what is Mozambican literature?

Yes, it is well known that there is a postcolonial, Portuguese-speaking Mozambican literature, illustrated by one name at least, Mia Couto. But how Mia Couto is to the literary traditions of the country is much more difficult question. There is a plurality of languages that the Portuguese used to call landins, and this is what Mia Couto tries to reflect; a lot of his literary fortune had been made through incrustation of the transcontinental Portuguese with all those local ingredients. But on the other hand, the country has a long history, both colonial and non-colonial. Already at the time when the Portuguese first arrived here during their circumnavigation of Africa, in search of the maritime passage to India, the country formed a periphery of the Islamic world, with its own traditions of literacy. 

I have read

Mia Couto, Mulheres de cinzas (2015), A confissão da leoa (2012), O Último voo do flamingo (2000), Um rio chamado tempo, uma casa chamada terra (2002) 
Paulina Chiziane, Niketche: uma história de poligamia (2001)
Luís Bernardo Honwana, Nós matamos o Cão-Tinhoso (1964)

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I have written

Mia Couto and his African context: Invention of an origin

​Ondjaki's Classmates Read Honwana. Towards a Transcolonial Theory

​Written exercises. Ancestral magic and emergent intellectuals in Mia Couto, Lhoussain Azergui and Dorota Masłowska

​History, faith and manners. (Reading the Mozambican interviews of Tânia Reis Alves)

killing the dog

Nós Matámos o Cão Tinhoso, Luis Bernardo Honwana's most famous short story, published in Lourenço Marques (the present-day Maputo) in 1964 and translated into English as soon as 1969, was one of the few texts produced in the Portuguese colonial Africa to reach the international audience so quickly. This concise, first-person narration presents the pattern of relations in the colonial school, whose primary aim is to inscribe the disciples in the pyramidal structure of dependence, as well as in the symbolic order dictated by the Portuguese “civilizing mission” operating, in the first place, by exclusion. Exclusive civilizing implies not only the elimination of the mangy dog loitering near the school, but also the creation of a symbolic boundary between the schoolboys as the members of the defective elite of assimilados, and the rest of the local society. Acting as an imperial agent, the school administrator not only requires the extermination of the dog; he also inscribes and stabilizes the young assimilados in their position of servitude, isolating them, binding them all together, as well as subordinating them to the colonial order.
The request emitted by the authority slowly drifts down the hierarchy, till a group of disciples is charged with its execution. The very fact of receiving the mandate, even before its realization, is an important step in the “coming of age” of those adolescents. Some promises are in the air, such as that of turning a blind eye to their poaching activities. No wonder that already at the moment of taking the dog to the forest where the execution should take place, the schoolboys behave arrogantly and aggressively towards the non-assimilated children (moleques), perceiving the increase of their social stance. Finally, the act of killing the dog prepares them for the role of unconditional executors of the colonial violence, also against each other. The fact that the coherence of the group is broken, as Ginho (the narrator) protests against the killing, does not undermine the efficiency of the projected training; on the contrary, reinforces it. Precisely for having protested, Ginho is obliged to fire the first shot. His identification with the animal victim, whose blue eyes have been interpreted as a mark of the assimilado himself, makes of him the executioner and the harmed all in one. The scene of killing the dog culminates in a nearly-human moan, coming indistinctly from the dog and the child.
The independence, in Mozambique as elsewhere in Africa, multiplied the problems as if in a fractal refraction of the former, colonial forms of violence. History proved the pertinence, even a prophetic dimension of Honwana's diagnosis. Describing the efficient paramilitary formation that the boys spontaneously adopt while conducing their victim to the forest, the writer anticipates many an African tragedy yet to come. Twelve appears indeed as the perfect number of adolescent soldiers: seven in a front line with their guns ready to shoot; one in the middle, without a gun, to lead the victim; two on the one side; another two on the other side, scouring the vegetation along the road; also these four armed. This band of adolescents is fully operational and ready to take assignments. Their colonial training prepared them to serve the authority, any authority, as soon as it provides them with a licence to kill. The youngsters gladly accept it, be it for poaching or any other adventure. Killing the Mangy Dog is just a gloomy beginning.



