Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 1 | Narciso Matos: An Interview, page 3 (low bandwidth)

NM: Yes. Very much so. But things did not go as we thought. That was during the Cold War, and Mozambique, for good or bad, chose to be a Marxist country.

I would say I myself believed at the time that the right thing to do for Mozambique was to embrace this philosophy of providing for everyone, that no one should exploit others. After all, we had had 400 years of exploitation by Portugal. So the socialist ideal was appealing and I bought it myself at that time.

But it brought difficulties to the country. For example, here you have a country that has a Western economy, social system and education—everything designed according to Western standards. And all of a sudden you interrupt this development, you try to develop something totally new, particularly with support from the Soviet Union and East Germany. So the economy went down. A civil war started, which eventually ended in 1992. It was a very hard time.

This is to say that the enthusiasm for building the country, which brought very, very positive results, at the same time crippled the country. And I would say that by 1985, ten years after independence, the country was a disaster. At that time enthusiasm had vanished, the country was very dependent, and it was a depressing time.

I was at university and it was ironic because, for all the intervention by the state in the economy and in the personal lives of citizens, the government did not get involved in the university. So somehow the university managed to maintain some integrity, with many difficulties but with a sense of direction, of building something for the future.

SK: Talk about your work in higher education and your role as a leader at the university.

NM: I started as a lecturer of chemistry but, as I mentioned, that was a time of change and the few of us, the few Mozambicans, were expected also to look beyond our discipline and to be involved in the administration of the department. As a matter of fact, at that time we had no director, no dean—no head of department. Everyone was included in governance and so I started to get involved in management. All during my career at university, I had one leg in the actual business of teaching chemistry, another in administration. I served one or two terms as dean of the faculty of science, and the faculty included chemistry and most of the other natural sciences. I became the dean of the faculty and combined that function with teaching and research.

By 1990 I had become vice chancellor. And that’s the time when I started to be more interested in getting involved with international issues. I think about, by 1992, I realized that

I had to make a choice. At that point I was no longer comfortable teaching chemistry because I didn’t have the time to remain as prepared as I wanted to be. That was the time when I got involved with the Mozambique Parliament, with a special focus on educational matters and international relations. I was a member of the country’s representation in the International Association of Parliamentarians, where you are expected to be fully informed about all sectors of your country, all issues. I became more involved with policy issues, with a special interest in education. That’s how I would define myself today.

SK: What made you decide to get involved in issues beyond Mozambique?

NM: To be a vice chancellor in Mozambique—and it applies to most African countries, particularly if it’s the major university in the country—you deal at the same level with cabinet secretaries. You interact directly with the president of the country and you are consulted about educational issues. You are expected to play a role beyond the small world of your university. And given my belonging also to Parliament, I was very involved in educational and developmental issues larger than the university. After being vice chancellor there was little left to me except going to government or embarking on an international career.

SK: So then, give me a feel for what it was like when you walked into the secretary general job at the Association of African Universities. You’d been working day and night since you were a graduate to build up one university, your university and your country. Now you’ve got the whole continent that you’re representing.

NM: Well, I had the experience of learning how to manage a university with very few resources, with a very great demand for education, with a relationship that has to be nurtured with government, and planning how to do better and to involve colleagues at all levels, departments and so on.

So my sense, when I went to the AAU, was that we needed to change the perception that the bad shape of the universities was exclusively the responsibility of our governments. I believed and knew from my own experience that there were things within our institutions that needed to be changed. That we needed to really look at how we could do better with what we had. And other colleagues shared these ideas.

I should mention also that it was a time when there was a coalition of donor agencies who were very concerned about the little attention being paid to universities in Africa. And they were willing to support universities and university leaders who really meant business. So I came to the AAU at a time when there were people willing to experiment with new ways of managing their institutions, donor agencies willing to support this kind of exercise, and willing, therefore, to support the AAU if we were to engage in this kind of development.

SK: Now you are in the Association, and it’s the 1990s, the Cold War has died, you’re now working on issues facing the continent, not just Mozambique. How would you describe that mood? Was there a sense of collective opportunity? Was there a sense of fatigue? Was there a sense of historic moment?

NM: It’s difficult to generalize. We are talking about 53 countries in Africa. Some of them going down, some of them just coming to shape. But I would say the mood was one of opportunity, most of all; of starting afresh.

The continent was changing. But I found myself depressed at times. There were the setbacks that we all read about—the wars and disasters. So I was saying to myself, we need to reevaluate what’s going on now. To be sure there is support for real development, not just some dreams of ours.

But I must add that, in general, the mood in Africa, in the past five years, has been one of hope. And the end of the Cold War had a very strong impact on Africa in many ways. Part of the positive impact is that we used to have undemocratic governments and they could prevail because someone supported them. Some of them were supported just because they were part of the cold war strategy of a certain country. And since they had outside support, they could afford to do terrible things, things you cannot describe, to their own people. But now they don’t have support. No one is supporting the Mobutus and the like today. They had to change or to go. And there is the South Africa factor which is very important, very powerful.

SK: What is that South Africa factor?

NM: The liberation of South Africa means a lot to Africa. The economy of South Africa alone is bigger than the economy of the rest of black Africa. And a liberated South Africa has influence not only in the neighboring countries. I mean, you go as far as to West Africa or to Uganda in East Africa, which is really like going from New York to Los Angeles and you find South African television, South African products in the market—the telephone companies are South African run or South African sponsored and so on. So it’s really an engine for the development of the continent. Today, you find scholars from all over Africa in South Africa; some of them become vice chancellors there and many become lecturers. The liberation of South African means a lot for the whole continent. It’s a window of opportunity opening up.

Next page: We discussed the issue of “cost sharing,” which is a coded phrase for students paying for their education, something unheard of in Africa.

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