Introduction
In 2016, I was employed as a researcher at the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA, African Studies Center) at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo. While doing research I found hundreds of written documents and 350 audiocassettes, including fieldwork recordings, interviews, seminars, and political speeches.Footnote 1 Somewhere in the Mozambique's postsocialist context, within the framework of the dominance of market economy and consultancy research culture in the university, these primary documents were relegated to CEA's basement to create more space in the main building for offices and departments linked to the emerging and well-paid consultancy that individual scholars at CEA began to do. What I understood as an ‘archive’ some of the CEA's postsocialist researchers saw as garbage. As one my colleagues, a senior researcher said to me, ‘Carlos, forget about the past, we have to move forward’.Footnote 2
I found a similar tendency to obliterate traces of the past in the present in another site. Colin Darch and Judith Head, who had lived and worked in socialist Mozambique, were hired to produce an evaluation report of the activities and the strategic plan for 2008 to 2011 of the Maputo-based Institute of Economic and Social Studies (IESE), founded in 2007. In the report published in 2010, they argued that ‘IESE is the first and the only’ such institute and that it ‘trails a path never before explored’.Footnote 3 This statement struck me as odd, as I was aware of their academic work at the ‘old’ CEA. During Mozambique's transition from a Portuguese colony to an independent, one-party socialist state, CEA emerged as the most prolific institution of knowledge production in the country. Darch had not only been a researcher, but also the leading archivist and librarian of the center. Head was a senior researcher and teacher at the university, and some of IESE's founding members had been her students in the 1980s.
Focusing on developments in two research institutions in Mozambique over a brief period of time, this article sheds light on wider processes in African history related to the interconnected politics of nation-building and the development of research institutions. Indeed, in the beginning of the 1980's Eduardo Mondlane University became — like institutions in Dar es Salaam, Ibadan, and Makerere before it — a transnational hub for political activism and social sciences knowledge production, as well as a pioneer in Lusophone Africa. Tracing continuities in personnel, ideas, and operations from the past (CEA) to the present (IESE), I build a broader argument: the history of the socialist period continues to shape the neoliberal era in a variety of ways. IESE may be independent of the state, and therefore freely critical of it, but it is not sufficient to see the institute solely as a product of Mozambique's current economic and political context of global capitalism and multiparty democracy. It is also vital to consider the impact of the state's and IESE's histories, and more particularly, the intellectual work of Marxists working at CEA. CEA's legacy is present in the work of IESE in three ways. First, in the mobility of personnel from CEA to IESE. Second, in the persistence of ideas, theoretical frameworks (notably Marxist political economy), epistemic operations, and archives. Third, in the continuity and reshaping of a particular ‘political morality’ linked to the socialist utopia of FrelimoFootnote 4 that saw the world in binary categories (revolutionaries or reactionaries, Marxists or bourgeoisie, socialism or capitalism, collectivism or individualism, patriotic or apostles of disgrace), but that, at the same time, was linked to the emergence of sentiments of political disillusionment.Footnote 5
The making of a left-wing expatriate research center in Maputo
President Samora Machel offered Aquino de Bragança (a guerrilla figure, trained physicist, and seasoned journalist) a ministerial position on the eve of Mozambique's independence. De Bragança declined and asked permission to instead create ‘something on social sciences’ that would study and document the history of Frelimo's liberation struggle.Footnote 6 The president embraced the idea because it fit perfectly in the ‘engine’ of the production of the new political legitimacy. CEA was established in 1976, within the hierarchical structures of the Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM), with de Bragança as its first director. Machel had met de Bragança (born in Goa, India) during Frelimo's liberation struggle, when the latter was a journalist in Morocco and Algeria as well as one of the key figures in the emergence of Conferência das Organizações Nacionalistas das Colónias Portuguesas (CONCP), an anticolonial and pan-African organization.Footnote 7 Following the coup d’état in Portugal in 1974, de Bragança was Frelimo's special envoy in Lisbon in conversations for a peace accord. Widely known as a militant in the struggle for decolonization in Southern Africa and in the Portuguese-speaking territories, possessing movement bona fides and an extended network of international contacts, de Bragança was well-positioned to found and lead an academic institution that would help advance the state's program for nation-building and economic transformation.
