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This is an analysis of the authors involvement since 1970 in textbook development for primary schools and adult education in Mozambique, focusing on integrating local cultural traditions, covering the period up to 2013. As main example, addition of the type 8+5=13 is used around the question of whether textbooks (and curricula) advocate counting strategies and/or computation strategies. Different visualisations of these strategies in textbooks and corresponding manipulatives are analysed. During the 1990s, local languages started to be used in adult education, apart from Portuguese, Mozambiques official language. Unschooled adults showed the importance of verbal computation in Mozambican languagesBantu languagesmost of which use also the auxiliary base five, apart from the base-ten numerals. The 2003 curriculum for primary education introduced the possibility of using local languages, and NGOs started translating textbooks into 16 Mozambican languages. The paper includes an analysis of some of these textbooks and concludes with the authors ideas in his teachers guides on teaching mathematics in Mozambican languages, showing the opportunities of verbal computation, exploring base-five numerals supported by finger gestures, instead of finger counting.