Para construir a nação se precisa matar a tribo? Tentativas de (in)visibilização da diferença no currículo moçambicano

Abstract

This discursive production intends to problematize the limits of a curricular policy at the service of a civilizing project thought out of the differences, whose horizon is the identity of a “Luso-Mozambican subject. This problematization is based on the understanding that the history of official education in Mozambique has been marked, both during colonization (1926–1974) and after National Independence (1975–2015), by the production of a curriculum with the intention of establishing national identity. In the colonizer's time, it was an identity guided by European standards, where the few who were formed as Assimilated and, considered Portuguese citizens, served as justification for the discourse of “inclusion” in colonial educational policies. In the post-independence period, subdivided into two moments: (1975-1990) education should constitute the New Man who abandoned his tribal practices to build the Mozambican nation; while in the following moment (1990–2015), due to the approval of the new constitution of the Republic, which introduces a multi-party democracy and makes room for neoliberal policies to intrude into teaching, education starts to guide that its curricula produce the Enterprising man, able to prepare himself to lead his future autonomously. Despite the apparent antagonism that exists between such different projects with regard to the emphasis given to their identity projects, they have in common the objective/pretension of overcoming/eliminating the tribal values assumed as a threat to the construction of a new society. Based on theoretical contributions from post-critical theories, particularly post-structuralism, post-colonialism (it was the main one for this thesis) and post-foundationalism, we defend the singularities of difference that articulate different subjects in the processes of differentiation. We argue that in all attempts to establish identity, there is, necessarily, negotiations with the Other that is constituted at the moment of enunciation. Therefore, the emergence of the discourse of building the Nation-State is understood as a way of “appeasement/erasing” of ethnic and tribal conflicts/antagonisms, that is, as a way of erasing politics understood as “the set of practices and institutions through which an order is created, organizing human coexistence in the conflictual context produced by the politician ”. As the curriculum is the "locus" from which the projects of fixing identities are articulated, it proves to be incapable of fulfilling this role, while, as a cultural enunciation, it subverts all aprioristic logics from hybridism, in becoming or spaces open trading. In this domain, I argue in defense of a curriculum based on difference and not on diversity as has been defended by official discourse.