Frelimo officially proclaimed sole and exclusive legitimacy to rule the country at independence in 1975 and became a Marxist-Leninist party in 1977. Like all sectors of civil and political society, the academic field was integral to Frelimo's hegemonic project. The Universidade de Lourenço Marques, the colonial university, became Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, in honor of Frelimo's first president. UEM was following in the footsteps of other African universities, such as the University of Brazzaville (Republic of Congo) and the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) which, a decade before, had dedicated themselves to an education grounded in populism, scientific socialism, and the call to ‘Africanize the university’.Footnote 8 This meant not only replacing the colonial curriculum with a revolutionary one, but developing strategies to Africanize the academic staff, which in universities such as Dar es Salaam were ‘staffed largely by expatriate faculty’.Footnote 9 Postcolonial Mozambique would face these same challenges. This was, indeed, a continental trend.Footnote 10
There were also places such as Makerere Institute of Social Research in Uganda, which according to Stanley Mbalibulha, ‘was made to take up the outlook of the new state, as well as to assume the new role of becoming a beacon of African nationalist political thought, closely allied to political economy and agricultural development plus economics, a circuit referred to as Marxist thought’.Footnote 11 Despite all these constraints, the confluence of scholars from all corners of the world gave a new impetus to the academic debates in countries like Tanzania and Mozambique. As Dominica Dipio vividly described the scene, ‘at the university of Dar es Salaam, in the late 1960s and early 1970s the so called “Debates on the Hill” became legendary and left-wing scholars from all corners of the globe descended on Tanzania to participate in the project of assisting the newly independent country grapple with the problems of independent development in the context of global capitalism’.Footnote 12 CEA became such a center in the end of the 1970s.
In Mozambique the challenges of building a new nation, writing a new history, and educating the ‘new man’ were immensurable.Footnote 13 While at Makerere in the 1960s there was a call to ‘Africanize the university’, replacing expatriates with African scholars, in 1975 most Portuguese in Mozambique, including a great number of people with formal technical and higher education degrees, suddenly left the country, leaving the university and other sectors without skilled or university trained people.Footnote 14 Social sciences and humanities were almost absent in the university. The only undergraduate courses available were Roman philology, geography, and history.Footnote 15 The student body of the colonial university reflected the racist underpinnings of the entire educational structure: of 3,000 students, no more than 40 were Black.Footnote 16
Mozambique was not exceptional in this sense. Countries like Uganda, Nigeria, and Tanzania all had to rebuild universities to welcome African students, and it was indeed a trend in all higher education institutions in Africa. Similar to Mozambique, ‘Colonial Nigeria had one university with 1,000 students in 1961. Thirty years later, in 1991, independent Nigeria had 41 universities with 131,000 students’.Footnote 17
Under de Bragança's leadership, CEA began to work with a group of nine young Mozambicans who had finished their bachelor's degrees in history. The majority of CEA researchers were white and mixed-race Mozambicans.Footnote 18 Research in the first months after CEA's founding was limited to archival work primarily for the production of textbooks and handouts for the bachelor's in history at Eduardo Mondlane University.Footnote 19 A few months after CEA's founding, the Frelimo government requested that it produce a research report on the socioeconomic situation of Rhodesia, the rogue white settler colony that bordered Mozambique.Footnote 20 Marc Wuyts, a Belgian economist involved in the project, argued that ‘The Rhodesian Question’ inaugurated a new way of doing research in Mozambique, as they began to focus on research with a sense of urgency, committed to the present, and done collectively.Footnote 21
Coming from the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Wuyts was hired in 1976 by the economics faculty of UEM, but soon left to join CEA. Other CEA expatriate scholars, like Dan O'Meara, Jacques Depelchin, and Ruth First, also spent part of their youthful years in Nyerere's Tanzania before joining the center. De Bragança had been there in the 1960's during Frelimo's liberation struggle, and was aware of Tanzania as a ‘hub for a transnational, global 1960s left’.Footnote 22 As historian Andrew Ivaska notes, ‘Tanzania's capital city had developed an unapparelled atmosphere of freedom fighters, socialists, nationalizations and anti-imperialism’.Footnote 23 Before arriving in Dar es Salaam, these same networks of anticolonial activists and leftist scholars had gathered in places like Kampala, Ibadan, or Accra. But political change dampened the intellectual vibrancy in Ghana and Uganda. Mbalibulha stated that Idi Amin's dictatorship (1971–9) ‘promoted a malaise that led to institutional decay and a downturn in research work’.Footnote 24 Tanzania began also to lose its glamor by the late 1970's, in part as a result of the failure of Ujamaa socialism, causing many disillusioned expatriate researchers to search for greener revolutionary pastures and new Third World laboratories for creating socialist utopias. Maputo became the next stop for these left-wing scholars.Footnote 25
