Mozambican academic, professor, radical thinker, researcher, epistemologist, historian and anthropologist Maria Paula Meneses has died in Portugal, where she lived and worked, following an illness, leaving the academic community in Mozambique, South Africa, Portugal and across the Global South in mourning.

The information was confirmed on Sunday afternoon by several sources, including students, lecturers and friends, who shared tributes on social media, describing the late scholar as one of the academics and researchers who made the greatest contributions to the social sciences and to humanity through her research and the training of new generations of thinkers.

Maria Paula Meneses was born in Maputo, Mozambique. She held a PhD in Anthropology from Rutgers University (United States) and a Master’s degree in History from St Petersburg University (Russia).

She was a lecturer at Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM) and was most recently a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, where she was a member of the research group on Democracy, Citizenship and Law. Her research covered post-colonial debates, legal pluralism — with particular emphasis on relations between the State and “traditional authorities” in the African context — and the role of official history, memory and “other” histories in reclaiming a broader sense of belonging within contemporary identity processes, engaging primarily within the African geopolitical space. She was Director of the first doctoral programme in Post-colonial Studies in Europe, the Doctoral Programme in Post-colonialism at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra.

Reacting to the news, Mozambican researcher Boaventura Monjane wrote on his official Facebook page: “I was still very young — bold, but deeply inexperienced. More of an activist than an academic, I carried many certainties about the world and little evidence to support them. It was then that Professor Maria Paula Meneses welcomed me. She believed in me when I myself did not yet know who I might become. She invited me to walk the arduous, but necessary, paths of critical thinking, demanding reading and methodical writing, to think academically and politically with rigour.”

Meanwhile, Mozambican writer and poet Sérgio Raimundo, currently living in Portugal, said: “We are completely orphaned: our dear Maria Paula Meneses has died; one of the most brilliant Mozambican intellectuals. A beautiful young woman, so radiant, who spent time speaking about the future! She faced, with great courage and without a single complaint, in her final days, so many voices that hurled blame after blame at her.”

Maria Paula Meneses was one of the most influential African anthropologists of recent decades. A specialist in the anthropology of legal pluralism, the anthropology of health, and local memories and global history, she was co-author of Epistemologies of the South, a work that is internationally known and widely recognised.