Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 1 | Narciso Matos: An Interview, page 2 (low bandwidth)

NM: I think it was not until I got to the university. I knew, during primary school and secondary school, that I didn’t feel strongly about the humanities and social sciences and languages.

I preferred science, I preferred math, I preferred physics and chemistry. I think I decided at the end of my secondary school that, why not chemistry? I found it interesting.

SK: That was my worst subject. I was scared of chemistry.

NM: It’s interesting, very interesting. It’s a science that I would say combines everything else, and that’s the beauty of it. You need math, you need physics, you need biochemistry—or you move to biochemistry from chemistry. So, to me, it’s kind of a pivotal science.

SK: If you would have taught me I probably would have enjoyed it more. In high school or the secondary schools in Mozambique, were you in the same kind of school, mostly dominated by whites?

NM: Yes. In all schools at that time, up until twenty years ago, black kids were a minority.

SK: What was expected of you? Were you being nurtured as a leader of the new Mozambique? Were you expected to lead?

NM: I think some people like my parents had leadership in mind. Actually I’m sure about that because my father mentioned several times that, “Well, I think if you’re educated, maybe the situation might change in the future for our country.” He was not a militant in the sense of directly challenging the system. In his own way, he believed that educated people would eventually play important roles in the country. So I think he expected that myself and other students would someday contribute to the emancipation of the country.

I grew up also in the time of struggle for independence. But you never heard about that from the newspapers or the radio. It was underground information, by word of mouth. But it was late in my educational career when I started to think that maybe my education could contribute to something. I wouldn’t claim to have contributed more just by sticking to my education. It was after independence that I became more involved in politics.

SK: Did whites expect much from you? Teachers?

NM: I think some of them did, yes. And in retrospect, I understand that some of them even ventured some few sentences, and when I interpret them today, they were saying, “Well, there are things we cannot say but we feel it should be different.”

SK: Tell me what your memories are when independence happened. You were in the university then. Was it scary? Disruptive? Or was it just liberating?

NM: It was liberating. That was 1975. I was at the end of my university studies. I had six months to go to complete my licentiate degree.

It was a time of change. There was fear. Because all along there was this propaganda saying that if blacks came to power they would kill all the white people there, and so forth. So people were scared, including those who had contributed in their way to liberation. But for Mozambicans it was—well, I don’t have a word to describe it. It was just, all of a sudden we thought, now we can start something in this country and we can contribute. Some people even made crazy decisions like, for example, they just dropped out from education. They said, “Well, now I just want to go and do something for the country.”

I was at university then and it was a time of upheaval. To give you an example: in the 1974 academic year, the university had 3,000 students. Most of them were white students and all the faculty were white. And one year after independence, in 1975, the university was down to 700 students. It means that most of them left to go to Portugal. Almost all the lecturers and professors also left, except for a handful who stayed in the country.

At that time, from within the university, there was a feeling of, “Let us try to keep the university functioning,” but there was not even agreement about that. Some people were saying, “Well this was a colonial university, what we have to do is to shut it down and start something new.” And there were those—I belonged to that group—who said, “No, let us try to keep this university and change what needs to be changed.” Eventually good sense prevailed, I would say. The university was never closed.

It was a time when we believed that everything, anything was possible. But there were many constraints and we made many mistakes. But most importantly, we believed in what we were doing. There was a sense of contributing to something bigger than one’s self-interest. That was the mood at the time. I think everyone, or almost everyone, felt that way.

Next page: The socialist ideal was appealing and I bought it myself at that time.

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