Luís Bernardo Honwana, Nós Matámos o Cão Tinhoso, Lourenço Marques, Sociedade de Imprensa de Moçambique, 1964.

(Fragment of my essay Ondjaki's Classmates Read Honwana. Towards a Transcolonial Theory, World Literature and the Postcolonial: Narratives of (Neo)Colonialization in a Globalized World, Elke Sturm-Trigonakis (ed.), Metzler, 2020, p. 171-180.)

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history, faith and manners
​(reading the Mozambican interviews of Tânia Reis Alves) 

It has always been difficult for me to make any sense of Mozambique. It is paradoxically due to the secret resemblance between this country and my own. I was born in the communist Poland, that was on the same side of the global divide throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the crucial decades of Mozambican history. Right now, as I read the collection of interviews with some of the country's most significant figures, published by the Portuguese journalist Tânia Reis Alves, I know not what to do with many of the episodes narrated. The similarities are hard to overlook, not only in the general tone in which these people speak, tainted with the same ideology I knew since my childhood, but also in specific details and anecdotes, such as waiting many hours in a queue, just to see if any basic food product would be distributed, or the story of a Marxist-Leninist instructor in a hurry to finish his lesson on materialism, because he had to take his children to catechesis. The Mozambican writer Mia Couto tells it in Portuguese just as many people might tell it in Polish: passámos o tempo a falar sobre a alienação religiosa, o ópio do povo, por oposição a uma ideia marxista e, portanto, materialista do Homem. Quando chegou às quatro da tarde, o homem olhou para o relógio e disse: "Bom, vou ter de interromper. Tenho de ir levar os meus filhos à catechese" (p. 54). Or later on, when he approves the reforms of the president Joaquim Chissano who admitted, for the first time since the advent of the communism in the country, some principles of the market economy: inaugurou a possibilidade da existência dos pequenos negócios, porque nós vivíamos ainda sob aquele lençol grande do socialismo... Então começaram aí, por exemplo, os chapas... (p. 63) - chapas are those minibuses, private jitneys that appeared in Poland perhaps barely a few years earlier (Couto refers to a period that started in 1994). The only difference, that corresponds to life or death of about a million, is that we did not have civil war.
Nonetheless, what actually puzzles me is the fidelity these people seem to conserve, till the present day, to their leftist ideas; in Poland, as far as it is my experience, everyone knew communism is a lie; no one actually believed in it, even if many adopted its ideas and plied to its requirements as opportunists. The Mozambican combatants did believe. And till the day they recounted their life stories as old men (in 2015), they were ready to admit they could not have married without asking the permission of the party (cf. the conversation with Raimundo Pachinuapa, p. 31).
The interviews are supposed to reflect some sixty of seventy years of particularly tragic history, since the colonial massacres, such as that of Mueda in 1960, across more than a decade of guerrilla that led to the country's independence in 1975, only to continue with yet another civil war till the first free elections in 1994. The very change that came after the independence was marked by many abuses, not only the exodus of the Portuguese settlers, but also chaotic deportations of such heterogeneous groups and categories of people as prostitutes, Jehovah's witnesses, and single mothers. Nonetheless, at least those people who Tânia Reis Alves interviewed kept a very warm and respectful memory of their leaders, Eduardo Mondlane (um homem humilde, muito simpático, bom professor in the eyes of Pachinuapa, p. 27), Samora Machel (um humanista, idem, p. 30, a hero assassinated by the apartheid, p. 35; Mia Couto adds: Tal como eu tinha a figura de Che Guevara colada na parede do quarto, as pessoas têm hoje a imagem do Samora, dizem: "Se estivesse vivo, certas coisas não aconteceriam" - p. 57), Joaquim Chissano (a pessoa certa para aquele momento - idem, p. 63). The fact that Mondlane was killed by a bomb that the Portuguese agents resolved to hide in a book appears to testify strangely in his favour...
Having read the first ninety pages of Reis Alves' interviews, I started to ask myself how on earth the country could become such a disaster, if it had such wonderful leaders and its people only thought about fighting for alphabetisation, improving the health care and becoming Mozambican professors in Mozambican universities. The answer given by Joaquim Chissano was simple: the civil war that came only months after the independence to stay in the country for 16 years was essentially caused by foreign agents sent by Ian Smith from Rhodesia, and later on from South Africa. But toward the end of the book, Tânia Reis Alves brings other materials as well, namely an interview with Afonso Dhlakama, presented in the headline of the chapter as "a warlord", in clear contrast to Chissano, qualified "the father of democracy". Yet somehow the reasons of the warlord speak to me louder than the smooth, idealising discourse of the ex-president. The leader of RENAMO, the dissident force opposing the dominant FRELIMO in the civil war, gives the reasons of his discontentment, that in fact seem to paint quite convincingly the human landscape that could not put up with the victory appropriated by the left wing: tribal chieftains, elites of various religions that the advent of materialism was supposed to dislodge, simple people sent to the camps for "reeducation". Seis meses depois da independência, já havia descontentamento no seio dos oficiais militares, Dhlakama says. O meu pai foi preso por ser régulo de Mangunde em Chibabava. Vi padres e religiosos de várias congregações, católicos, protestantes, muçulmanos, serem presos e proibidos de rezar porque a FRELIMO dizia que não havia Deus e que Deus havia ido para Portugal com o colonialismo português. Houve régulos que foram mortos pela FRELIMO três ou quatro meses despois da independência, acusados de ser um instrumento do colonialismo. Ao mesmo tempo, assisti a jovens, velhos e raparigas a serem levados à força para as províncias de Niassa e Cabo Delgado, para os campos de reeducação (p. 100-101). He seems to be very clear and precise, admitting having received foreign support; from Rhodesia, and not only; also from other countries in Europe an across the globe; just as the other side relied upon the mercenaries from Cuba and even Eastern Germany. He enumerates and specifies the arms received. And this is how the things go on, from 1977 till the day the journalist came to pay him a visit, in the heart of the national park of Gorongosa. In the end, the warlord is as charming and benevolent as a well-bred colonial officer, since the white lady complains of not having seen the animals. A resposta não tardou, says Reis Alves. "Porque é que não me telefonou? Se queria ir à Gorongosa, eu mandava cessar fogo!" (p. 99).



