MUFUNDZICI: aquele que faz estudar, que ensina, professor

Abstract

This study analyzes the professional development associated with university teaching, based on the first professors of the Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM) in Maputo, Mozambique. The objectives encompass how processes of appropriation and attribution of values and meanings to family, childhood, traditions, and politics occur. It also presents the individual perspective of transformative agents of education, through the methodology of oral life history, based on interviews conducted with pioneering UEM professors shortly after the country's Independence in 1975, within a context of profound social and political transformation marked by national reconstruction and the tensions of civil war. The central questions were: Who are these professors? What happened in their life trajectories that made them professors? Why are they considered important intellectuals in the construction of the "new man" — a concept linked to the ideal of the revolutionary citizen and the formation of a post-colonial national identity? From these findings, narratives were extracted that unveiled concepts related to Africanities, education, and teacher training, highlighting socially, culturally, and politically experienced situations that enabled their construction, constitution, and professional development, thereby guiding, transforming, and intervening in reality. This study contributes to promoting new knowledge and wisdom rooted in African matrices. Furthermore, it demonstrates how this same perspective intertwined the collective context with the vision of State and Education, as well as their social and economic interactions, in light of teacher training situated within a scenario marked by wars, pain, grief, hunger, yet also by certainties, victories, and uncertainties.