Paulo Freire and Emancipatory Praxis in Africa

Abstract

There has been a growing resurgence of interest in Paulo Freire in recent times. In much of this work, there has been a tendency to focus on him as a pedagogue rather than as an emancipatory political thinker; his involvement in and influence on liberation struggles in Africa, in particular, have received little attention. This is concerning, given that his involvement spanned a period of about two decades and came at a pivotal moment in both the continent’s history and his own life. Here, we critically reflect on Freire’s praxis in relation to the African continent, arguing that this warrants greater acknowledgement.

Introduction

There has been a growing resurgence of interest in Paulo Freire in recent times, largely because of the 50th anniversary (in 2018) of the publication of his seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1972), and the centenary of his birth in 2021. Like much of the interest in Freire over these fifty-plus years, this has tended to underemphasise Freire as an emancipatory political thinker. In particular, Freire’s involvement on the African continent at a particular historical juncture, and how this influenced his own emancipatory praxis, has been underexplored.

As Schugurensky (2011) points out, ‘There is no shared-upon agreement among commentators about the relative impact of the different influences on Freire’s theoretical framework’ (p. 77) – however, the lack of discussion on possible African influences is remarkable. For example, in an edited book entitled Paulo Freire’s Intellectual Roots: Towards Historicity in Practice (Lake and Cress, 2013), Amilcar Cabral is mentioned once. Frantz Fanon gets four mentions, often in connection with other (Western) thinkers. Another work specifically on the philosophical influences on Freire (Dale and Hyslop-Margison, 2010) is even worse. Whilst Darder (2018) specifically includes a section on Fanon in her chapter on Freire’s intellectual history, most others refer to him only in passing, if at all. Torres (in Gadotti, 1996) is one of the very few who provides a fairly extensive discussion specifically entitled ‘A influência africana’ (‘African influence’), which runs for nearly 13 pages. However, much of it is a recounting of Freire’s involvement on the continent, rather than a discussion on how Freire might have been influenced by this, or by African thinkers. It also appears to misrepresent some of Cabral’s thinking, particularly in relation to the use of the Portuguese language. ¹

And yet Freire himself claimed to have been profoundly influenced by African thinkers, and his involvement on the continent. He read Wretched of the Earth by Fanon whilst in exile in Chile in the late 1960s, and said ‘I had to rewrite the book (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) in order to begin to quote Fanon’ (Horton and Freire, 1990: 36). He specifically referenced Fanon in his acceptance letter to the World Council of Churches (WCC) (where he took up a post as special education adviser) in 1970, saying ‘You must know that I have made a decision. My case is the case of the wretched on the earth’ (quoted in Schugurensky, 2011: 546). In much of his writings, especially on Guinea-Bissau, Freire specifically mentions how he was influenced by Amilcar Cabral. Indeed, Freire says that he had wanted to write a book about Amilcar Cabral, to be entitled Amilcar Cabral: The pedagogue of the revolution, which would be ‘a thorough analysis of Amilcar Cabral’s work’, to draw a distinction between ‘revolutionary pedagogue’ and ‘pedagogy of revolution’ (Freire and Macedo, 1987: 103). He interviewed ten people out of a planned thirty (p. 105) but then had to abandon this project because he did not have the time or money necessary to complete the work (p. 104).

Freire spoke about his experiences on the continent in multiple interviews and articles in the 1970s and 1980s (some of which specifically focus on his work on the continent – see e.g. Freire, 1981), as well as in his dialogue books with Donaldo Macedo (Freire and Macedo, 1987), Ira Shor (Shor and Freire, 1987) and Myles Horton (Horton and Freire, 1990). The dialogue book with Antonia Faundez (who also worked for the WCC), Learning to Question: A Pedagogy of Liberation (Freire and Faundez, 1989), specifically discusses their work in Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa. Pedagogy in Process: Letters to Guinea-Bissau focuses on Freire’s particular experiences with that country at that point (the title emphasises the fact that the engagement was ongoing); and Freire is clear that he fully anticipated learning from it:

Our political choice and its praxis also keeps us from even thinking that we could teach the educators and learners of Guinea-Bissau anything unless we were also learning with and from them. (Freire, 1978: 4)

Freire’s ideas are, we argue, largely consistent with a line of emancipatory African scholarship and thinking with which Freire was himself engaged, and which remain critical in our time. We show that Freire’s thinking was affected by his engagement with the African continent, and remains relevant to it – although, as we discuss below, this was not unproblematic, particularly in relation to his inclination to underplay the tendencies of the post-independence state to attempt to control the people, and perhaps to romanticise the role of charismatic national leaders.