In 1977, after the study of the ‘Rhodesian question’, discussions within CEA shifted to the necessity of producing more urgent, collaborative, and empirical research, oriented towards Frelimo's socialist strategy of always focusing on Mozambique in the context of Southern Africa. This was the time when First, the South African journalist, scholar, and anti-apartheid activist, arrived at CEA. First had been living in exile for a short while in Dar es Salaam when, in 1976, de Bragança invited her to lead a research project on the question of Mozambican migrant labor to South African mines.Footnote 26 As a result of the success of the ‘Mozambican Miner’, First moved from Dar es Salaam to Mozambique in 1979 knowing that she would become the center's new director. In Maputo she came to sharpen CEA's research approach as a think tank oriented to critical policy recommendations on rural transformation and the socialization and commercialization of production, themes at the center of the new state's agenda. In that same year, First was able to get core funding from the Swedish Development Cooperation Agency (Sida-SAREC), giving the institution greater independence from the university, which was facing serious material and financial constraints.Footnote 27 Other public institutions such as the UEM's history department and the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique (Mozambique's Historical Archive) did not attract outside funding and were instead dependent on the extremely limited state budget for the university (which, for instance, did not cover research costs). In this sense, CEA stood out in the Mozambican academic scene. As one Mozambican historian remarked, ‘the Arquivo didn't have great links with the center, there was even, I think, a certain rivalry, because I think they also looked at the other structures with a certain arrogance: “we are good, we are the ones who do things well”’.Footnote 28
The Swedish support that First was able to secure was indeed crucial in mitigating the colonial legacy and also the new state's lack of interest in rigorous and critical research. In 1979, with the help of the Swedes, the center was able to establish the Development Course (curso de desenvolvimento), the Southern African research group, and the Documentation and Information Center (led by Darch), and to hire more researchers from abroad and to finance empirical research all over the country.Footnote 29 By the late 1970s the center attracted much scholarly interest in the region, eclipsing the prestigious history departments at Ibadan (Nigeria), Makerere University and the Makerere Institute of Social Research (Uganda), and the University of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), from which most of the expatriate researchers were recruited (Darch, Wuyts, and many more).Footnote 30 Like these institutions in their golden ages, CEA also attracted a dynamic international community of scholars from different social science disciplines. One by one, these other institutions had lost their academic personnel and effectively collapsed, some the victim of state repression and political tyranny, others suffering the economic repercussions of the oil crisis, the world recession, and the shifting of industrial production to Asia.Footnote 31 In Lusophone Africa, CEA was far ahead. Even Angola — which, along with Mozambique, were the only Lusophone African countries with universities — did not have any research structure like that of CEA.Footnote 32
One of the most important projects that benefited and enhanced the research capacity of many Mozambicans (from the academic community and other sectors of the state apparatus) was CEA's Development Course, a teaching and research platform. ‘Development’ had been the fetish word of applied social sciences during the golden years of African independence. At Dar es Salaam, for example, students took full-year courses on ‘development studies’ each year of the program.Footnote 33 Both presidents Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya and Julius Nyerere in Tanzania were interested in transforming the elitist nature of the colonial university, and gearing research and teaching actively toward social and economic development.Footnote 34
Through the Development Course, First intended to strengthen the ties between the university's activities and the needs of the party-state structures. Thus, the course focused strongly, like in Tanzania, on Marxist political economy oriented to the transformation of the social conditions of Mozambican people. Economy was a central concern. Even though there was no pressure from the party-state to do this, there was an overall consensus among the intellectuals that supporting Frelimo's socialist utopia, despite the hardships this endeavor generated in the everyday lives of citizens, was morally right. First wanted also to allow students to acquire a better and deeper understanding of the linkages between theory and practice. But right at the design phase, the course's leadership — comprised of First, Wuyts, and Bridget O'Laughlin — realized that Mozambique did not have enough undergraduate students to fill the course. First's solution was to open the course to personnel from state institutions and Frelimo party members who had post-primary degrees.