Tânia Reis Alves, A minha pátria é Moçambique. Testemunhos de Joaquim Chissano, Mia Couto, Afonso Dhakama e outras personalidades políticas e artísticas, Lisboa, Guerra & Paz, 2017.

Leiden, 8.04.2019

on Mia Couto

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Um rio chamado tempo, uma casa chamada terra1 , a novel by Mia Couto published in 2002, deals, in the first place, with the problem of nation building in Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony that gained independence in 1975. The main slogan of the post-colonial nationalism, “o povo unido do Rovuma ao Maputo,”2 is clearly a calque of the former banner of the Portuguese empire: “Portugal do Minho ao Timor”3; the post-colonial falsification follows closely the colonial one. The main problem diagnosed by Couto is thus the imperfect unification of diverse ethnic elements. Mozambique is symbolized by a common house, called the Nyumba-Kaya in order to render its composite nature: nyumba is the word for “house” in the northern tongues, while kaya is the correspondent term in the south.
The main personage, Marianinho, may be identified as an emergent intellectual, who is, according to Edward Said's definition, an individualized figure fostering cultural change through his or her “mastery of language”, and specifically, the mastery of writing. The question of literacy proves to be crucial. Earlier post-colonial reflection on rebuilding cultural identities has shown that the living voice, unsupported by writing, is doomed to be silenced either by the instances of modernization or by the traditional, precolonial figures of dominance. To give just one example, in Moha le fou, Moha le sage4, Tahar ben Jelloun has shown how the essentially oral figure of the Maghrebian rawi, epitomizing the living voice of the earth and alien to both spheres of writing, the Arabic and the French one, is silenced twice: by the local patriarch and by the psychiatrist applying a treatment deriving from the modern concept of the clinic.
The Mozambican case is different and analogous all at once. Apparently, the native African cultures are eminently oral traditions. The gesture of writing appears as the prerogative of the white man not only in the colonial, but also in post-colonial times. This is why it is crucial to give Africa the opportunity of a truly autonomous development. Couto himself, as the author of Um rio chamado tempo..., goes beyond the limitations of his own physical condition as a white, blue-eyed and blond-haired writer. In spite of all his effort of solidarity with Africa, he is a descendant of the colonizers, not of the colonized.5 With Um rio chamado tempo... he places himself in the position of a forerunner, wishing to foster the emergence of a truly African intellectual, such as his personage Marianinho, directly incarnating the spirit of the African dead. The writer is conscious of the fact that his own presence and literary creation is only a makeshift solution, typical of the general rough-and-ready state of the post-colonial affairs. Similarly to the emergent Berber scholars, Mia Couto comments on the absolute necessity of literacy as a means of stepping from circular conceptualization of time into the modern domain of history: “Para a oralidade, só existe o que se traduz em presença. Só é real aquele com quem podemos falar. Os próprios mortos não se convertem em passado, porque eles estão disponíveis a, quando convocados, se tornarem presentes” / “For the orality, there exists only that what can be translated into a presence. The only real entity is the one with which we can talk. Even the dead are not transformed into the past, as they may appear, whence called, and become present.”6 The modern historicity requires writing as a medium of building the past and memory, and, at the same time, of building a future: “tempo por acontecer resulta de equilíbrios entre os vivos e os antepassados” / “The time to come is the result of a balance between the living and the ancestors.”7. Different relations with the dead thus give different scenarios for the future.
Arguably, the Mozambican writing, whether in the Portuguese or in the Bantu languages,8 has at least a century-long tradition; the roots of literacy in the Arabic script may reach even further back in time (the latter has often been neglected in Europocentric optics; perhaps new discoveries, beyond ideological manipulation, may throw a new light on the precolonial literacy of the eastern coast of Africa). On the other hand, Couto evokes, in very touching terms, the enthusiasm with which the idea of creating a university in Zambia, launched by the president Kenneth Kaunda in 1966, was accepted among the illiterate peasants9. Nonetheless, this possible or emergent tradition has been overshadowed, also in post-colonial times, by the vision of writing as a “white” activity; literacy has been associated with a single group and thus the access to it as a practice has been symbolically restricted.
