Dissident Authorship in Mozambique:

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 O X F O R D M O D ER N L A N GUA G E S
A N D L I T ER AT U R E M O N O G R A P HS
Editorial Committee
C. DUTTLINGER S. GILSON
G. HAZBUN A. KAHN I. MACLACHLAN
C. SETH W. WILLIAMS
Dissident Authorship
in Mozambique
The Case of António Quadros
(1933–1994)
T O M ST EN N ET T
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Tom Stennett 2023
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
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prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
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DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198885900.001.0001
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
 Acknowledgements

This book is based on research carried out during my doctorate at St. Anne’s
College, Oxford University. Throughout the project, I benefited from the
engagement of colleagues at Oxford University and Exeter University. I
would like to thank, in particular, my doctoral supervisor, Phillip Rothwell,
for his generous and encouraging supervision.
Many thanks to the individuals that I interviewed or who provided aca-
demic support during my research: João Paulo Borges Coelho, José Forjaz,
Eugénio Lisboa, Olga Iglésias, Luı́s Cabaço, Ana Mafalda Leite, Paulina
Chiziane, Mia Couto, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, Margarida Calafate Ribeiro,
Rita Maia Gomes, and Sandra Quadros. A special thank you to Amélia Muge,
who gave me permission to photocopy a substantial portion of her archive
of António Quadros’s works.
A ‘thanking you’ to my friends and family, who can claim an indirect, if
not insubstantial, contribution. What follows is dedicated to my dad.
 Contents

Introduction: António Quadros and the Problematics

of Authorship and Readership in Mozambique 1
1. Late Coloniality and Post-coloniality in Mozambique 23
2. The Shifting Identity of João Pedro Grabato Dias 42
3. Duplicitous Writers and Totalitarian Readers in As
Quybyrycas (1972) 63
4. The Idiosyncratic Anti-colonial Poetics of João
Pedro Grabato Dias’s A Arca (1971) 83
5. I, the People: Onymous, Anonymous, and
Collective Subjects in Eu, o Povo 95
6. Quadros and his Readers 114
António Quadros and the Future 135

Bibliography 139
Index 152
 Introduction
António Quadros and the Problematics of
Authorship and Readership in Mozambique

In ‘A lula compartilhada’ (The Shared Squid), the poet describes his horror
as he watches a colonial official and an opponent of the colonial regime in
Mozambique eat squid together.¹ From the 1971 collection Uma Meditação,
21 Laurentinas e Dois Fabulı́rios Falhados (A Meditation, 21 Laurentinas
and Two Failed Lyrical Fables), ‘A lula compartilhada’ was published under
Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique. Seasoned with ‘enganos’ (trick-
eries), the meal is an exchange of ‘galhardetes’, of political allegiances, as the
politically ambidextrous ‘Ó pus (cisão … )’ (Oh puss (scission)) is revealed to
be pally with the colonial regime that it only notionally opposes. The sight of
the squid being shared by political enemies is enough to make the poet spew
words (‘vergomitar’, a neologism). The result of the poet’s heaving is the text
that his readers have before them. He wonders with some irony whether his
nausea is the result of his having drunk too many of the beers that give the
collection in which the poem appears its title (Laurentina is a Mozambican
beer brand) or his heightened sensibilities as a minor poet (‘poetazinho’).
Either way, the final lines reveal that the speaker too has been partaking
of squid: his vomit smells of the seafood that he has eaten. The speaker,
who is repulsed by this vision of political corruption, is also complicit in the
unseemly meeting. However, he does not act on his revulsion. His role is lim-
ited to observing, writing (vomitous) poetry, and retiring to bed to nurse a
hangover.
‘A lula compartilhada’ raises several questions relating to the politics of
authorship in colonial Mozambique. What is the function of authors in
colonial contexts? What strategies were available to writers to critique the

¹ Laurentinas, p. 35. When referencing quotations taken from works by Grabato Dias, Muti-
mati Barnarbé João, Frey Ioannes Garabatus, or António Quadros, I use abbreviated titles,
followed by a page number, where one is available (unlike most of the texts written by Quadros,
Laurentinas is paginated) and I provide an English translation of the quoted text.