The course's economic approach nonetheless received strong criticism from the students. In one of the course's regular meetings named ‘sessions on critique and self-critique’, the students complained that the course focused heavily on economic issues, leaving the cultural aspects of Mozambican society aside.Footnote 35 First replied that their ‘remarks were “a bourgeois critique of Marxism”’.Footnote 36 In the context of the dominance of a single-party system and its clear-cut notions of what was morally right and wrong, this was a very strong accusation.Footnote 37 First's reaction was indeed ironic and highlighted the contradictions between material conditions, on one hand, and theoretical and political positions, on the other. An interview with one of the students showed that their critique was more than theoretical or ideological. It was also linked to material inequalities, and to the different social spaces that both students and the teaching staff occupied,
The cooperante had better cars, better life, better houses, and the Mozambican did not have. There wasn't much freedom to talk about it. It was argued among us that there were great inequalities. The way of life was different. There was also an inequality between black and white cooperantes, for example, the Cuban cooperantes. And there were problems between themselves. If they were from the Eastern Europe or not, there was a lot of this problem. What was not there was the freedom to express and to say that you receive more than I do.Footnote 38
Thus, with the exception of a handful students who were top-ranking Frelimo officials, the majority were students who lived in austere conditions. The expatriates had a salary ‘twice as much as their Mozambican counterparts earned, and unimaginably more than the monthly income of the vast majority of Mozambicans’.Footnote 39 They were the ones who could drive to Swaziland to buy things you could not find in the country. In Maputo, although there was rationing and food shortages, there were special shops, Loja Interfranca, which also sold in US dollars and South African rands. Valdemir Zamparoni, a Brazilian historian who worked at CEA in the 1980's, recalled the times of the cartão de abastecimento (ration card) and how he gave his monthly portion of powdered milk to his maid and one of the CEA's female researchers, both who had little children.Footnote 40
Beyond the party-state rhetoric of a classless society, the perception of social differentiations was also part, as we can see, of everyday life. These discrepancies gradually took the form of political disillusionment. There were also other forms discrepancies. A series of incidents beginning in 1982 caused the twilight of CEA as a global 1980s hub. In 1982, for instance, First was murdered at her office in CEA through a letter bomb sent by the apartheid regime. Her death had a tremendous effect at the center. Two years later, the signature of the Nkomati Accord — officially called the ‘Agreement of Non-Aggression and Good Neighborliness between Mozambique and South Africa’ — also hit CEA hard. One of clauses stipulated that the Mozambican government had to cease hosting African National Congress (ANC) cells in the country, and suddenly it was forbidden to write or publish anything on South Africa's politics. This was extremely disappointing for the four ANC activists and researchers at CEA. For them, it seemed that Frelimo had lost its moral standing and was now willing to shake hands with the ‘devil’. Consequently, some of them hurriedly left Mozambique. O'Meara explained his exit from CEA in the following terms:
Aquino worked very hard to protect us, but the price which he was forced to accept was that we were not supposed to write or say anything about South Africa and, for a while, were not even supposed to read the South African newspapers to which the Center subscribed. I judged these conditions to be intolerable and felt I could do better work, so I left.Footnote 41
The year of 1986 brought another tragic event that served as a keystone of political disillusionment. A plane carrying President Machel and several dozen others (including de Bragança) crashed in the mountains that formed the border between South Africa and Mozambique, killing the president and CEA's director. Many suspect this ‘accident’ was engineered by the South African apartheid regime. And, the tragedy did indeed kill the revolutionary hope that people like Machel and de Bragança embodied. Without its mentor, CEA's history workshop succumbed. By 1987, Mozambique had buckled to demands for structural adjustment, which introduced the country to market reforms. Two years later, Frelimo officially abandoned Marxism-Leninism and in 1990 the country adopted a new constitution which promulgated free, multiparty elections. It was indeed in this postsocialist context that the Swedish development agency, Sida-SAREC, stopped providing CEA with financial core support.