Freire and Africa

Freire’s early work specifically considered Portugal’s colonisation of Brazil, which marked the Brazilian context even after the formal end of Portuguese rule, and he was particularly interested in other countries colonised by Portugal. Freire claimed that he felt a special connection to Africa: ‘As a man from northeastern Brazil, I was somewhat culturally tied to Africa, particularly to those countries that were unfortunate enough to be colonised by Portugal’ (Freire and Macedo, 1987: 94). Much of Pernambuco, where Freire grew up, was used for the cultivation of sugarcane since the Portuguese invasion in 1500, powered by the labour of black African slaves purchased from the Dutch. Pernambuco was also where the black republic of Palmares was established as part of the slave rebellions of the sixteenth century. Living and working in a part of Brazil where most of the population was of Afro-Brazilian origin, clearly had an influence on Freire. He was certainly reading and thinking about colonialism in Angola in the early 1960s. Whilst he was working with the Cultural Extension Service of the then University of Recife, he wrote, ‘we were in the process of obtaining authorisation to develop projects geared toward Africa when we were stopped by the 1964 coup d’etat’ (Freire, 1996: 135).

After being exiled to Chile by the coup, Freire read widely on colonisation and its psychological effects, existentialism, phenomenology and Marxist humanism (Darder, 2018; Gadotti, 1994; Schugurensky, 2011). As Darder (2018: 77) points out, Freire’s central argument in Pedagogy of the Oppressed ‘is intimately tied to an anticolonial perspective’. Freire says:

I was extremely interested in the struggle for liberation of the African people in general. With great curiosity and even greater happiness, I closely followed the struggle for liberation in Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Guinea-Bissau, keeping in mind the distinct nature of these struggles. (Freire and Macedo, 1987: 94)

In 1970, after a brief period at Harvard University, Freire took up a position as a special education adviser to the WCC and moved to Geneva to help implement a WCC decision to run projects related to conscientisation. Together with a group of Brazilian exiles, he helped create the Institute for Cultural Action (IDAC) in 1971 and was appointed President of its Executive Committee (Gadotti and Torres, 2009). For the next two decades, he was frequently visited by people from the continent and became directly engaged on the continent, either on behalf of WCC or IDAC or both.

From his experience in Brazil, Freire was aware that colonialism does not end with the expulsion of colonialists. He understood this to be so at both a material/structural and psychological/cultural/cognitive level. In Education for Critical Consciousness (1974), Freire specifically undertook an analysis of the colonisation of Brazil by Portugal. His analysis argued that colonialism was primarily about economic exploitation and that the colonial experience profoundly affected the post-colony.

Thus, prior to his direct engagement with Africa, Freire was aware that struggles for independence did not necessarily lead to emancipation from oppression. Clearly, Freire did not believe that the post-independence experience in Africa had to be like what he witnessed in Brazil. Much of his work in relation to the African continent (and elsewhere) was based on a belief that something different could happen – although this remained largely rooted in a belief in the pivotal role of the nation-state. ² He thus worked closely with a number of post-independence governments on the African continent, and in particular those countries liberated from Portuguese control. We argue that his understanding of the nature of decolonisation was affected by this work.

In the following section, we focus on those African countries that Freire visited or with which he had a direct connection. We then turn to a consideration of how his experiences influenced his thinking.

Freire in Africa

Tanzania

Freire’s first visit to the continent occurred in 1971 when he visited Zambia and Tanzania, both of which had achieved independence in the first half of the 1960s (Freire and Macedo, 1987: 95). The Tanzanian President, Julius Nyerere, was ‘familiar with the work of Paulo Freire. He had read Pedagogy of the Oppressed and asked to meet Paulo when he came to Tanzania’ (Hall, 1998: 96). Freire reports that during his conversations with Nyerere, they talked about ‘education as self-reliance’ and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1994). Budd Hall, who was present at the meeting, wrote:

Freire began the conversation by saying that he was so impressed by the writings of Nyerere that he would like to organize a series of seminars to discuss and analyze his speeches in depth . . . One of the main issues that Freire had wanted to explore with President Nyerere was the possibility of Tanzania becoming an international centre for the kind of education in which Freire believed. Freire found that the climate and flora of Tanzania resembled parts of Northeast Brazil which he missed so deeply. He asked President Nyerere to provide support for an educational centre in Tanzania based on the ideas of Freire and Nyerere. Nyerere replied somewhat ambiguously that Paulo should always feel at home in Tanzania and that he was welcome to spend all the time that he wished in Tanzania. Freire did not follow-up this point and was at once drawn back to the infectious sharing of ideas between them. (Hall, 1998: 98)

During this first visit to Tanzania, Freire visited a number of communities, being exposed to the ideas and the practices of ‘ujamaa (communitarian) socialism’ as espoused by Nyerere (Schugurensky, 2011).

