To Maria Paula Meneses, the great African anthropologist

There is something rebellious, something critical, something noble, and something poetic in his writing.

March 16, 2026

Ángeles Castaño Madroñal

I want to write with clarity about the person Maria Paula Meneses was and the work she has left us. For over a year, I have resisted writing a single word that could be perceived as a premature farewell.

Because the friendship I shared with Paula will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Photo: Nuria González. UPV/EHU.

Paula was a star with her own light. Just approaching her was enough to perceive her radiance and her warmth. And a brief conversation was enough to surrender to the fascination of knowledge rooted in a long and profound experience. The first time I met her, she had just begun her journey, the most important scientific project that will ever be undertaken again at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, the ALICE project (Strange Mirrors, Unforeseen Lessons: Leading Europe to a New Way of Sharing World Experiences), directed by Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Please allow me this rhetorical license we Andalusians have, the double negative, to definitively and categorically put something to rest: this is not redundancy or hyperbole, it is an absolute certainty that makes a pronouncement, a time that will never again exist in the eyes of present-day mortals.

A unique project and a superb team. It was at a farewell lunch following a scientific working session for another CES project I was involved in. Like so many other moments in their company, it has remained etched in my memory, on that shelf of life's treasures, of the astonishing because it is unique. That place, which I imagine we all have, where the ineffable is captured to anchor its essential weight in memory.

I remember her fluent conversation in several languages, or rather, in a language made up of many languages, explaining things that we, the diners from various countries seated near her, could understand. We were engaged in a relaxed yet intense and deeply interesting conversation. She possessed a capacity I've only occasionally encountered in educated, well-traveled African women: the creative ability to communicate across cultures with a transborder, transcultural language, capable of shifting from one register to another with astonishing ease.

That language, a blend of experience and the desire to communicate with others, overflowing with creative imagination and oral skill. A form that can only be composed of one's own intense, embodied experience, making orality a patchwork capable of sustaining the shared moment without leaving anyone out. Only an African woman can do that, or at least, I have only found it in exceptional women from the contexts found there.

She spoke of her life and ethnographic experience in Mozambique, of her student life in Russia and the United States, and of her research trips to Goa, responding to our increasingly surprised inquiries with a naturalness as if it were the most common thing among mortals. I assumed that a cultured and academically committed Mozambican woman shares the common African notion that traveling the world to find a place to express and use one's voice is almost an obligatory debt to one's roots. At a table, surrounded by Spaniards, Portuguese, English, a German, and a Uruguayan, this African woman was undoubtedly a unique case. Or at least, for me, she was a unique case, a unique person, as difficult to find in the academic arena as finding a date palm in the Mediterranean today.

Over time, a friendship developed, rooted in deep mutual respect and affection. This led to numerous encounters and long conversations, allowing me to learn about and discover aspects of her life of struggle, from her youth, for individual and collective rights in her homeland. A life so passionately driven by her convictions could only lead, in someone as intelligent as her, to the fruitful development of a groundbreaking body of work that opened new horizons for anthropology, firmly rooted in the people and culture of her birthplace and the contexts in which they lived and worked. This work, the product of a lifetime of professional achievement, illuminated the theory of Epistemologies of the South, while simultaneously receiving its radiance. It is a scientific paradigm that provides anthropology with the foundations and tools to sculpt the dignity of colonial liberation struggles and the struggles of the oppressed.

In a world that, in this 21st century, is re-emerging new dehumanizing and exterminating imperialisms and colonialisms, thanks to new communication technologies and weaponry, the anthropology within the Epistemologies of the South, which María Paula Meneses has developed alongside Boaventura de Sousa Santos, is a cornerstone for understanding, within this paradigm, the immeasurable diversity of human plasticity and its value in the struggles for existence and human dignity. But at the same time, the Epistemologies of the South are for 21st-century anthropology the breath of fresh air needed for this science to recover its health in this ailing millennium, to rediscover the fundamental value of the diversity toward which it was directed from its origins, amidst the colonial machinations of knowledge-power within the disciplinary interstices of its own Western power system.