Political disillusionment and knowledge production
Political disillusionment, according to Paul Hollander, has its origin ‘in the perception of a discrepancy between idealistic expectations and their failed fulfillment, and the disturbance that that perception provokes’.Footnote 42 Luís de Brito's personal trajectory offers a poignant example of the emergence of political disillusionment and its effects on people as well as on knowledge production. In 1983, three years before de Bragança's death, Brito, then director of the UEM's Faculty of Marxism-Leninism — established in 1981 by Frelimo's most orthodox cadres with the help of eastern bloc cooperantes — was accused by some members of Frelimo for deviating from the ideology taught by Soviets and East Germans, and for not being ‘Marxist enough'.Footnote 43 What triggered these accusations was a student protest against what they viewed as the teaching of dogmatic Marxism. Students lampooned the discipline of ‘dialectical and historical materialism’ as ‘diabolical and hysterical materialism’.Footnote 44
Brito sided with the students. His times as a researcher at CEA might have been crucial in maintaining his critical approach to any type of Marxist orthodoxy. As Brito argued, ‘I came from CEA which had a different approach, and I suggested to the rector, Fernando Ganhão to create new programs and not just go strictly by the book’.Footnote 45 Ganhão agreed to modify the curriculum. Nonetheless, Frelimo's university party cell, the watchdogs of the orthodox line, were inflexible. As Brito confessed, ‘they accused me of being a social democrat, and that was the worst accusation that someone could receive’.Footnote 46
A social democrat, in the eyes of the eastern bloc lecturers at the university and some most orthodox cadres of Frelimo party, was someone who defended a more reformist Marxism, was a servant of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, and was a traitor to the revolution. Brito resigned from his post as director and, because of this act of defiance, was arrested and sent to a ‘reeducation camp’ in Niassa province, in northern Mozambique.Footnote 47 Following his release in 1984, Brito returned to the university only to ask for an indefinite leave of absence. He then entered a doctoral program in France, where he became, according to Alice Dinerman, one of the first proponents of the revisionist approach to Mozambican history.Footnote 48
Brito's imprisonment and departure contributed to a general sense of disillusionment at the university. At the time of Brito's arrest, António Francisco was working as a teaching assistant (to a Soviet lecturer) at the Faculty of Marxism-Leninism. Brito's imprisonment turned Francisco into a Frelimo dissident. Disillusioned with the concrete acts of the ‘revolution’ he was left in a kind of ideological limbo.Footnote 49 Indeed, in his words, ‘when a guy gets disillusioned, a guy gets lost’.Footnote 50 Months later, he took an academic post in Australia and became one of the main advocates of a free-market system for Mozambique. He avidly read authors such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Of Mises, Francisco said, ‘I can't forgive myself for discovering him late’.Footnote 51
Paul Hollander uses the terms ‘heretic’ or ‘renegade’ to describe people like Francisco, who came to a point of not only opposing socialism or communism as political and conceptual systems but also, ultimately, supporting economic liberalism or capitalism.Footnote 52 These people, paraphrasing Hollander, no longer throw out the dirty water of the Mozambican revolution to protect the child, ‘they discover that the child is a monster that must be strangled’.Footnote 53 Political disillusionment with socialist or communist systems is, for Hollander, a complex phenomenon that contains at least two positions. First are those, like Francisco, who feel complete dissatisfaction with socialism as a political, social, and economic system as well as with Marxist theory as a model of analysis and interpretation. Francisco might have been the first from his generation to openly assume this theoretical position. He revealed to me that when O'Laughlin (his former supervisor) and Wuyts came to work at IESE they were surprised to see him ‘turned into a liberal scholar’.Footnote 54