Freire was deeply impressed by what he saw Nyerere trying to achieve in Tanzania, particularly with the villages of Ujamaa . . . Freire admired Nyerere’s emphasis on self-reliance and his belief in the need to find African models for development and not simply imitate European ones. In Nyerere’s Tanzania, Freire embraced a one-party state that claimed to be democratic and in the 1970s was trying to relocate millions of Tanzanians into Ujamaa villages. (Kirkendall, 2010:105)

As part of implementing Ujamaa, between 1973 and 1976 over 10 million people were moved into Ujamaa villages, as part of a national policy of villagisation and economic self-reliance.

Also, whilst in Tanzania in 1971, Freire presented a seminar at Dar-es-Salaam University, then a central hub for debates amongst a group of intellectuals, including Claude Ake, Archie Mafeje, Mahmood Mamdani, Walter Rodney, John Saul, Issa Shivji and many others (Gibson, 2011). In his presentation, Freire was at pains to emphasise the political nature of his ‘methodology’:

First of all I must underline the point that the central question that I think we have to discuss here is not the methodological one in itself. In my point of view, before or simultaneously with the discussion of the methodology it is necessary to perceive in a very clear way the ideological background which determines the very methodology . . . the ideology determines the methodology of searching or of knowing. (Freire, 1973: 78)

Freire visited Tanzania again in 1972 and 1974, giving seminars or lectures, visiting Ujamaa villages and meeting with others, including Nyerere. He said of Nyerere ‘He is a very great man – a wonderful educator who is completely immersed in the history-cum-culture/waters of Africa’ (Shallcrass, 1974). However, he also appears to have expressed possible concern about Nyerere and what was happening in Tanzania in a discussion on how education changes post-revolution. Freire comments, ‘It is not easy to change . . . When I talked with the president (Nyerere), he used to say to me, “Paulo, it’s not easy to put into practice the things we think about”’. Freire comments, ‘Yes, it is not easy, but it’s not impossible. This is my conviction’ (Horton and Freire, 1990: 219). In an interview at the time, he remarked, ‘But I agree that very often Africans are still blinded by colonialism – they are still often alienated because they are so near the colonisers. Africa is trying to escape from this in a few years – 10 or 15 – but remember, in Latin America, after 150 years we are still alienated’ (Shallcrass, 1974: manuscript page 5).

Mozambique

During his first visit to Tanzania in 1971, Freire met representatives of Frelimo (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, Mozambique Liberation Front), then engaged in the struggle for liberation in Mozambique. One of these was the widow of the assassinated Frelimo leader Eduardo Mondlane. He also visited the Frelimo teacher training camp in Bagamoyo where student-teachers were trained to implement literacy policies and were smuggled into the liberated zones of Cabo Delgardo, Niassa and Tete to teach during their school holidays (Johnston, 1990) as part of the liberation struggle (Freire and Macedo, 1987):

What they wanted was to dive into a critical, theoretical reflection with me on their practice, their struggle . . . Their confidence in me as a progressive intellectual was genuinely important to me. They did not criticize me for citing a peasant along with Marx. Nor did they regard me as a bourgeois educator because I maintained the importance of the role of consciousness in history. (Freire, 1994: 138)

At the request of Eduardo Coloma, Frelimo Secretary for Education and Culture (Coloma, 1971), he visited the Bagamoyo school again in 1972, which resulted in the production of a Frelimo Literacy Book, based on his seminars, written by three teachers (Carvalho, 2023). Henrique N’Guiraze, the co-ordinator of literacy in the Zambezia province, stated that ‘At the time, regarding the content, these courses had much influence of Paulo Freire. Indeed, there was a lot of talk about the concept of awareness’ (quoted in Carvalho, 2023: 17). A report on Mozambique by a representative of the Commission on Inter-Church Aid, Refugee and World Services (CICARWS) of the WCC who visited after liberation in 1975 (Testa, 1975), notes that ‘Prof Paulo Freire’s contribution during his visit last year (i.e. 1974) to the Mozambique Institute in Dar-es-Salaam was immensely appreciated’ (p. 7). It states that the Minister of Education and Culture, Graca Simbine Machel, planned to invite Freire to Mozambique to hold seminars with teachers involved in literacy programmes and adult education, although there is no record of such an invitation or visit. ³ Carvalho reports that Freire ‘does not have specific writings on his experience with Frelimo and the Bagamoyo School’ (2023: 13). The WCC archive contains no documents about his trip to Tanzania or his contact with Frelimo.

In June 1976, Freire accepted an invitation to be a keynote speaker at the first World Assembly of Adult Education, held in Tanzania. However, at the conference itself, Freire refused to provide a keynote address, opting rather to work with a group of fifteen to twenty people ‘on the specific challenges of their own situations in Botswana, Tanzania, Chile, Zambia and elsewhere’ (Hall, 1998: 97).