María Paula Meneses's anthropology represented African wisdom, a vital force for a discipline prematurely aged by the prostitution of its essential value: the recognition of the diversity and cultural specificity of human groups and societies. This prostitution has been driven by new trends in the suicidal globalization of a science prostituted by the capital that funds it. It is a sterile anthropology, a product of Western colonial science that perpetuates itself in the ways of seeing this century. On the raft of Epistemologies of the South, all the struggles against colonial exclusions and dispossessions—struggles that have been erased from the archives of history so that no one can ever find them—can float.

For this reason, she placed the cornerstone of her work in Mozambique. Because Paula has been, and is, above all, a situated and deeply rooted anthropologist. Her work brilliantly demonstrates that we are in the presence of the most brilliant African anthropologist of this historical moment, when in social and cultural anthropology it is truly rare to find something genuinely original contributing to our understanding of the diversity of human beings and what they share. And this has been the great pillar of this anthropologist's work in the "Epistemologies of the South" and her great contribution to contemporary anthropology.

I could never have been luckier than our paths crossing. I learned without even going there, things I never would have learned at any university, on any retreat, in any academic temple where the mini-gods never leave the facade on which they are carved. Perhaps because border people, like her, possess knowledge from a threshold that very few reach. Even more so in academia and science, where this nature is neither understood nor have tools been developed to address it. And I have always been drawn to borders. Not to study their boundaries, but to transcend them and cross them, transgressing their phantasmagoria.

Perhaps this dedication explains her ability to bridge the gap between the nine languages ​​she could speak, five of them European. She spoke several with almost native fluency, creating an inclusive and communicative space for anyone who wanted to understand. Her ethnographies in Mozambique and Goa, and her far-reaching and long-standing studies of Portugal's postcolonial relations with its Lusophone colonial territory, have significantly contributed to expanding the field of (anti-)colonial studies and the contributions of knowledge to the struggle, especially those of women, who are always forgotten in the dehumanizing colonial contexts.

There is something rebellious, something critical, something noble, and something poetic in her writing. As a spirit that wisely reconstructs its essence from complex battles fought—political, personal, professional, emotional, and spiritual—she probably also weaves into her voice and her writing the gem of all the crystallizations of an exciting and misunderstood life.

Paula's writing embodies the poetics of the senses, something so genuinely African, carrying from flavors to knowledge the epistemic ground of the African women fighters she encountered in her ethnographic encounters. Her Facebook page is a vibrant tapestry of incredible African knowledge and ingenuity—political, economic, productive, artistic, musical, textile, aromatic, chromatic—as her 2,129 friends know well. But what is truly astonishing is that this same essence was present in her lectures, her writings, her classes, her office, her home, her family, and her heart. She was able to bring her fight for the invisible into every space she inhabited. With a sagacity, intelligence, know-how, and mastery of language unlike anything I had ever witnessed before.

And she carried and brought, like seashells in this sea of ​​the senses, the gifts of friendship that only an African woman knows how to share. Multicolored African textiles from the souks where she wandered with her heart ended up in the hands of her dearest friends. But the best of all has always been her warmth, her stories, and her hospitality. And the curiosity and inquisitiveness in the brilliant and lengthy conversations about the contemporary problems of this madness that seems to dominate our present. Those conversations that I miss so much and will miss dearly. Where the connection was often filled with mutual understanding, because no more words were needed. She is a person whom, I think I can say, I see, whom I have seen. Beyond the material appearance that makes us mortal.

She has dedicated one of her life's greatest efforts to training young researchers capable of independent and critical thinking. She always keeps in mind that they are the future of an aging academy whose pillars and frameworks are outdated, worn, and reek of decay. Yet, she always conveys that the future exists, and that they are the ones who embody it, the hope that something better can emerge.