Dissident Authorship in Mozambique. Tom Stennett, Oxford University Press. © Tom Stennett (2023).
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198885900.003.0001
2 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIP IN MOZ AMBIQUE: ANTÓNIO QUADROS

colonial regime in Mozambique? To what extent is poetry an efficacious

medium to speak truth to power? Can authors be politically indepen-
dent thinkers? What right do poets complicit in colonialism’s evils have to
denounce the iniquities that they witness? These are some of the questions
that will orientate my discussion of the works of Grabato Dias and the other
pennames of Portuguese artist and writer António Augusto de Melo Lucena
e Quadros (1933–1994).
Grabato Dias is one of three pennames under which António Quadros
published literary texts. Quadros hailed from Santiago de Besteiros, near
Viseu, in the North of Portugal. He studied at the Escola das Belas Artes do
Porto (now called the Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto),
where he also lectured. He studied at the Escola das Belas Artes de Lisboa
and in Paris in the 1950s, at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts,
with a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation.
In 1964, Quadros left Portugal for Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), the
capital of colonial Mozambique. Coincidentally, he arrived the same year
that the colonial war started between the Portuguese army and Mozambican
nationalist party Frelimo (Frente da Libertação de Moçambique), when the
latter launched strikes on Portuguese bases in the north of Mozambique. In
Lourenço Marques, Quadros taught at the Liceu Salazar, a high school, and
gave voluntary classes at the cultural association Núcleo de Arte on paint-
ing, sculpture, ceramics, and engraving. In Lourenço Marques, he was part
of a privileged social elite. With the poet Rui Knopfli, he co-edited a liter-
ary magazine called Caliban (1971–1972) for four issues, published in three
instalments, until production was halted by the secret police. The issues fea-
tured work from Knopfli, José Craveirinha, Glória de Sant’Anna, Herberto
Helder, Eugénio Lisboa, Jorge de Sena, and others. In Mozambique and
Portugal, Quadros’s artistic activities were varied: he was a painter, poet,
sculptor, engraver, illustrator, potter, and beekeeper.²
Quadros stayed in Mozambique until 1984. In the period after Mozam-
bique’s independence (achieved 25 June 1975), he taught at the Universidade
Eduardo Mondlane, before moving to the Direcção Nacional da Habitação
(the Mozambican Housing Ministry), where he worked with the archi-
tect José Forjaz. He initiated the experimental TBARN (Técnicos Básicos

² A selection of Quadros’s artworks are reproduced in António Quadros, O Sinaleiro das

Pombas (Porto: Árvore, Cooperativa de Actividades Artísticas, 2001). O Sinaleiro das Pombas is
the most comprehensive anthology of Quadros’s artistic work, which is scattered across galleries
and private collections in Portugal and elsewhere.
 INTRODUCTION 3

para o/no Aproveitamento Racional da Natureza) project, which sought to

develop agricultural techniques through collaboration between academics,
farmers, and the state. Along with Forjaz, he co-produced the Monumen-
tos aos Heróis Nacionais—a mausoleum to important figures from the
anti-colonial struggle.
In terms of his literary activities, Quadros’s time in Mozambique was the
most productive of his career. According to the dates of composition of his
published poems, the vast majority were written in Mozambique and many
of them in Lourenço Marques/Maputo. Grabato Dias’s literary début was
in 1968. That year, the judging panel of a poetry competition held by the
Lourenço Marques town hall awarded their prize to a poem, accompanied
by illustrations, submitted by an incognito poet called Grabato de Tete (Gra-
bato from Tete). The mysterious author did not attend the award ceremony
to collect the monetary prize. Two of the members of the panel, Eugénio
Lisboa and Rui Knopfli (both friends of Quadros), recount that they only
discovered that Quadros was behind Grabato de Tete after the competition.³
Quadros approached Lisboa in 1970 with the poems that would later be pub-
lished in his first collection, 40 e Tal Sonetos de Amor e Circunstância e uma
Canção Desesperada (40-odd Circumstantial Love Sonnets and a Song of
Despair) and asked him to write a text to introduce the collection. In the
meeting with Lisboa, Quadros mentioned that he was prompted to publish
his poetry by his then wife, Clara.⁴
Besides Grabato Dias, Quadros had two other pennames: Frey Ioannes
Garabatus, a fictional friar and drinking mate of sixteenth-century canonical
Portuguese poet Luı́s de Camões, to whom a mock sequel of Camões’s foun-
dational imperial epic Os Lusı́adas (The Lusiads, 1572), titled As Quybyrycas
(1972), is ludically attributed; and, Mutimati Barnabé João, a guerrilla
soldier whose collection Eu, o Povo (I, the People) was published by Mozam-
bique’s ruling party, Frelimo, in 1975 as part of Mozambique’s independence
celebrations.⁵
Quadros published five collections under Portuguese colonial rule: 40 e
Tal Sonetos (1970); the twin odes, O Morto (The Deceased, 1971) and A

