Category: Mozambique

The struggle for Mozambique

Post author By afrikanseries
Post date July 20, 2020
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This is the story of a country’s struggle for independence , one that would last nearly fourteen years.

During this time, the people of Mozambique tried every means possible to free themselves from Portuguese colonial rule . Ultimately , they entered into a violent conflict that eventually led to freedom . Key to their success was the Mozambique Liberation Front ( or FRELIMO ) and its first leader Eduardo Mondlane.

Most Popular Mozambique

Ualalapi

Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa first published Ualalapi: Fragments from the End of Empire in Portuguese in 1987. Named one of Africa’s hundred best books of the twentieth century, it reflects on Mozambique’s past and present through interconnected narratives related to the last ruler of the Gaza Empire, Ngungunhane. Defeated by the Portuguese in 1895, Ngungunhane was reclaimed for propaganda purposes by Mozambique’s post-independence government as a national and nationalist hero. The regime celebrated his resistance to the colonial occupation of southern Mozambique as a precursor to the twentieth-century struggle for independence. In Ualalapi, Ungulani challenges that ideological celebration and portrays Ngungunhane as a despot, highlighting the violence and tyranny that were hallmarks of the Gaza Empire. This fresh look at the history of late nineteenth-century southeast Africa provides a prism through which to examine the machinations of those in power in Mozambique during the 1980s.

Most Popular Mozambique

Karingana ua karingana

The work, in the author’s words, intend to poetically transmit the daily life of Mozambicans, at a time marked by the struggle against colonial occupation Karingana ua karingana is the expression used by rongas when they begin to tell a traditional story. The listeners answer karingana !. Corresponds to the expression «once upon a time» used in Portuguese in the same situation.

Most Popular Mozambique

Sleepwalking Land

A bus burned down on a dusty road serves as a shelter for old Tuahir and boy Muidinga, fleeing the devastating civil war that is raging everywhere in Mozambique. As is well known, after ten years of anti-colonial war (1965-75), the Southeast African country was faced with a long and bloody internal conflict that extended from 1976 to 1992. The vehicle is full of charred bodies. But there is also another body on the side of the road, next to a suitcase that houses the “Kindzu notebooks”, the long diary of the dead man in question. From there, two stories are narrated in parallel: the journey of Tuahir and Muidinga, and, in flashback, the journey of Kindzu in search of naparamas, traditional warriors, blessed by sorcerers, who, in the boy’s eyes, are the only hope against warlords. Terra Sonâmbula – considered by a special jury at the Zimbabwe Book Fair as one of the twelve best African books of the 20th century and now reissued in Brazil by Companhia das Letras – is an abyss novel, written in a poetic prose that refers to Guimarães Rosa. Couto also uses the resources of magical realism and traditional African narrative art to compose this beautiful fable, which teaches us that dreaming, even in the most adverse conditions, is an indispensable element to continue living.