Jonna Katto is a a cultural and gender studies researcher. She was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in African Studies at Ghent University, 2019-2021. She has also been a Postdoctoral Researcher in African Cultural Studies at the University of Helsinki (Finland) and a Research Affiliate at the Center for African Studies at the Eduardo Mondlane University. Author of Women’s Lived Landscapes of War and Liberation in Mozambique: Bodily Memory and the Gendered Aesthetics of Belonging (Routledge, 2019), she has also written on emotions in history telling and the sensory aesthetics of food memories. Her current research focuses on time and change in African gendered histories, and especially on the ways that the deeper past echoes and is reworked in oral history encounters in the present.
View Jonna Katto’s publications
Contact: jonna.katto@helsinki.fi
Helena Baide was born in Chiconono, in the district of Muembe. She is the granddaughter of Chief Ce-N’tamila II. During the 10-year liberation struggle against Portuguese colonial rule, Helena served as a soldier in the Female Detachment (DF) of FRELIMO. She is a founding member of the Mozambican Organization for Women (OMM), and even today she still takes an active part in their work as an honorary member.
Helena has always had a keen interest in history and that is how she started working with Jonna. First they worked on the life historical memories of female ex-combatants of the liberation struggle, interviewing members of the DF about their life historical memories. After this, they moved to older oral history to look at female figures of authority in the more distant past.
Domingos Aly is from N’kalapa, district of Mavago. A teacher by profession since 1991, he has worked at the Paulo Samuel Kankhomba and Cristiano Paulo Taimo Secondary Schools, where he taught design and descriptive geometry as well as mathematics and physics. From the year 2000, he has collaborated in the Bilingual Program in the production of teaching manuals. His training on the standardisation of writing in Ciyaawo was guided by Professor Armindo S. A. Ngunga. Domingos Aly is co-author of the alphabetisation books Naciloongola, for 3rd Class reading, and Dilaanguka. He has also participated in the translation and adaptation of mathematics and natural science manuals, as well as teachers’ manuals. His literary name is ‘Asimudiile Ali’.
‘I confess that in a first phase I decided to embrace the GENHIS-AFRICA Project purely out of material interests. But after I had the opportunity to listen to the interviews, my thinking changed and I now consider it a priceless opportunity to get to know the history of my people—a history for which I have deep admiration.’
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 797440.
