Goodbye to María Paula Meneses Gutierrez
With deep sadness, CLACSO bids farewell to María Paula Meneses Gutierrez, a dear friend and admired colleague, born in Mozambique, Africa, on April 8, 1963.
A lifetime dedicated to her passion for critical thinking, history, and anthropology. She was a brilliant intellectual. Voices of women from the Global South like yours are essential in the current geopolitical context to defend the peoples of the Global South and recognize within them the wellsprings of wisdom.
In 1989, she began her academic career at Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, where she later taught. She earned her master's degree in history from St. Petersburg University (Russia) and her doctorate in anthropology from Rutgers University (USA).
Since 2004, she moved to Portugal and served as a professor and research coordinator at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) at the University of Coimbra, where she dedicated herself to the training of thesis students and to teaching in various doctoral programs.
A specialist in Epistemologies of the South and postcolonial debates in the African context, he undertook the critique of official history and the construction of memory and other contemporary identity processes.
In the spring of 2014, María Paula visited us at CLACSO to design the co-creation project of the South-South University within the virtual space of the Postgraduate Specialization and International Course in Epistemologies of the South. This project was developed between 2015 and 2023 in collaboration with CES and CODESRIA, and was offered in two official languages: Spanish and Portuguese, in conjunction with the coordinator of the South-South Program, Karina A. Bidaseca. She also co-coordinated the Working Group on Epistemologies of the South and participated in the publication of the book Epistemologias do Sul by CLACSO (2018) https://libreria.clacso.org/publicacion.php?p=1487&c=0, as well as the CLACSO Conferences in Bogotá (2019) and Mexico City (2022).
In an interview with Martin Granvosky for CLACSO TV, she spoke about CLACSO's role in alliances between countries of the Global South, Africa's place in the world, and her research work with the Memory Commissions in Mozambique. "If we don't open up history, the same mistakes can happen again," she said.
Between 2023 and 2025, she coordinated the two cohorts of our Diploma program: "Souths that allow (re)existences. Current debates on decolonization."
Throughout her career she has published numerous books in various countries: Mozambique, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Senegal, the United States, England, Argentina, Germany, the Netherlands and Colombia: The Mozambique of Written Words (2008) —with Margarida Calafate Ribeiro—, The Wars of Liberation and Colonial Dreams (2014), Mozambique on the Move: challenges and reflections (2018) —accompanied by Sheila Pereira Khan and Bjrn Enge Berstelsen—, Knowledge Born in Struggles (2018) and Epistemologies of the South (2018), among others.
Doing justice to his name, his legacy and his memory will continue to live on for us, for the present and future generations.
May his spirit rise in peace.
Karina Bidaseca