The hero of Um rio chamado tempo..., Marianinho, is a son of parents involved in the decolonization as well as the first stage of the post-colonial transformation, and a grandson of a traditional patriarch, who is currently believed to be neither dead nor alive. This is why the burial ceremony has been suspended. The roof of the Nyumba-Kaya, a house representing the unity of the North and the South, has been removed due to the mourning. Symbolically, this element may represent the opening of the discussion on the national issue, previously closed by the dogma of unity that reveals its falseness through a generalized crisis (the life has “lost its beauty”). The domestic climate is heavy with unspoken truths. The appearance of the young hero who has just completed his studies in the city incarnates a new hope, as his purity seems to shine, contrasting with the multiple, dubious and unclean compromises of the previous generation. In a mysterious way, Marianinho plays the role of a medium, receiving strange letters that appear as written by his own hand and at the same time epitomize the voice of the (un)dead grandfather. In this way, the writing becomes a bridge between the past and the present, a way of recuperating the magical contact with the xicuembos (ancestral spirits worshiped by the family). The task of the young hero is to trace a new destiny of the community: “a sua tarefa é repor as vidas, deitar os destinos desta nossa gente” / “Your task is to put lives back together again, and trace the destinies of our people”.10
This crucial task, a duty towards the community, is nonetheless to be performed in solitude. Writing is essentially an activity of a lonely subject. The essential aspect, accentuated by Edward Said in his Representations of the Intellectual, is the mediation between an individual consciousness and the community: “the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty of representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public”, in order to “represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rag”.11 Such people and issues are many: starting from the fate of the blind Miseirinha, former lover of the patriarch, and finishing with the affair of the sunk ferry. The catastrophe wasn't an accident; it had been caused by the influential local businessmen, as they took advantage of the public ferry to transport the logs cut in the primeval forest. Evidently, the personal risks the young intellectual is facing are in proportion to the financial stakes implied in the game; there had been an assassination before, yet another issue swept under the rug. Nonetheless, the fear Marianinho experiences at the moment of grasping the pen derives from his confrontation with the tremendum of non-human entities he is to represent. A powerful flow of energy is channeled through his hand, as he becomes a medium for “an ancient voice” representing justice, community, the earth: “Seguro a caneta. O desejo arde em minhas mãos mas, ao mesmo tempo, o medo me paralisa. É um receio profundo de que qualquer coisa esteja desabando. Começo escrevendo, a mão obedece a uma voz antiga enquanto vou redigindo” / “I grasp the pen. The desire burns in my hands, but at the same time the anxiety paralyzes me. It is a deep fear that something is falling apart. I start to write, my hand obeys an ancient voice as I go on writing”.12
The mission of the intellectual is to invert the downgrading tendency that marks the post-colonial history of the country. During the second half of the twentieth century, it passed through several stages: the fight for independence (1964-1974), a short period of socialism (1975), the civil war (1976-1992), the deficient transition to the market economy and multiparty political system (after 1992). This historical evolution is presented in the novel as a continuous decadence, specially as it is referred to the evolution of the leaders and the local elite: “Começamos por pensar que são heróis. Em seguida, aceitamos que são patriotas. Mais tarde, que são homens de negócios. Por fim, que não passam de ladrões” / “First we believed they are heroes. Later on, we accepted they are patriots. Still later, that they are businessmen. Finally, that they are none other than thieves”.13 At the same time, the crisis presents not only a social, economical or political dimension. It takes a generalized, nearly a cosmic turn. The earth “closes itself”, forbidding the men to dig the graves for their dead. Not only life, but also death becomes impossible: “O mundo já não era um lugar de viver. Agora, já nem de morrer é” / “Already before, the world wasn't the right place to live. Now, it's not even the right place to die”.14 Thus the mission of the intellectual stretches beyond the usual, rationalistic paradigms of action established by the modernity. He or she becomes a figure of universal salvation, redeeming the “world” conceptualized as a cosmic whole.
One of the Reith lectures delivered by Said in 1993 had a suggestive title: “Holding nations and traditions at bay”.15 Indeed, the most important task of the emergent intellectual seems to oppose solidly legitimized discourses, such as the national unity forged in the battle against the colonizers. These discourses speak loud, epitomizing the symbolic oppression that in post-colonial times should no longer be associated with a colonial power or an external metropolis. The source of this violence is local, yet this fact changes but very little in its oppressive nature. The intellectual's duty consist in “asking questions, making distinctions, restoring to memory all those things that tend to be overlooked or walked past in the rush to collective judgment and action”.16 A critical attitude towards these sanctified visions and values permits to introduce constant correction into the course of the public affairs and to adapt the formulas of the communitarian life to the changing conditions of the contemporary world. This fact transforms the figure of the intellectual into the gauge of the survival of the community.