³ Eugénio Lisboa, Acta est Fabula: Memórias, 6 vols (Guimarães: Opera Omnia, 2012–2017),
III, p. 333–335. Rui Knopfli, ‘Homem do Renascimento’, Jornal de Letras: Artes e Ideias, XIV:
632 (1995), 14.
⁴ Lisboa, Acta est Fabula, III, p. 337.
⁵ I refer to the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique as Frelimo throughout this book. Before
the party’s Third Congress, held in 1977, the party was called FRELIMO. Arcénio Francisco
Cuco, ‘FRELIMO: De um Movimento Revolucionário a Partido Político’, Revista Núcleo de
Estudos Paranaenses, 2:2 (2016), 138.
4 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIP IN MOZ AMBIQUE: ANTÓNIO QUADROS

Arca (The Ark, 1971); As Laurentinas (1971); and, As Quybyrycas, ‘edited’

by Grabato Dias. In 1974, two months after the Carnation Revolution that
brought an end to Portugal’s dictatorship, he published a third ode attributed
to Grabato Dias, called Pressaga Pré-saga Saga/press: Ode Didáctica da
Primeira Singular à Segunda Plural sobre as Terceiras, Segundas e Primeiras
Pessoas (Presage Pre-Saga Saga/press: Didactic Ode Conjugated in the First-
Person Singular and Addressed to the Second-Person Plural, Regarding the
Third, Second, and First Persons). A year later, Eu, o Povo was published
by Frelimo as part of Mozambique’s independence celebrations. Besides a
series of anonymous articles that appeared in newspaper Domingo from late
1980 until early 1981 and a poem published in 1977 in Portuguese journal
Colóquio/Letras, Quadros did not publish again until 1986 (Facto/Fado:
piqueno tratado de morfologia: parte vii, Fact/Fate: a modest treatise on
morphology: part vii) after he had returned to Portugal from Mozambique.
In the early 1990s, Quadros revisited texts that he had written in Mozam-
bique in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1991, a second version of As Quybyrycas was
published by Afrontamento. In 1991 and 1992, Quadros self-published three
works attributed to Grabato Dias under the name ‘Edições Pouco’ that were
written in Mozambique after independence: Sete Contos para um Carnaval
(Seven Short Stories for Carnival), Sagapress: Poesia com Datas (Sagapress:
Poems with Dates) and the spiritual sequel to Eu, o Povo, O Povo é Nós
(We Are the People). The name of the fictitious publisher ‘Edições Pouco’
(Few Editions) appears to be an ironic reference to the fact that it was a
self-publishing venture.
Quadros’s time in Mozambique overlapped with a period of momentous
change in the country. His arrival in 1964 coincided with the beginning
of the anti-colonial struggle. He was in Lourenço Marques on the day of
the Carnation Revolution, when the Estado Novo (New State), Portugal’s
dictatorship, was brought down by a leftist military coup. He was present
at the country’s celebrations of independence from Portugal in 1975, to
which he contributed a collection of poems attributed to a dead guerrilla
soldier, fallen in the armed conflict against the Portuguese which contin-
ued until September 1974, five months after the fall of the Estado Novo.
Quadros remained in Mozambique until the mid-1980s, before leaving hav-
ing grown disillusioned with the ever-worsening political situation in the
country.
The Carnation Revolution marked a watershed moment in Mozam-
bique’s history. As Patrick Chabal remarks, the date ‘not only marks the
Portuguese revolution “of the carnations” but also, in effect, the beginning
 INTRODUCTION 5

