Based on Carlos Fernandes, “Regional and Local Dynamics in the Shaping of the Centre for African Studies in Maputo, 1976–1986”, Journal of Southern African Studies, 2015.
The Centre for African Studies at Eduardo Mondlane University was born in one of the most charged intellectual and political moments of post-independence Mozambique. Created in 1976, barely a year after independence, the CEA emerged at the intersection of scholarship, socialist politics, anti-colonial commitment and regional struggle. It was not merely an academic centre. It became a place where research was expected to serve the transformation of society.
Carlos Fernandes shows that the CEA cannot be understood only as a university department or as a group of researchers writing about Mozambique. Its work was shaped by the broader history of Southern Africa in the late twentieth century: the defeat of Portuguese colonialism, the rise of Frelimo as a ruling party, the liberation struggles in Rhodesia and South Africa, the regional pressures created by apartheid, and Mozambique's own attempt to build a socialist state.
Many of those who worked at the Centre were not conventional academics detached from politics. They were militants, intellectuals, former activists, foreign researchers, and Mozambican scholars who believed that knowledge had to be linked to the urgent problems of the country. The CEA's research was therefore directed toward practical questions: labour, rural production, state policy, class formation, socialism, regional destabilisation, and the everyday consequences of colonialism and war.
One of the Centre's defining features was its connection to Ruth First. A South African journalist, Marxist intellectual and anti-apartheid activist, First brought to Maputo a rigorous and politically engaged method of research. Under her influence, the CEA became known for collective work, field research, political debate and a refusal to separate academic knowledge from the realities of Southern African struggle. Her assassination in Maputo in 1982 by a parcel bomb sent by the apartheid regime revealed how dangerous such intellectual work had become in the region.
The article also shows that the CEA's intellectual project was marked by tensions. It sought to support Mozambique's socialist transformation, but it also had to navigate the expectations of the Frelimo state. It wished to produce independent research, yet it worked in a political environment where loyalty to the revolution was not a minor question. Its researchers studied class, labour, rural change and regional conflict, while also confronting the limits imposed by war, scarcity, ideology and institutional pressure.
Between 1976 and 1986, the CEA became one of the most important centres of social science research in Lusophone Africa. Its studies on migrant labour, rural production, the peasantry, South African capitalism, apartheid destabilisation and Mozambican socialism helped shape how scholars understood the region. It also attracted researchers from Mozambique, South Africa, Europe and beyond, making Maputo an unusual centre of intellectual exchange during a period of regional violence and political uncertainty.
Yet Fernandes avoids presenting the CEA as a simple heroic institution. Its history was complex. It was ambitious, productive and politically committed, but also marked by contradictions. It operated between Marxist theory and state practice, between research autonomy and party expectations, between local realities and regional struggles. Its importance lies precisely in this tension: the CEA tried to produce knowledge at a moment when knowledge itself was part of the struggle over the future of Southern Africa.
By the mid-1980s, Mozambique was facing war, economic crisis and growing pressure to move away from its earlier socialist project. The CEA's original intellectual environment began to weaken. Still, its legacy remained significant. It showed that social science in Mozambique could be more than description; it could interrogate power, recover hidden histories, analyse labour and production, and connect local experience to regional and global forces.
The story of the CEA is therefore also a story about Mozambique after independence: hopeful, militant, intellectually ambitious, but surrounded by enemies and contradictions. It reminds us that the making of a nation is not only fought in government offices or on military fronts. It is also fought in archives, classrooms, research reports, field interviews and difficult debates about what kind of society should be built.
Source: Carlos Fernandes, “Regional and Local Dynamics in the Shaping of the Centre for African Studies in Maputo, 1976–1986”, Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3, 2015.