Angola

Freire’s involvement with the Angolan independence movement, MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola), also began during his first visit to the continent (Freire, 1996). On his way to Tanzania, Freire stopped in Zambia, where he met with a leader of MPLA, Lúcio Lara. In greeting him, Lara said ‘Comrade Paulo Freire, if you knew my country as well as we know your work, you would know Angola extremely well!’ (Freire and Macedo, 1987: 95). They discussed the struggle in Angola, and ‘the practice of struggle as a pedagogical struggle’ (Freire and Macedo, 1987: 95). He was shown documentary films about the liberation struggle and related pedagogical experiences.

There is synergy between Freire’s emancipatory ideas and those of MPLA President, Agostinho Neto. ‘The struggle for liberation’, written by Freire and his wife Elza, as part of their work in São Tomé and Principe in the early 1980s, discussed the struggle in Guinea and Cape Verde, and Angola, and how this led to the Portuguese revolution. They write, ‘our struggle was not made against any race or against the Portuguese people’ – rather, it was against colonialism, imperialism and all forms of exploitation (Freire and Macedo, 1987: 81). This argument resonates with Neto’s (1974) speech entitled ‘Who is the enemy? What is our objective?’:

In terms of what we basically want, I do not think that the national liberation struggle is directed towards inverting systems of oppression in such a way that the master of today will be the slave of tomorrow . . . national liberation must be a stage for the achievement of a vaster form of liberation, which is the liberation of humanity (p. 115).

After independence, Freire visited Angola, at the request of the new government and met again with Lúcio Lara, now chief of the MPLA’s Political Bureau in Luanda. Freire also worked as a consultant to the Ministry of Education under Antônio Jacinto (Freire, 1994; Freire and Macedo, 1987: 99). In his 1977 report to the WCC Working Group on Education he writes, ‘In Angola this contribution is not in the field of literacy, but of post-literacy, and education in general, and is done in collaboration with the National Council of Culture’ (Freire, 1977: 3). He, and others with whom he was working, visited Angola three times a year, and he was in regular correspondence with the government (Freire, 1977).

Guinea-Bissau

Freire saw the revolutionary party as having an important pedagogical role in ending oppression:

The relationships between revolutionary party and the oppressed classes are not relationships between one side which brings historic consciousness and another side, void of consciousness, arriving on the scene with an ‘empty consciousness’. If it were so, the role of the revolutionary party would be the transmission of consciousness to the dominated classes and this transmission would signify filling up their consciousness with the consciousness of their class. Actually, however, the dominated social classes are not devoid of consciousness, nor is their consciousness an empty depository. Manipulated by the ruling classes myths, the dominated classes reflect a consciousness which is not properly their own. Hence, their reformist tendency. Permeated by the ruling class ideology, their aspirations, to a large degree, do not correspond to their authentic being. These aspirations are superimposed by the most diversified means of social manipulation.

All this throws out a challenge to the revolutionary party. It unquestionably calls them to play a pedagogical role. (IDAC, 1973: 117).

However, this was in stark contrast to Freire’s role in Guinea-Bissau (1975–1977), which has received far more attention. Guinea-Bissau achieved independence in 1973, after a protracted armed struggle led by the Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde, African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). By the time Guinea-Bissau declared independence, almost two-thirds of the country was under the control of the popular movements in the liberated zones. The Portuguese currency had been banned and replaced by a system of barter and trade – effectively banning the potential for capital accumulation. ⁴ Peoples’ assemblies, in which women played a leading role, operated at the village level making decisions on all aspects of life, including healthcare, education, agriculture, and local trade as well as providing armed resistance against incursions by colonial troops.

Borges (2019) provides a detailed description and analysis of the development of education in the liberated zones, emphasising the democratic and dialogic processes involved:

The term militant education is inextricably linked to the concepts political education, political freedom, and liberation rather than to the ‘military’, although disciplinary elements of the latter can be found. Militant education and militant school . . . referes (sic) to a type of educational practice that is committed, engaged, conscious and grounded on anti-colonial and decolonial principles. It is focused on an ample concept and goals of the liberation struggle. The aim is that pupils, civilian population and military militants receive a education that combined political teaching, technical training and the shaping of individual and collective behaviors, guided them toward the development of the Self as a liberated African citizen. (p. 176)

Based on interviews with militant educators, Borges (2019) provides insight into the participatory processes used for developing the curriculum, and the ability of those in localities to decide how schools were to be run, including (crucially) deciding on the use of Creole, Portuguese or other languages. Education for revolution was, she argues, an ongoing process of dialogue between revolutionary leaders and the masses of people from which they come, to foster a deeper emancipatory consciousness:

a permanent and continuous process of reflection and action that aims to organize political consciousness through the: ‘development and a reconstruction of ourselves, our thinking and feeling, so that we become conscious of what is happening to us and why it is happening . . . a continuous process of reflection and action that is identical with revolution itself and precedes, accompanies, and follow the actual seizure of power one moment in the revolutionary process’ (Borges, 2019: 175, quoting Geary, 1976).