1 Mia Couto, Um rio chamado tempo, uma casa chamada terra, Lisboa: Caminho, 2002.
2 “United people from Rovama to Maputo”; the evocation of the rivers situated on the northern and southern ends of the country covers up the importance of the Zambezi valley that coincides with the crucial ethnic division into culturally quite dissimilar zones.
3 “Portugal from Minho to Timor” reflects the dogma defended by the Salazarist regime, claiming that the ultramarine territories of the colonial empire, such as Timor situated at the eastern end of the Lesser Sunda Islands, are as unalienable parts of the Portuguese homeland as its European province Minho.
4 Tahar Ben Jelloun, Moha le fou, Moha le sage, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978.
5 Couto was born in 1955 in the city of Beja in Mozambique as a son of a Portuguese couple that moved to the colony in the early decade of 1950s.
6 Mia Couto, E se Obama fosse africano e outras intervenções, Lisboa : Caminho, 2009, p. 130.
7 Ibidem, p. 131.
8 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Ronga, a Bantu language belonging to the Tswa-Ronga family, spoken in southern Mozambique (also called landim by the Portuguese), became a written language attested in the emergent journals O Africano (1908) and O Brado Africano (1918).
9 Mia Couto, E se Obama fosse africano..., p. 28-29.
10 Mia Couto, Um rio chamado tempo, uma casa chamada terra..., p. 126.
11Edward Said, Representations of the intellectual: The 1993 Reith lectures. London: Vintage, 1994, p. 9
12Mia Couto, Um rio chamado tempo, uma casa chamada terra..., , p. 233.
13Ibidem, p. 223.
14Ibidem, p. 23.
15 Edward Said, Representations of the intellectual..., p. 19.
16Ibidem, p. 25.