When discussing colonial education in Africa, attention often focuses on those who were excluded, subordinated, or subjected to systems designed to reproduce inequality. Antoinette Errante approaches the subject from a different angle. Her concern is not only what colonial schools taught African children, but also how they shaped the consciousness of White settler children growing up in Mozambique between 1934 and 1974.
At the heart of the article lies a simple but unsettling question: how did a colonial society persuade generations of children that European superiority was natural? The answer, Errante argues, cannot be found in laws and institutions alone. It must also be sought in classrooms, textbooks, playgrounds, family conversations, daily routines, and the countless small interactions through which ideas about race and nation became common sense.
Portuguese colonial education was built upon what the author describes as a myth of colonial omnipotence. Portugal portrayed itself as a civilizing nation whose presence in Africa represented progress, order, and historical destiny. Schools became one of the principal instruments through which this worldview was transmitted. Through lessons, rituals, discipline, and curriculum, children learned to associate Europe with civilization, knowledge, authority, and advancement, while Africa was frequently represented as traditional, backward, and dependent.
Yet the article demonstrates that colonial society was never as simple as its official narratives suggested. Race alone did not determine one's position. Colonial Mozambique was structured through a complex hierarchy involving class, education, occupation, culture, and proximity to Portuguese norms. Europeans occupied privileged positions, but not all Europeans occupied the same place. Wealthy administrators, poor settlers, farmers, political dissidents, assimilated Africans, mestiços, Indians, and Muslims inhabited different social spaces within the colonial order.
Errante therefore introduces the concept of cultural Whiteness. Whiteness was not merely a matter of skin colour. It functioned as a cultural ideal associated with education, refinement, language, behaviour, religion, and social status. Colonial schools did not simply teach children who was White and who was Black. They taught them what it meant to act, think, and behave according to standards that colonial society defined as civilized.
The Estado Novo regime under António de Oliveira Salazar reinforced these ideas. At a time when Portugal itself faced economic and political challenges, the empire became central to national identity. Schools in both Portugal and Mozambique promoted obedience, patriotism, discipline, religious values, and loyalty to the nation. Colonial possessions were presented as proof of Portugal's greatness, while the imperial mission was portrayed as both natural and benevolent.
The dual educational system reflected these assumptions. European children attended official schools that prepared them for citizenship and social advancement. African children, by contrast, were largely channelled into rudimentary forms of schooling intended to produce disciplined workers rather than equal citizens. Although reforms occurred over time, educational opportunities remained profoundly unequal. By independence, illiteracy among Black Mozambicans remained extraordinarily high, revealing the limitations of the colonial promise of civilization.
What makes the article particularly compelling, however, is its reliance on oral testimony. Through interviews with White Mozambicans who spent their childhoods in the colony, Errante uncovers memories that frequently challenge the official ideology they were taught. Many interviewees remembered learning that Portugal and its colonies formed a single national community. Yet their own experiences often pointed elsewhere.
For a significant number of settlers, Mozambique was not merely a colonial possession. It was home. Some had never seen Portugal. Others felt little emotional connection to the distant metropole. They remembered the landscapes, languages, friendships, and rhythms of life in Mozambique as the foundations of their identity. The more deeply they became attached to the country, the more difficult it became to accept simplistic notions of Portuguese superiority.
These contradictions became increasingly visible during the final decades of colonial rule. Some teachers introduced students to broader intellectual debates. Exposure to new political ideas, the wars of liberation, and changing international attitudes towards colonialism encouraged many young people to question what they had previously accepted as self-evident truths. For some, identification with Mozambique gradually became stronger than identification with Portugal.
Yet the author is careful not to romanticize this process. A Mozambican identity did not automatically imply a rejection of racial privilege. Nor did sympathy for independence necessarily translate into solidarity with Black Mozambicans. Political consciousness, national identity, race, and class frequently moved along different trajectories. The relationship between them remained complex, uneven, and often contradictory.
One of the article's most important observations concerns the distinction between racial consciousness and national belonging. While many White Mozambicans eventually embraced Mozambique as their homeland, fewer fundamentally questioned the racial hierarchies from which they benefited. In this sense, the decline of colonial rule did not automatically dismantle the assumptions inherited from colonial education.
Nevertheless, colonial schools produced outcomes that their architects never intended. Institutions designed to reproduce Portuguese hegemony also became places where that hegemony could be challenged. Students encountered ideas, experiences, and relationships that complicated the rigid categories promoted by official ideology. Some emerged from these experiences with identities that no longer fit comfortably within the colonial framework.
Errante concludes that colonial education succeeded in transmitting powerful myths, but failed to make them absolute. The belief in Portuguese superiority could be taught, repeated, and institutionalized, yet lived experience often exposed its contradictions. Mozambique's social realities repeatedly challenged the assumptions embedded in textbooks and official discourse.
Ultimately, the article reveals that colonialism produced unexpected forms of belonging. While many Africans were encouraged to aspire towards European ideals, some Europeans developed a profound attachment to Africa. In the process, the colonial project generated not only a longing for Europe among the colonized, but also, among certain settlers, a longing for Mozambique itself. The result was a generation whose identities emerged not from the certainty promised by colonial ideology, but from the tensions and ambiguities that colonial society could never fully contain.