This was in keeping with PAIGC founder and leader Amilcar Cabral’s understanding of education as something intimately related to subjectivity and humanisation:

Everywhere in the world education is the fundamental basis that underpins the work of emancipation of every human being, the consciousness of humans, not according to the needs of every individual or class conveniences but in relation to the environment he lives, the needs of the community and the problems of the humankind. [. . .] Today, education aims at the goal of the full realization of humans, without the use of races or origins, as being conscious and intelligent, useful and progressive, integrated into the world and its environment (geographic, economic and social) without any sort of subjection. For this reason and therefore the problem of education cannot be treated separately from the social-economic one, as a mere resultant of the turbulence or the licentiousness of the times. (Cabral, 1951: 24–25, quoted in Borges, 2019: 173).

Borges shows that although the ‘militant education project . . . is generally historically perceived to have been influenced by Paulo Freire’s work in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it was actually developed in loco in Guinea-Bissau some years earlier’ (2019: 18).

Amilcar Cabral was assassinated on 20 January 1973, by some of his comrades (probably with the support of the PIDE Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado, the Portuguese secret service). With the declaration of independence eight months later, on 24 September 1973, all PAIGC structures were relocated and centralised in the capital city, Bissau. The popular structures created in the process of the liberation struggles were dismembered, and the Portuguese currency was reinstated. The nationalist movement thus occupied the existing colonial state in the belief that it would be possible to continue the struggle for humanisation using the structures of the colonial state. In doing so, the new state was, by definition, a neocolonial state.

This was contrary to Amilcar Cabral’s argument that it was not the colour of the administrator that was the problem with the colonial state, but the fact that there was an administrator (Cabral, 1979: 60):

We don’t accept any institution of the Portuguese colonialists. We are not interested in the preservation of any of the structures of the colonial state. It is our opinion that it is necessary to totally destroy, to break, to reduce to ash all aspects of the colonial state in our country in order to make everything possible for our people (Cabral, 1973: 83).

After independence, new school structures were created, but PAIGC also adopted former Portuguese colonial structures. The growing emphasis on economic development began to obscure the importance of militant education – education for human emancipation – developed during the struggle.

This, then, was the context in which Freire was invited to help develop the country’s education system, when IDAC and the WCC received a request from the post-independence Minister of Education, Mario Cabral, to assist in the implementation of the development of the education programme. Freire arrived with some knowledge of the educational and political achievements of the liberated zones, having been in communication with Mario Cabral; and he and his team immersed themselves in reading Amilcar Cabral’s work in preparation for their involvement (Freire, 1978). Freire and his team developed a number of literacy initiatives with people in several rural areas of Guinea-Bissau. The focus was to provide training in literacy for ‘national reconstruction’, an agenda that was determined by the State. In contrast to Cabral’s explicitly political conception of education, ‘national reconstruction’ appears to have little or no connection with emancipation. As occurred in many post-independence states across the continent, references to ‘freedom’, which galvanised the population in the rise of the anti-colonial revolution, were replaced with ‘development’, presented as a technical rather than political solution to immiseration. Freire seems unconcerned by the depoliticisation of the purpose of education.

He makes no mention of Cabral’s ideas about occupying the colonial state, a glaring problem in his work in this country. Perhaps this was because he was taken by the romance surrounding the victory over colonialism that Guinea-Bissau represented – he was clearly thrilled to have been asked to participate and to engage in discussions with Mario Cabral and to interact with the new President and brother of Amilcar, Luis Cabral. He does refer to the delicacy of the political situation in his discussion with Donaldo Macedo published in 1987, when he first reveals a letter to Mario Cabral which was withheld from his Pedagogy in Process (a collection of letters written during his involvement in the country). The letter, written in 1977 whilst working in Guinea-Bissau, critiqued the government’s choice of Portuguese as a language of instruction because, he argued, Creole was a largely oral language (Freire and Macedo, 1987: 160–169):

The Portuguese language will come to establish a social division in the country, creating a small, privileged urban minority, as opposed to the oppressed majority of the populace. . . . While cultural action is political-pedagogical action that includes literacy, it is not always forced to revolve around literacy . . . it is necessary to work with communities in the ‘reading’ of their realities . . . [but] not all programs of action over reality initially imply learning the reading and writing of words.

The decolonialization of mentality is much more difficult to achieve than the physical expulsion of the colonialist. Sometimes the colonizers are thrown out but they remain culturally, because they have been assimilated into the minds of the people they leave behind.