Hollander describes a second position, which he terms ‘resistance'. Here the disillusionment is related to, for example, how a particular political group or government puts its socialist project into practice, but not with the utopian potential of socialism or even the Marxist theoretical framework. Such was the case of IESE's founder, Carlos Castel-Branco. His statement is eloquent of this condition: ‘I give no explanation for the failure of socialism, because I see no evidence of the failure of socialism as a mode of production’.Footnote 55 So, while he still believes in the heuristic value of Marxist analysis, the main source of his political disillusionment came from seeing the revolutionary Frelimo turning into a ‘party of business’.Footnote 56 IESE collaborator and former CEA researcher Wuyts represents another ‘resister’, stating in one of IESE's publications that he wants to ‘bring back to the modern debate some old ideas of development economics’, and that his desire reflected ‘a kind of nostalgia for the old-school political economy’.Footnote 57 We can find also this nostalgia for the old-school political economy in the Tanzanian scholar, Issa Shivji who was a central figure during the heyday of Tanzania's social sciences history. Like Castel-Branco, Shivji continues today to assert the relevance of Lenin, Marx, and Marxist political economy.Footnote 58 The new postsocialist context dominated by ‘great capital’ becomes a fertile ground for these scholars to plant the seeds of counter-hegemony.Footnote 59
This context of a liberalizing economy and multiparty politics introduced new dynamics into the relationship between the government and civil society. As James Ferguson posits, ‘swarms of new non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have arisen, taking advantage of the shift in donor policies that moved funding for projects away from mistrusted state bureaucracies and into what were understood as more “direct” or “grassroots” channels of implementation’.Footnote 60 In other words, the international donor community was more inclined to support institutions in Africa if they were independent of the state. These agencies seeking to strengthen active citizenship and good governance regarded state institutions like CEA with caution. This was, indeed, a post-1990s trend happening in various African countries, referred to in donor lingo as ‘difficult partnership countries’ or ‘fragile states’.Footnote 61 The main idea was that in order to prevent aid capture and improve effective aid delivery, and thereby increase aid effectiveness, donors should bypass the government in countries with inadequate governance and, instead, collaborate with non-state partners.Footnote 62 As a result, research institutions in Africa became key ‘development partners’. This is the case with, for instance, the Forum of Social Studies (FSS) in Ethiopia, established in 1997 by Ethiopian scholars — and, like IESE, funded by European countries like Ireland and Sweden. FSS has the same core objectives as IESE: producing critical policy research and promoting public debate on key issues for national development.
Unlike privately based research institutes, public universities faced constrained economic circumstances. Therefore, most of CEA's staff began to look for alternative sources of income to alleviate their meager state salary — what Ferguson calls the ‘explosion of parallel businesses’.Footnote 63 Many turned to consultancy work from international NGO's or ventured into entrepreneurial schemes outside academia. Referring to this context, one of CEA's founding members told me abruptly: ‘CEA no longer exists!’Footnote 64 This was the context in which most of the written and sound materials began to be dumped into the basement. The conditions that had facilitated the intellectual vibrancy of the past had vanished. CEA followed a trend that was occurring in many African universities.Footnote 65 The effects of neoliberal reforms and the ‘NGO-ization of academic research’ were fermenting across the continent.Footnote 66 Castel-Branco, Brito, and Francisco became concerned that donor-funded consultancy work dominated local social science research.Footnote 67 They saw CEA overwhelmed by lack of institutional support, which left scholars with no choice but to embark on individual consultancy research. In response they set out to create a new model of research that was neither state nor consultancy dependent. And in this they succeeded.
It was in this multifaceted context of political disillusionment, market economics, and free political elections that the Institute of Social and Economic Studies (IESE) was established as a research institution independent from the state.Footnote 68 IESE's main focuses are critical state policy analysis (production of socioeconomic and political studies in Mozambique and the region) and the promotion of public debates on the issues and challenges of development in Mozambique.Footnote 69 Like the old CEA, IESE is strengthened by international funding.Footnote 70. Using this financial support, the institute is able not only to finance research but also to pay staff salaries.Footnote 71 With researchers — many of them graduate students recruited from UEM — paid higher salaries by the institute than by the state there is little urgency to seek out extra academic or consultancy work.