of the transfer of power in the Portuguese African colonies’.⁶ The revolution

set in motion the decolonization process that would lead to Mozambique’s
independence from Portugal on 25 June 1975. Eugénio Lisboa, who was
with Quadros when he first heard news of the coup, recalls Quadros’s reac-
tion: ‘A caminho da Matola, Quadros barafustava: “Agora que tudo estava
a correr tão bem … ”.’ (On our way to Matola, Quadros remonstrated: ‘And
everything was going so well … ’).⁷ Quadros’s reaction, as reported by Lis-
boa, points to an ambivalence towards Mozambique’s independence, which
Grabato Dias expresses in Pressaga, published two months after the revolu-
tion, in June 1974. In Pressaga and in Eu, o Povo, published the following
year, in 1975, Grabato Dias and Mutimati express their concerns about
Mozambique’s future and, in particular, the place of settlers in independent
Mozambique.
The contrasts and similarities between the late colonial and post-
independence periods in Mozambique are a recurring theme of the chapters
that follow. In Dissident Authorship, I deploy Quadros’s quirky case to
think about how the place and function of authors changed during the two
decades that Quadros lived in Mozambique.

Authorship and Readership: Two Interlinked Questions

Grabato Dias’s literary début in 1968 coincided with the publication of two
foundational texts on authorship: Roland Barthes’s ‘La mort de l’auteur’
(The Death of the Author, 1968) and Michel Foucault’s ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un
auteur?’ (What Is an Author?, 1969).⁸ Barthes’s and Foucault’s essays are
primarily concerned with probing the centrality of authors in literary anal-
ysis. They ask, in different ways, why should we care who the author of
a given text is? Barthes’s declaration of the death of the flesh-and-blood
author, consigned to irrelevance in textual analysis, was written against the

⁶ Patrick Chabal, ‘The End of Empire’, in A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa (Bloom-
ington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 17.
⁷ Lisboa opines that Quadros was referring to his personal projects. Lisboa, Acta est Fabula,
III, p. 426.
⁸ In an article published in 1973, Grabato Dias’s reader Maria Lourdes Cortez repeatedly
cites Barthes’s S/Z—the comprehensive analysis of the same short story, Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’
(1830), discussed in ‘La mort de l’auteur’. Cortez, ‘Grabato Dias e as Trangressões de Lin-
guagem’, in Craveirinha, Grabato Dias, Rui Knopfli: Leituras (Lourenço Marques: Minerva
Central, 1973), pp. 19–34; Cortez, ‘Introdução’, in Uma Meditação, 21 Laurentinas e Dois Fab-
ulírios Falhados, edited by Jorge de Sena (Lourenço Marques: João Pedro Grabato Dias, 1971),
pp. 5–13.
6 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIP IN MOZ AMBIQUE: ANTÓNIO QUADROS

backdrop of a French tradition of literary criticism that looked to biography

to explicate an author’s body of work. Barthes is concerned with rewrit-
ing the terms of authorship and readership: he replaces the notion of the
author with ‘écriture’ (writing)—which, as Adrian Wilson notes, he would
later substitute with ‘Texte’⁹—and the ‘Critic’ with a depersonalized reader.
Barthes dramatically notes at his essay’s conclusion that the ‘birth’ of this
reader comes at the cost of the author’s death.¹⁰ Barthes’s essay is a rejection
of authorial intention; of the idea that a given text contains a single, ‘the-
ological’ meaning—the ‘message’ of the Author-God.¹¹ He displaces the act
of the production of meaning from authors to readers. For him, reading is
fundamentally not a question of divining what the author intended to say.
As Andrew Bennett has noted, the declarative tone of Barthes’s announce-
ment of the author’s death belies an anxiety that the author—in many
critical practices—is not dead.¹² Barthes’s text, more manifesto than criti-
cal study, makes the case that the author as a biographical entity ought to
be excised from literary analysis. Paradoxically, the anonymous intertext
established with Nietzsche’s proposition that God is dead ‘links authorism
with theism’.¹³ Similarly, Adrian Wilson notes the ‘seeming ambiguity as to
whether [Barthes and Foucault] were signing a death warrant, carrying out
an assassination, or preaching at a funeral’.¹⁴
Foucault’s 1968 paper, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’ is, in part, a response to
Barthes’s essay. Bennett describes Barthes as Foucault’s ‘unstated premise,
his silent progenitor and antagonist, his “intertext”’.¹⁵ Foucault says that it
is insufficient to declare that the author is dead; a statement so obvious is
tautologous.¹⁶ Foucault positions his paper as a preliminary post-mortem
and an analysis of the space opened up by the author’s demise. Foucault
calls the author a function of discourse. To put a name to a text, to attribute
authorship, is a complex process whose outcomes are revealing about the
importance assigned to different kinds of texts and the ways in which they
are read. Like Barthes’s essay, Foucault’s paper is a critique of a certain