This terrible presence haunts the revolutionary process, and, in some cases, it hinders the movement toward liberation . . . The ex-colonialized in many ways continue to be mentally and culturally colonized. (Freire and Macedo, 1987: 118)

A key element of Freire’s thinking was the importance of the unity between theory and praxis in the struggle for being human, something which he talks about in his introduction to Pedagogy in Process:

In the revolutionary perspective, the learners are invited to think. Being conscious, in this sense, is not simply a formula or a slogan. It is a radical form of being, of being human. It pertains to beings that not only know, but know that they know. The act of learning to read and write, in this instance, is a creative act that involves a critical comprehension of reality (Freire, 1978: 17).

Freire argued that the oppressed must be directly involved in the processes that determine the purpose of education. Yet that is not what happened in Guinea-Bissau. Rather, he accepted that the State could determine the agenda. In the period before independence, there had been an intimate and dialectical relationship between those involved in the process of education and the militants of the PAIGC. But in the aftermath, that intimate connection did not survive. Instead, the State assumed that it had the wisdom to know what was best – the ‘overall goals of national reconstruction’. Ideas about being human, of human emancipation, of freedom, of education being a political process – ideas associated with Cabral’s thinking – were no longer referred to and were replaced with the exigencies of national development. Freire seems to have accepted, contrary to his own argument, that in this instance, the State could determine the agenda, an agenda that increasingly posed as a technical one.

Thus the work that Freire and his team did in Guinea-Bissau appears to have been essentially the (unsuccessful ⁵ ) application of the methodology as a technology devoid of any reference to human emancipation. It raises some concerns about Freire’s influence in the African context. Freire argued, however, ‘It is one thing to write down concepts in books, but it is another to embody those concepts in praxis. Those things are showing themselves to be very challenging, but they continue to give me a sense of joy and satisfaction’ (quoted in Torres, 1990: 14).

São Tomé and Principe

In 1976, Freire and Elza moved to the newly independent island of São Tomé and began training officials in his method: ‘The new government administration maintained repressive control over the country, arguing it was to prevent counter-revolution’ (Barnes, 2018: 46). Freire and Elza wrote ‘Popular Culture Notebooks’ – a series of adult education books and primers (Freire and Macedo, 1987: 63). Speaking about São Tomé and Principe at this time, he said:

Its people and their leaders confront innumerable difficulties, among them the international price fluctuations of its principal product, cacao. They must overcome the inhibiting legacies of centuries of colonialism, among which is a shortage of national cadres able to confront the tasks essential to national reconstruction. (Freire, 1981: 30)

Whilst Freire insists that their approach meshed entirely with the new government’s objectives, the ‘Popular Education Notebooks’ include a number of clear warnings of what could happen if the people were not careful, suggesting that he had perhaps taken note of what had happened in Guinea-Bissau. For example, in one of the primers, they wrote:

The sacrifice of our struggle against colonialism would be useless if our independence meant only the replacement of colonialists by a privileged national minority. If this were so, our People would continue to be exploited by the dominant classes of the imperialist countries by means of the national minority. (Freire and Macedo, 1987: 82)

The literacy phase workbook also states, ‘We need to be watchful against those who are trying to bring back the system of the exploitation of the majority by the dominant minority. Now try to write about what you read and discussed’ (p. 72).

He says that the ‘Popular Culture Notebooks’ were ‘designed to meet the objective of the literacy campaign, namely, for the people to participate effectively as subjects in the reconstruction of their nation’ (Freire and Macedo, 1987: 65). For him, then, there was a necessity for the people to reflect critically on the colonial past and on the ‘present moment of reconstruction’ (p. 65), ‘so that by taking more and more history into their own hands, they can shape their history’:

Shaping history means being present and not merely represented. . . . That is the historical challenge facing the people and the revolutionary leadership in São Tomé and Principe in the current transitional period. It is my hope that both the people and their leaders will respond correctly to that challenge. (Freire, 1981: 29)

The notebooks emphasise the ability of everyone to think and to ground that in actual lived experience. They argue that the struggle continues after independence – it has not ended because the colonialists have lost. In ‘National Reconstruction’, Elza and Paulo write, ‘if we said that we have to create a new society it is because it does not happen by accident. For this reason, the national reconstruction is a struggle that continues’ (Freire and Macedo, 1987: 79), and liberation is a ‘permanent process’ (p. 66). Building this new society, they argue, will require unity, discipline, work and ‘vigilance, much vigilance, against the internal and external enemies, who will do anything they can to deter our struggle for the creation of a new society’ (p. 79). Freire comments

Obviously, the theme of the national reconstruction or the reinvention of the society of São Tomé is imposed by its present state. The game played with the words unity, discipline, work, and vigilance, which appear in a great number of slogans, was introduced to present them in a dynamic text preserving or recovering their most profound meaning (threatened by the uncritical character of clichés). (p. 80)