The research work of IESE is structured around three departments: ‘Economy and Development’, ‘Citizenship and Governance’, and ‘Poverty and Social Protection’, led by Castel-Branco, Brito, and Francisco, respectively. Since its creation, IESE has explored new forms of partnerships with international researchers, but it does not have institutional collaboration with any particular universities or governments in the region. It is clear that the institute's administration favors working with individual expatriate researchers who have worked in Mozambique in the past. IESE notably invited two of the ‘scientific sharks’ of the Marxist CEA: Wuyts and O'Laughlin.Footnote 72 These scholars’ role at IESE has been ‘working on developing research themes related to macro-economics of poverty, employment and social health, and to train and supervise young IESE researchers’.Footnote 73 Nonetheless, Francisco has a different reading of their move to IESE. As Francisco jokingly affirmed the presence of Wuyts and O'Laughlin functioned as a form of tutelage of his liberal approach.Footnote 74
Unlike the CEA, IESE is a research institution which hosts competing theoretical positions. Marxists work alongside proponents of the free market. Castel-Branco, drawing on a Marxist framework, argues that the welfare state in Mozambique is not working because it is part of a larger capitalist state. Frelimo's new leadership, by his estimation, is dedicated to the accumulation of private capital rather than to serving society. For Castel-Branco, the imperative of ‘socialist transformation’ (the old CEA's mantra) is still central.Footnote 75 His research is engaged in advancing a ‘social research agenda that could contribute to the process of political transformation’, a phrase resonant with CEA research agendas.Footnote 76
Toward the other end of the epistemic and ideological spectrum, if working in an adjacent office, Francisco argues that it is precisely because there is a limited capacity for capital accumulation and market competition that Mozambique remains poor. He is resistant to the idea of the state playing an interventionist role in the economy. Francisco's thinking is influenced by Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, and other liberals.Footnote 77 Following in the footsteps of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, Francisco posits, for instance, that the state should limit itself only to improving the legal framework for greater and more effective market competition.
Such divergent theoretical positions living within the same organization was unheard of in Mozambique's socialist regime of truth. This reality might underpin Darch and Head's affirmation that IESE was the ‘first and the only’.Footnote 78 But even if this is the case, it is only half of the story. A more complex reality is embedded in the vibrant intellectual history of the old CEA which continues to shape IESE's work today.
Castel-Branco's political morality was brought to the spotlight in November 2013, when he posted to Facebook an open letter to then-president Armando Guebuza. Castel-Branco accused Guebuza of serving ‘the great capital’Footnote 79 to the detriment of the Mozambican population, and compared the president to dictators like Adolf Hitler, António de Oliveira Salazar, and Mobutu Sese Seko. The Public Prosecutor's Office accused Castel-Branco of insulting Mozambique's president, charging him with crimes against state security.Footnote 80 What a journalist captured Castel-Branco revealing in the courtroom on the day of the trial shows how emotion, morality, and intellectual engagement inflect political disillusionment. The journalist described the court scene vividly:
Castel-Branco became emotional when remembering the period of the revolution and he added: I remained with my revolutionary ideals, he [Armando Guebuza] did not. With President Guebuza, when I was a national political commissioner, I learnt Marxism-Leninism, I learnt about socialism learnt the values of the revolution; I learnt the superiority of social systems that serve the people and that are in the service of the development of the people. I learnt that from him, I learned that from Marcelino dos Santos, I learned that from the Mozambican people. When these principles are violated I have two options: either I stay on the boat or I violate the principles.Footnote 81
Castel-Branco was only 17 when he joined Mozambique's Popular Forces for the Liberation of Mozambique (FPLM). From 1980–3 he worked in the Gabinete de Estudos do Comisariado Político Nacional das FPLM (the Studies Office of the National Political Commissariat of the FPLM), where Guebuza was his boss and mentor.Footnote 82 Castel-Branco stated in 2019 that he learnt Marxism-Leninism and socialism with former president Guebuza.Footnote 83 But today there is a rupture in that intellectual bond. Political disillusionment, according to Hollander, is located exactly at that intersection between the personal, the emotional, and the intellectual.Footnote 84 ‘The higher the moral threshold’, he argues, ‘the more difficult it is to tolerate, rationalize, or make commitments to unpleasant policies or conduct, subordinating the means to the ends, with dishonesty and deceit’.Footnote 85 The contemporary actions of the one-time revolutionary party betrayed Castel-Branco's political morality: the wide discrepancy between what was expected of Frelimo and what was experienced pushed him to dissidence. Many shared this experience. Brito, of course, as well as those shocked by his detention. There were also the cases of O'Meara and Darch, who left CEA and Mozambique in the wake of the Nkomati betrayal.Footnote 86 Frelimo's abandonment of the Marxist-Leninist ideology in 1989 and its full embrace of market ideology in the 1990s were also sources of personal and political disillusionment for many scholars.
