CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 1
LITERACY MODEL OF THE MAUBERE PEDAGOGY Antero Benedito da Silva
This brief article derives from a large thesis on FRETLIN popular education from 1974 to 1978, and is on the FRETILIN and RDTL I struggle to combat obscurantism, a colonial policy to keep the majority of the Timorese people from the progress of science. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines obscurantism as “an opposition to the spread of knowledge or a policy of withholding knowledge from the general public” (“Obscurantism”, n. d.). This concept was commonly used by FRETILIN to characterize the Portuguese colonial education system. For example, in an interview with Bill Nicol in 1975, FRETILIN leader Roque Rodrigues, ‘Maubenko’, argued that the Portuguese colonialism had used illiteracy as a weapon: “a struggle against illiteracy is a struggle against mindlessness… The colonial state used the educational system to polarize the people’s creativity and to suffocate the Timorese culture” (as cited in Nicol, 2002, p. 162). The term is also found in the FRETILIN Political Program (point eleven) which says: “Therefore FRETILIN will initiate a rigorous literacy campaign, a teaching method that is truly liberating, which in turn would go liberate our people from 500 years of obscu20