Africa’s influence on Freire

Freire’s direct engagement with Africa drew to a close in the second half of the 1980s. In 1989, he reflected on his involvement in a dialogue book with Antonio Faundez. As Viola (2022) points out, Freire constantly reflected on his own work and on critiques of it, and incorporated new insights into his later work; and his book with Faundez suggests that this process had already begun. It suggests that he had come to see much more clearly the difficulties of creating a new society, as he imagined it, post-independence:

We must acknowledge the extraordinary difficulties daily confronting the political leaders of a small country which has recently come out from beneath the colonial yoke. These leaders either accept, out of opportunism or by their own free choice, a neo-colonial policy, which keeps the country colonized (but with few responsibilities for the colonial power!), or they set out along the difficult path to independence. We should be under no illusions about how a young nation achieving independence comes into being in a situation of conflicting economic, ideological and political interests . . . by mentioning the difficulties confronting leaders . . . I am not claiming they are guiltless of the mistakes that have been made. (Freire and Faundez, 1989: 85–86)

Because oppression dehumanises both the oppressor and the oppressed, true human emancipation, according to Freire, requires the end of the system of oppression in its entirety. Only in this way can all people, everywhere, be liberated, be humanised (Freire, 1972). After his encounter with struggles in Africa, Freire argues that a number of things can go wrong in liberation struggles, for example, ‘you cannot have authoritarian tactics to materialise democratic dreams’ (Shor and Freire, 1987: 167). In other words, the struggle itself needs to prefigure that which it is struggling for. As he engaged with liberation struggles, Freire appears to have become increasingly concerned about revolutionary leaders (he often called them the ‘authoritarian left’) who departed from an emancipatory approach and demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to trust the ability of the people to think:

Insofar as they keep within themselves the myth of the natural incapacity of the masses, their tendency is one of mistrust, of refusing dialogue with those masses, and of holding to the idea that they are the only educators of the masses. (Freire, 1985: 163)

This kind of leadership sees itself as ‘exclusive owners of the truth’ (Horton and Freire, 1990: 112), and ‘tries to domesticate the people mechanically to a future the leadership knows a priori, but thinks the people are incapable of knowing’ (Freire, 1985: 82). And ‘by smothering the people’s capacity for conscious action, they . . . transform those people into simple objects to be manipulated’ (Freire, 1985: 161). The distrust in the thinking of the people leads to an emphasis on content, which they claim only they know:

They feel they belong to a special group in society . . . which ‘owns’ critical awareness as a ‘datum’. They feel as if they were already liberated, or invulnerable to domination, so that their sole task is to teach and liberate others. (Freire, 1994: 105)

Freire argued that revolutionary leaders have to go through ‘rebirth’; anyone who claims to side with the oppressed must renounce myths that are dear to them: ‘the myth of their superiority, of their purity of soul, of their virtues, their wisdom, the myth that they save the poor, the myth of the neutrality of the church, of theology, education, science, technology, the myth of their own impartiality’ (Freire, 1985: 123). This is because, ‘From these grow other myths: of the inferiority of other people, of their spiritual and physical impurity, and of the absolute ignorance of the oppressed’ (p. 123). Freire argues that ‘we can be authoritarian in sweet, manipulating and even sentimental ways’ (Shor and Freire, 1987: 91).

For Freire, this happens in the classroom, in the trade union, and in the slum, where it is ‘imperative to “fill” the “empty” consciousness that, according to this (authoritarian left) individual, the workers (or slumdwellers) do not have’ (Freire, 2014: 106). An emphasis on content is sometimes at the expense of action – which is, after all, the point: ‘reflection alone is not enough for the process of liberation. We need praxis or, in other words, we need to transform the reality in which we find ourselves’ (Davis and Freire, 1980: 59). This must be, he argues, communal, not individual. When the revolutionary vanguard does act, it tends to limit action to a single demand (e.g. a wage increase). Or it overrules the concrete demands of the people and substitutes them with something more far-reaching, but which has not yet come to the forefront of the people’s attention and is thus inauthentic (Aronowitz, 2012).

