Medical Cooperantes in Mozambique, Adapting and Contributing to a Socialist Primary Health Care 1970–1985

Abstract Immediately after Mozambique’s independence in 1975, the Mozambican Liberation Front ( frelimo ) started shaping the country’s new health services by announcing the nationalisation of all health care facilities and by adopting primary health care. As Portuguese doctors left Mozambique at the end of the colonial era, fewer than a hundred remained after independence. Doctors and nurses soon came from Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Guinea-Conakry and Italy. These medical professionals were called cooperantes in Portuguese. Those coming from state socialist countries were sent by their governments as a gesture of solidarity with the young nation. Those coming from Western countries were often left-wing militants committed to creating an alternative health system and to contribute to the revolution. Mozambique was seen as a place particularly well suited to the creation of a revolutionary medical utopia: with almost all the “capitalist” doctors gone, the new health services could be built from scratch. But the transformation ambition went beyond its borders. Together with the Mozambican Ministry of Health, the cooperantes became major disseminators of the Mozambican health experience abroad, actively seeking to influence the debate on international health care priorities and solutions. This paper aims to interrogate the cooperantes ’ experiences, to characterise their contribution to the Mozambican health services, and to explore how they adapted to the orientations of the Mozambican health authorities and to the constraints and shortages of the Mozambican context.