotten when it does not serve our purpose or when it becomes bothersome.
I and others, in this room, are agreed that this moment in the past, thirty years old, could be useful for our present and that it should therefore not be forgotten. At least, this is how I understood the objective of our meeting today: to consider to what extent the social sciences of thirty years ago, which emerged in the climate that I have briefly described, can illuminate the social sciences of today, born of a totally different context?
I will try to answer this question, in the space I have left, by choosing, from amongst many others, three characteristics which in my view correspond to many of the virtues of the context which I have sketched out. Or, if you prefer, three lessons that I draw personally from this exercise of remembering Ruth First's days in Mozambique.
I will call the first lesson that of Diversity. It is not by chance that I have focused so much on the tensions which existed between the different actors: tensions between TBARN and CEA; tensions between TBARN and the Centre for the Study of Communication, which I have not yet mentioned; tensions between these centres and the dynamic Faculty of Art; tensions, as I will call them, within CEA; finally, the tension that for a while was much talked about between CEA and the Department of Anthropology, over the question of whether anthropology could free itself from its colonial past.6
My argument here relies on the often used botanic metaphor according to which a monoculture is always poorer and more vulnerable than a natural forest. The latter, beautiful, lush, is made up of diverse species, all of which adapt themselves to the environment and establish complementary relations. Differently put, I contend that these inter or intrahyphen;departmental tensions, when they result from the healthy confrontation of diverse academic perspectives, constitute the kernel of university life; they guarantee the progress of the social sciences.7
The social sciences, like other sciences, are made up of investigations and contradictions. That is to say they are alien to certainty, to absolute truth. Absolute truth is sterile; it brings to mind order and hierarchy, but also stagnation, everything that immobilises the world. Adorno says that the absolute, totality, is a lie. Steiner writes that incompleteness and the fragment are the passwords of modernism.8 The fundamentalism of absolutes, in its defence of a definitive and supposedly ‘true’ text, in its hatred of the uncontrolled and secular word, is the principle enemy of science, which can only live if it breathes the air of liberty. Only critical interrogation, born out of contradictions, provokes change and the search for the new. Transformation, then, can only take place in a context of diversity.
The second lesson that this moment in the past teaches us, closely linked to the previous one, I call Hospitality. Hospitality in the sense that the philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas uses it: a gesture of welcome, or a predisposition to receive the Other, to receive he who is different from us in our midst. One thing which remains with me from this time thirty years ago is the memory of the people who arrived daily at this University, and in particular at the CEA building. From every direction came dozens and dozens of national and above all international scholars (there were few Mozambicans involved in research at the time). Let me give you here a few names I remember: Kurt and Masha Madörin, Barry Munslow, António Pacheco, David Wield, Marc Wuytts, Bridget O'Laughlin, Kurt Habermeier, Helena Dolny, Colin Darch, Judith Head, Dan O'Meara, Rob Davies, Alpheus Manghezi, Sipo Dlamini, Valdemiro Zamparoni, Jacques Depelchin, John Saul and also Pierrehyphen;Philipe Rey, Claude Meillassoux, Christine Messiant, Catherine Coqueryhyphen;Vidrovitch, Christian Geffray, Yves Lacoste, Marc Ferro, Philippe Constantin, Nadine Wanono, Lúcio Fl´vio Regueira, Constante Pereira, João Azevedo, Teresa Muge, Marcelo Ramos, Miguel Arrais Jr, Christine Vershuur. And, of course, Ruth First herself. This list could carry on, I have only mentioned the visitors of that era and have still left many out. Many became specialists in subjects related to Mozambique after their stay here, others were already wellhyphen;known academics when they came here or passed through. All of them, in one form or another, contributed to enriching our intellectual life. And we received all of them with hospitality.
When I speak of hospitality, I speak of important, even fundamental, ethical dimension of respect for the Other, but not only this. I also mean, like Lévinas, a dimension of growth, of learning, in so far as (and I cite him) the Other ‘comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain’.9 That is, the presence of these Others, with their diverse research, perspectives and problematics, constitutes an invaluable source of wealth which enlarged not only our vision but also the number and quality of perspectives about our reality. It brought us more than we contained. It enriched us and enriched the discourses about our reality.
In contrast, an inhospitable attitude of selfhyphen;sufficiency is, in the academic world, the attitude of a selfhyphen;satisfied person, someone who has lost curiosity and the ambition to know more, to learn more. It is the attitude of a person who has given up on academia, even if lethargy, their career or some other obscure reason have kept them within it. It is the attitude of someone who can see only a threat in the Other.
So my question is: what are we doing today to cultivate this hospitality which populated the corridors of the social sciences faculties with associate researchers and extended our knowledge? My question is: why are our corridors devoid of researchers? My question is: how do we populate our corridors again?
Finally, the third and last lesson I want to draw from this period in time is one which concerns what I will call Trust and it has to do with the complex relationship between the spheres of politics and academia. I have already noted the incredibly important role which Aquino de Bragança and Ruth First exercised in defence of CEA before the political sphere. Alongside Fernando Ganhão, the rector of University at the time, they gave a voice to academia, ensuring that it was not a subordinate partner, but a critical interlocutor in a productive dialogue with the powers that be. In this respect, I cannot resist referring to the theorist Edward Saïd, who wrote that our function as academics is to enlarge the spheres of debate, not to establish limits which suit the dominant authority.10 Science develops from a base of contradictions; it is founded on uncertainty. Since science, by definition, is what academia does, it will always be bad at carrying out orders. By definition, there is entropy in the scientific process and much loss of energy. Sometime many failures are necessary to obtain a single success. The destiny of academia is radical: create or be useless.
I believe that the individuals I am talking about were creating something. They endeavoured to define themselves through debates rather than wait for others to define them. They debated which path to follow rather than wait to be told which path needed to be followed. In consequence they gained respect from all sides of the political field and diverse sectors of the state, people who were soon knocking on the door asking for studies and critical opinions about this and that.
I remember with great clarity the last day I heard Ruth First's heels hammering the floor of the corridor. Ruth looked through our door and announced that she would be opening a bottle of wine in her office, to bid farewell to our colleague John Saul. She turned on her heel and left. We tidied our desks and were on our way when the explosion happened. A few hours later, when the echoes of the terrible attack faded away, I remember thinking that nothing would be the same from then on.
It is our duty to recall these scholars who were interested in far more than their careers and who took pleasure in the work they did. Uneasy about the world, they felt the need to do something, something which would contribute to it. These were academics whose purpose was not to describe or carry out rituals (including that of earning money), nor to prove their obedience. Their purpose was to help diminish the suffering of existence (in the literal, scientific and cultural sense); to fight ignorance; to help transform a particular place without losing sight of the fact that they belonged to something universal.
To me this past, with the values it held, constitutes a reference point. One which we should try to return to whenever we feel we have moved too far away from it. We shall have to see whether we are capable of transmitting to future generations this legacy of principles and values which was generously left to us.