Portrait of an ethnography during pandemic times: Bagamoyo remote reconstruction and the (un)Freire of literacy policies in Mozambique

Abstract

Since 2019, I have been engaged in remote ethnography about the reconstruction of the beginning of the language and literacy policies developed by the Frelimo School in Bagamoyo (1970–1975), Tanzania. I entered the field based on previous ethnographic fieldwork in which the encounter between Mozambique’s national languages and its official language, Portuguese, became one of the central issues to understand the reconstruction of national identity. I look at the origin of that reconstruction as legitimated through language(s). Paulo Freire, who contributed to the development of critical pedagogy, was a key actor in the literacy policies that were developed in post-independent Africa. However, in Mozambique, my research brought me to the other side of the (hi)story, to the (un)Freire (hi)story of Bagamoyo. During pandemic times, my ethnography was done at a distance, supported by a network of shared contacts that I developed during my long personal journey of research and experience in Mozambique. As I call it, this interconnected line of ethnographic inquiry, in which I was not physically present although I was “being then,” was developed using the collective work methodology within a participatory approach as advocated in the Bagamoyo school in the 1970s.