School textbooks now teach the Colonial War in a more impartial way, but “the version of the colonized peoples and the liberation movements” is missing, Miguel Monteiro, a retired professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, told Lusa.
“In the textbooks I know, there has been rigor, although there is still little visibility of the voices of the peoples of Africa, whose theme has been much addressed by Military History,” the director of the Master’s Degree in History Teaching at the Institute of Education of the University of Lisbon, in partnership with the Faculty of Letters of Lisbon (FLUL), told Lusa.
According to Miguel Monteiro, this topic has been covered more in depth in higher education, particularly in the context of studies on the Estado Novo, or in colloquiums. However, in schools, there have been initiatives to talk more about the Colonial War, particularly through testimonies that come into direct contact with students and give them a first-hand insight into the times of the war.
This has been a long road over these 50 years of freedom, because before, the subject “wasn’t even taught in schools, it was almost taboo,” he said.
“Many school textbooks were biased, politicized, with serious errors. Contemporary history itself was poorly taught and treated in a biased way,” he said.
However, 50 years after April 25, there is now “the serenity to talk about past events with compassionate eyes and less emotion [to the skin]”.
“We don’t have so much intolerance anymore,” he said.
School textbooks have kept pace with this evolution, he explained, and have greatly improved their scientific accuracy “when a certification system was created, requested by publishers from universities, to improve historical content”, although “there are still scientific errors”.
For the FLUL professor, one of the main challenges in teaching Portuguese colonial history is to “make a history that is free of both sides”. For this to happen, “cooperation [between Portugal and the former colonies] has to be transparent, without complexes”.
He also mentioned that there are archives, such as the Army’s, with “kilometers of poorly studied information”, or those of the countries that were colonized, and, he argued, analyzing them would be interesting for teaching the subject, not least because “in current textbooks there is little on the version of the colonized peoples and liberation movements”.
