RHI Seminar: Withdrawal of the state: the provision of primary schooling in Mozambique under the indigenato

Abstract:

After the Second World War, there was a generalised move among colonial states in Africa towards greater intervention in the provision of schooling. In Mozambique, however, while the state kept its role in the provision of higher quality primary schooling for the white population, it abandoned the direct running of rudimentary primary schools targeted at the black population. The agreements signed between the Portuguese Estado Novo and the Catholic Church in the early 1940s had made this the preserve of the Catholic missions, which rose exponentially in number and importance. As part of this shift, state-run schools were gradually transferred to these Catholic missions.

I explore the reasons for the Portuguese strategy and find support for two mutually non-exclusive hypotheses. Firstly, I combine expenditure and enrolment data to construct measures of government expenditure per child enrolled in state-run schools and in Catholic mission schools prior to the shift. I find that transferring schooling responsibilities to the Catholic missions would have been a cheaper option for the colonial state to expand rudimentary schooling than running the schools itself.
Secondly, I construct a geo-referenced dataset of the expansion of Catholic and Protestant missions in Mozambique between 1922–1942, to show that the goal of transferring state-run schools to the Catholic missions may have been not only to save resources but also to limit the influence of Protestant missions over the African population. In analysing the withdrawal of the state in Mozambique, I shed light on the political economy of schooling provision in colonial Africa through the case of a comparatively weak colonial power.