Transversality in the Centre of African Studies in Mozambique, 1976-1986: The Building of a New Vision for the Social Sciences

Abstract

This article uses the career of the author as a case study deploying the anthropological concepts of transversality and the crossed gaze. The author examines his own experience of working in a research centre in Mozambique in the 1980s, during a post-independence armed conflict with a rebel group supplied and supported by apartheid South Africa. An English-speaker with some years of experience of working in other African countries, he arrived in Mozambique in 1979 unable to speak Portuguese or to distinguish the local features of daily life from those inherited from the colonial power, since both were alien to him. In addition, the research and pedagogical practices used in the Centre of African Studies were innovative and unusual. The author draws three conclusions from this experience: that it is necessary to approach a new culture and a new language as free as possible from prior expectation, as anthropologists normally attempt to do; that in Africa at least, we are now, forty years later, living in an epoch when the open flow of information and experience is increasingly under threat, and with them the possibility of transversality; and that although we live in circumstances and material conditions that are beyond our control, as Marx points out, we make our own choices about our own trajectories.