Brazilian missionaries in Angola

popular education, memory and experience

Abstract

This article presents reflections about intercultural practices in Angola (Africa), narrated in 2008 by thirty religious women from the Congregation of Franciscan Catechist Sisters in the year that the Congregation celebrated 25 years of missionary presence among several people of the Angolan country: Bantu, Kikongo, Umbunto, Ibinda, among others. There are eighty narratives altogether, published in a notebook entitled Cores da vida: 25 anos de presença em Angola. In Walter Benjamin’s perspective, these religious women are reportedly narrators, and their narratives were permeated by the learner’s memory, built up into experiences. The substance of each narrative is the experience that was being constructed by elements of life experiences, of what happened, of what was seen and heard, as well as what was narrated subjectivity, which is rooted in objectivity. It is concluded that the remembrance of intercultural practices, enlightened by the principles of Theology of Freedom and of the Franciscans, became the face of popular education. In this sense, in the scope of understanding the experience of the narrators, this article aims to relate such experience to the popular education in general and, especially, in connection to Paulo Freire’s thinking, which gained strength in the 1960s decades.