Portuguese Mozambique - Education

Education

Mozambique's rural black populations were largely illiterate, as were a majority of Portugal's peasantry. However, a number of natives from diverse tribal backgrounds were educated in Portuguese language and history by several missionary schools established across the vast countryside areas. In mainland Portugal, the homeland of the colonial authorities which ruled Mozambique from the 16th century until 1975, by the end of the 19th century the illiteracy rates were at over 80 percent and higher education was reserved for a small percentage of the population. 68.1 percent of mainland Portugal's population was still classified as illiterate by the 1930 census. Mainland Portugal's literacy rate by the 1940s and early 1950s was low for North American and Western European standards at the time. Only in the mid-1960s did the country make public education available for all children between the ages of six and twelve, and the overseas territories in Africa profited from this new educational developments and change in policy at Lisbon. Starting in the early 1950s, the access to basic, secondary and technical education was expanded and its availability was being increasingly opened to both the African indigenes and the European Portuguese of the African territories. A comprehensive network of secondary schools (the Liceus) and technical or vocational education schools were implemented across the cities and main towns of the territory. In 1962, the first Mozambican university was founded by the Portuguese authorities in the provincial capital, Lourenço Marques, the Universidade de Lourenço Marques, awarding a wide range of degrees from engineering to medicine, during a time that in the European Portuguese mainland only four public universities were in operation.