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Angola EDUCATION
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Students at a secondary school in Luanda
Conditions Before Independence
African access to educational opportunities was highly
limited
for most of the colonial period. Until the 1950s,
facilities run by
the government were few and largely restricted to urban
areas.
Responsibility for educating Africans rested with Roman
Catholic
and Protestant missions
(see Religious Life
, this ch.). As
a
consequence, each of the missions established its own
school
system, although all were subject to ultimate control by
the
Portuguese with respect to certain policy matters.
Education beyond the primary level was available to
very few
Africans before 1960, and the proportion of the age group
that went
on to secondary school in the early 1970s was still quite
low.
Nevertheless, primary school attendance was growing
substantially.
Whether those entering primary schools were acquiring at
least
functional literacy in Portuguese was another matter.
Primary
school consisted of a total of four years made up of a
pair of twoyear cycles. Portuguese statistics do not indicate how
many
students completed each of the cycles, but it is estimated
that far
fewer completed the full four years than entered the first
cycle.
Similarly, there seems to be general agreement among
observers that
a great number of those who entered secondary school did
not
complete it. In general, the quality of teaching at the
primary
level was low, with instruction carried on largely by
Africans with
very few qualifications. Most secondary school teachers
were
Portuguese, but the first years of secondary school were
devoted to
materials at the primary level.
Data as of February 1989
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![[JPEG]](http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/angola/ao02_06a.jpg)
