Protestent churches and the formation of political consciousness in southern Mozambique (1930- 1974): the case of the Swiss Mission

Abstract

The Swiss Mission was established in the southern region of Mozambique in the 1880s. Its insertion in the local community, its methods of work in the field of education, and particularly its use of African languages, generated conflict from an early date, as it was suspected of contributing to the formation of a nucleus of oppositions to colonial domination. In the 1930s the Swiss Mission developed a non-formal youth education system emphasizing individual competences and fostering skills essential to the development of a critical understanding of social reality. In the next decades the Swiss developed a project of Africanistaion of Church leadership and supported the growth of a small indigenous elite whose social engagement in the circumstances of social of the redynamised colonialism of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s transformed the social import of the Swiss Mission work into a fundamental contribution to the development of political consciousness. Swiss Mission activities fostered a Tsonga ethnic identity particularly by developing a vernacular literacy culture. However, the wider world view and intercultural contacts constructed through their educational system helped widen the borders of identification from the particular and ethnic to the multi-faceted and national. The developing politico-religious crisis during the 1960s and 1970s, the flight of young Protestants to join the nationalist struggle, the anti-colonial positions expressed by African Pastors from the Mission and the emergence of figures like Manganhela or Mondlane expressed the anti-colonial position of what was by then an African Presbyterian Church and the contribution of the Swiss Mission to the shaping of consciousness, particularly among the younger generations