However, Freire also argued that to a large extent what had gone wrong in anti-colonial struggles was because of a misrecognition of the nature of oppression, and thus of the oppressor: the belief that to be free was to be like the colonialist. The new dominant class simply replaced the old colonialist. In his analysis, the replacement of colonial bureaucracies by new bureaucracies constituted a fundamental problem:

What I defend and recommend is a radical breach with colonialism, and an equally radical rejection of neocolonialism. I call for the defeat of the colonial bureaucracy, as I actually suggested to the governments of Angola, Bissau, and São Tomé and Principe (Freire, 1994: 167). ⁶

Freire argues that ‘the struggle to preserve independence once gained . . . is no less difficult than the struggle to gain independence in the first place’ (Freire & Faundez, 1989: 86). He discusses the problem of post-independence political leaders who become ‘remote from the popular masses, sometimes stifled by and in the inherited bureaucracy, and other times guided by an elitist authoritarian ideology, albeit in the name of the revolution’ (p. 86). In later work, Freire was deeply critical of the ‘party’ that lost its base in the masses:

No leftist party can remain faithful to its democratic dream if it falls into the temptation of rallying cries, slogans, prescriptions, indoctrination, and the untouchable power of leaderships . . . No leftist party can remain faithful to its democratic dream if it falls into the temptation of seeing itself as possessing a truth outside which there is no salvation, or if its leadership proclaims itself as the avant-garde edge of the working class. (Freire, 1997: 82)

Thus, Freire argued, ‘The struggle does not stop when the revolution is in power’ (Horton and Freire, 1990: 218). Over time he offered an increasingly scathing analysis of post-colonialism in his own country:

It is incredible how the dominant classes of this country, even in their most advanced capitalist sectors, repeat the habits and procedures that reek of colonialism.

The dominant classes’ arrogance in dealing with the popular classes – their contempt; their greed; their exploitation; their authoritarianism; their hypocritical discourse, shamelessly in opposition to their actions; and their unsustainable excuses for discrimination – has, over time, silenced or attempted to silence the Brazilian people. (Freire, 1996: 46)

The role of the revolutionary party, he argues, should be to facilitate careful critical reflection through dialogue on lived reality. Through this process, both the learner/oppressed and the animator/revolutionary leadership come to be ‘conscientised’ – that is, to understand the true nature of their lived reality, that it is the result of oppression; ‘we are able to know that we know’ (Shor and Freire, 1987: 99). But we also need to act on this reflection, in ways which can lead to the end of oppression and the rehumanising (emancipation) of everyone. Acting is the point; but this must be acting with critical reflection – that is, praxis.

Conclusion – where to now?

Freire’s engagement with Africa should be understood as a dialogue. We have explored how Freire was influenced by the rise of emancipatory thinking that characterised Africa during his lifetime, and through his own direct experience on the continent. Freire’s direct and indirect engagement with various countries in Africa appears to have had little lasting influence in post-independence countries, even though it is clear that his ideas were often met with enthusiasm in the upsurge of liberatory struggles and resonated with liberatory ideas on the continent in that period. Sadly, the rise of thinking freedom from within Africa (as elsewhere) was to go into decline for a period in the 1990s as neoliberal capitalism exerted its stronghold on political and economic policies with structural adjustment/austerity programmes that guaranteed immense wealth for the oligarchs and immiseration for the majority.

Freire saw neoliberalism as part of the ongoing imperialism of the West/North, both materially and ideologically:

We cannot continue to ignore reality. The countries of the North, formerly colonialists and today almost always imperialists, cannot continue to accuse those of the South, exploited and oppressed by their elites as well, for their high birth rates, supposed laziness or negligence, or intrinsic inferiority, which the North claims are the primary causes of their hunger.

We denounced these ideological interpretations of the elites – the rich countries and rich people – who, in reality, have been mercilessly punishing poor people and Third World countries with the wounds of economic-social inequalities, which determine the hunger of the world. This is indeed a scandal. (Freire, 1996: 246–247)

Where once the term ‘Africa’ was intimately associated with the ideas of freedom, the term has increasingly become associated with taxonomic identities (Manji, 2024). The downturn of the struggles was also reflected in the decline in interest in emancipatory politics and praxis, including interest in Freire as a political thinker. What remained was largely the adoption of his methodology with little connection with the idea of liberation.

But we are convinced that the story is not over. As Hountondji (1983) asserts,

In a word, through the history of our cultures, through their present greatness and misery and through our own sufferings, we can rediscover the adventure of a single and same humanity which has forever been seeking itself and which today more than ever must re-leam solidarity (p. 56).

We can do this in part through Freire’s ‘radical and uncompromising love, a love that seeks to humanise even the dehumaniser’ (Simpson and McMillan, 2008: 4); and through Fanon’s faith in humanity:

Through Fanon’s faith in humanity’s ability to overcome the hegemonic ordering of symbolic and material life, to apprehend the need to envision and then fashion liberatory praxis, we come to understand the need for decoloniality at every level of thought and action. (Parris, 2018: 116–117)

This does not require waiting for the right moment for a revolution. It also, quite emphatically, means asserting the ability of everyone to think, being open to dialogic thought, and rejecting identity politics. If emancipatory praxis is, as Freire argues, political practices informed by reflection (Aronowitz, 2012) – then we can begin that process right here, right now.