In the coming months, a monumental two-volume work compiling her complete oeuvre, Moçambique eo Sul Global. Uma perspectiva a partir das Epistemologias do Sul (Mozambique and the Global South: A Perspective Based on the Epistemologies of the South) , will be published by Almedina. In the first volume, Teoría e História (Theory and History) , Paula establishes, from an interdisciplinary perspective, a methodology based on relationships and the recognition of knowledge held by local professionals. This methodology represents the future of historical-anthropological research, and I can affirm that it is relevant not only for her Moçambique, the world she has studied, but also for the diverse onto-epistemological realities that constitute humanity. In the second volume, As ecologías de saberes (The Ecology of Knowledge ), she articulates three fundamental axes that, in themselves, represent the pillars of existence and survival for any society, though specifically as they are presented in her Moçambique: the ecology of legal knowledge, medical knowledge, and environmental knowledge.

The study of the complex relationships between scientific and popular-community-indigenous knowledge systems; understanding knowledge as a living entity where epistemes converge in everyday practices between the human and the natural, intimately linked. A monumental contribution that articulates history and anthropology in an innovative and unique way, which, at this moment in history, where the human is becoming blurred in the reign of objects and machines, represents one of the greatest contributions to the revitalization of anthropological science.

And although the verse “ there is no greater expanse than my wound ” by Miguel Hernández, the poet of the pain caused by murderous violence and the suffering of the innocent, resonates in my heart, I intend here to highlight a singular genius, whose legacy will leave an impact that the brutal blows of academic racism will not be able to hide.

We live in a type of society that tends to reproduce various forms of violence within institutions, perpetrated collectively, which kill indirectly and facilitate the invisibility of those who commit them. New technologies not only facilitate this, but also allow the perpetrators of slander and unfounded defamation to hide in technological anonymity and within the very institutions whose legal and ethical mechanisms they exploit for their own benefit. Academic violence is the most refined, but it is no less irrational and inhumane than any other.

I don't know if this is the right time, place, or location. But I cannot ignore the damage that has broken her heart and shattered her fighting spirit, with the barbarity that so often reigns in academia. Dominated once again today by the extremist savagery of our times: the patriarchal racism practiced by pseudo-feminist academics who don't realize they aren't feminists. Capable, like colonialists wielding the whip, of pushing aside Black men and women who stand in the way of their fatuous upward trajectory, when, like her, they confront and challenge their excesses with the utmost honesty and frankness. The brutality of the most destructive and cruel patriarchy, which only women who don't know they aren't feminists are capable of wielding and reproducing in the most vicious violence of academic power—unjust and cannibalistic.

And I don't leave it behind, because I can't, because there is no justice. Because of the undignified and inhumane silence maintained at the center where she worked. Where, despite the open lines of investigation, they hypocritically fail to put theory into practice in the defense of human rights and social justice for the most vulnerable people in the very place where they operate. As, in fact, has been the collective social injustice committed against Paula Meneses.

And all I can do here is write my heartfelt, friendly embrace, along with my rebellious cry for what will never be fully repaired. No, not in this academy that remains dominated by patriarchal, racist, colonial women and men.

I can imagine her terror, the kind only those who have experienced racism firsthand can truly understand. So vulnerable and defenseless; perhaps she felt and relived the horror of her youth? Could she have felt alive again, yet paralyzed beneath the weight of a dead soldier's body, as she felt in that ditch, where hardly anyone else remained alive beside her? I can imagine and feel her shock. For when you believe you are among comrades in the struggle (academic?), to be surprised by the racism of those you assumed were colleagues can be, as it has been, deadly.

And no one has apologized for the profound pain unjustly inflicted upon her. Nor for the heartbreak inflicted on her family and friends. No one at her workplace has had the honesty to apologize for participating in the shameful witch hunt. No one has resigned for the disastrous handling of the situation. No judge has apologized for succumbing to media manipulation. No journalist has written an article of repentance retracting their flawed investigative reporting. No feminist academic has denounced the infamy of the murderous falsehoods against an African colleague. They remain prisoners of fear. The fear of the practical absence of rights, the fear of the cyber mob. The fear of fear itself. And all of these elements contribute to the mediocrity of this society, which makes us more vulnerable, more exposed, weaker, more prey to barbarism.

Paula left us this past February 8th. And we will continue here, building with the stones she carved. So that new generations may receive some of the brilliance that emanates from emotional reason, the most intelligent kind.

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