The socialist past and the market-oriented present coexist in complex ways inside IESE. Alongside Marxists like Castel-Branco and Haykean researchers like Francisco, some, like Brito, seem less sure of their positions, or choose to be discreet about their own personal beliefs and ideological commitments. Unlike Castel-Branco and Francisco — who appear often on television and newspapers, and haveaccounts on Facebook where they reiterate their ideological convictions and critiques on Frelimo's governance — Brito chose to withdrew from the spotlight. Alexei Yurchack's Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More sheds light on the effects of political disillusionment, including in the Mozambican context. He explores the paradoxes of Soviet life in the late socialist period, referring to this type of living as ‘internal emigration’.Footnote 87 As Yurchack posits, ‘this metaphor should not be read as suggesting complete withdrawal from Soviet reality into isolated, bounded, autonomous spaces of freedom and authenticity. In fact unlike emigration, internal emigration captures precisely the state of being inside and outside at the same time, the inherent ambivalence of this oscillating position’.Footnote 88 Indeed, in the case of Brito, there has not been a complete withdrawal from the public realm, as he is still active through his research work.
Finally, histories of state institutions cannot be narrated though the dichotomic lenses of ruptures and continuities. The past and present are evidently intertwined and continue to shape IESE's intellectual work. In comparison with the socialist context, there is today more space of maneuver for critique and dissent. Marxist or liberal researchers today are more openly critical to the rule of the day. However, the grip of a political party that is still in power since the ‘revolutionary’ years has not loosened. For instance, IESE's critique of Frelimo's government created troubles within the institute. It is worth quoting at length the pronouncement of IESE's director at opening of the institute's Fifth International Conference in 2017,
Despite its clear purpose of fueling reflection and debate on public policies and options for the country's economic, social and political development and contributing to the process of building active citizenship in Mozambique, IESE over the course of 10 years has not always been understood. As a result, at the height of political intolerance and aversion to thinking differently, which unfortunately has come to characterize our country in recent years, IESE researchers, because of their positions, were often accused of being unpatriotic, apostles of disgrace with threats and intimidations which aimed not only at discrediting the Institute's work, but also at silencing their voices.Footnote 89
In fact, in May 2014, three months before IESE's Fourth International Conference, the institute was evicted from the house it had been renting since 2007 — as retaliation for IESE's criticism of the state, according to Forquilha.Footnote 90 This accusation of being ‘apostles of disgrace’ reminds us of the moralistic vocabulary used by Frelimo to treat the dissidents and opposing voices. There are, in this sense, not only continuities between CEA and IESE but also in state practices too.Footnote 91 This was eloquently captured in a webinar in which Francisco participated in April 2021. While he was starting his presentation, José Luís Cabaço — Machel's former Minister of Information — entered the virtual room, and without realizing that he was being heard, referred to Francisco as ‘that reactionary’.Footnote 92 Cabaço's spontaneous remark reminds us indeed about the works of a particular political morality that still reverberates in the present.
Conclusion
Basic research and even public policy analysis is in crisis in Mozambique today. Short-term consultancy work, geared to the interests of external funders rather than the national collective, dominates the agendas of most university researchers. But it has not always been this way. Maputo became a hub for transnational political activism and knowledge production in the 1980s, and that past still lingers in the present. In the current postsocialist context, institutions of knowledge production like IESE remind us that it is still possible to pursue independent and critical research on sociology and economics. However, this article also posited that it is insufficient to understand IESE solely in terms of a present marked by multiparty politics and a market-oriented economy. We also need to take into consideration the history of social science research production from the socialist past, mainly that produced at CEA. Many scholars migrated, temporarily or permanently, from one institution to the other. This shaped not only the theoretical structure of at least two IESE research groups, but also the nature of critical reflection within the institution. These scholars bolstered IESE's organizational and research capacity, bringing with them strategies employed at CEA. The intellectual legacy further includes the mobility of epistemic capital and political moralities inflected by work at the center. Certainly, there are new paths of research being undertaken at IESE, but, ultimately, these studies continue to be shaped by the intellectual vibrancy and ideological ferment of the old CEA.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank David Morton for his critical reading and careful proofreading and editing of the first draft. I am also grateful to António Tomás, Euclides Gonçalves, Ivo Correia, Janne Rantala, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
