Access to Higher Education in Mozambique: Between Historical Injustices and Struggles for the Right to Education

Abstract

This article analyzes the mediations of ethnicity and social class in the process of democratization of access to higher education (HE) in Mozambique as part of public policies. Such a model, to include the Whole, strictly respected the income criteria, without adopting the ethnic criterion that would contemplate the populations of the central and northern regions of the country. Based on the statistical data provided by the Mozambican Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, in the period between 2010 and 2020, we seek to sustain the thesis that, considering the pattern of Mozambican ethnic relations, producer of ethnic/regional asymmetries among groups with specific ethnic marks, ethnic inequalities have in political power their offensive and powerful motto, at the same time that isolated social class is insufficient in the understanding and overcoming of the ethnic problem in HE. The results point out that the discriminatory and institutional mechanisms experienced in the context of HE do not undermine the importance of the idea of its expansion, inclusion and democratization of its spaces; ethnicity, in its political and cultural biases, operates in a relational and independent way with social class in the context of production of regional and ethnic asymmetries in Mozambique in access to HE.