Why is the project "Educação Bilingue" so difficult to establish?

Tecnical reasons.

One obstacle is that there are many local languages. Another obstacle is, that there were no research in the languages before independence in 1975. Most of the languages did not have an authorized ortography until a seminar on ortography in 1989. The written material in the languages were very scarce and in some case missing.

Psycological reasons.

During the colonial time and the first part of independence, the policy was intentionally to give the national languages a very low status - any development had to be made by means of Portuguese. It was told that Portuguese pointed towards the future and the "dialectos" pointed backwards. This has been indoctrinated from 1940, and it is not easy to change such a mentality.

Political reasons.

The Portuguese has allways been the language of the elite - the language of power - both before and after independence. To strengthen the national languages can be seen as a threat to the establishment, and there is no real interest from the authorities to promote the "Educação Bilingue", and foreign support must be negociated with these very same authorities.