Using the Center for African Studies (CAS) at Eduardo Mondlane University as an example, this article analyzes the social conditions of knowledge production and legitimization of the post-independence Mozambican State, during the period of "socialist transition". The thesis of the article is that the processes of knowledge production in a context of national state-building generated dynamics that challenged the assumptions on which the CAS should have produced social science. For example, in producing a type of research program that not only took into account their function as policy-oriented research, but also in identifying and questioning the very process of scientific production. These inter-relationships between knowledge production and legitimization of the state, could then explain not only the specificities of the CAS, but also the emergence of a new form of socio-scientific questioning in post-independence Mozambique.
Organic intellectual; social sciences; critical engagement