⁹ Adrian Wilson, ‘Foucault on the Question of the Author: A Critical Exegesis’, The Modern
Language Review, 99:2 (2004), 343–344.
¹⁰ Barthes, ‘La mort de l’auteur’, in Le bruissement de la langue (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,
1984), p. 67.
¹¹ Barthes, ‘La mort de l’auteur’, Le bruissement de la langue, p. 67.
¹² Andrew Bennett, The Author (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 17.
¹³ Bennett, The Author, p. 14.
¹⁴ Wilson, ‘Foucault on the Question of the Author: A Critical Exegesis’, 342.
¹⁵ Bennett, The Author, p. 19.
¹⁶ Michel Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, in Dits et écrits: 1954–1988, 2 vols (Paris:
Gallimard, 2001), I, p. 824.
 INTRODUCTION 7

author-inflected mode of reading. According to Foucault, texts are read in

relation to the author to whom they are attributed and the body of work
of which they are a constituent part. For this reason, the names of authors
act differently to other names because an author is synonymous with their
work.¹⁷
For Foucault, the author-function conditions readings of literary texts. If
a writer’s work is littered with inconsistencies, problems, tensions, or con-
tradictions between works, this is a sign of maturation or evolution—these
things can be explained away by biography. If there are tensions, inconsis-
tencies, or contradictions within a given text, this can be rationalized by the
fact that it was authored by a human being, prone to perversities, quirks,
lapses in logic, and irrationality. The author confers on a work or body of
work a unity which reconciles its contradictions.¹⁸
The question with which Foucault begins and ends his paper is posed
by Samuel Beckett in Nouvelles et Textes pour Rien: ‘Qu’importe qui parle,
quelqu’un a dit qu’importe qui parle?’¹⁹ As Bennett remarks in a com-
parison of Foucault’s and Barthes’s essays, Foucault emphasizes that in
post-Romantic modes of reading, who speaks—or who readers think speaks
in a given text—matters, at the same time that he ‘yearn[s] towards a future
in which our only response to such a question would be a shrug or, as Fou-
cault puts it, at the close of the essay, a “stirring of an indifference”. Foucault
wants it to matter not at all who is speaking.’²⁰ Seán Burke’s contention that
one of the great paradoxes of Foucault’s text—that the author is most alive
when he is considered dead, most present when he is presumed absent—has
rather served the inverse of Foucault’s longing for a literary culture in which
the author’s identity were a matter of indifference: the names Foucault and
Barthes have become synonymous with their positions on authorship.²¹
Foucault’s author-function describes a specific socio-historical concep-
tion of authorship (Western, post-Romantic)—the author as an individu-
alized subject. Foucault’s critique of author-centred modes of readings rests
on the tension between the primacy of the author and the author’s continual
and endless disappearance in writing. As Bennett notes, Foucault’s framing
of writing as a process under which the author continually disappears and is

¹⁷ Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, in Dits et écrits, I, p. 820.

¹⁸ Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, in Dits et écrits, I, p. 830.
¹⁹ Foucault, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’, in Dits et écrits, I, p. 820.
²⁰ Bennett, The Author, p. 19.
²¹ Seán Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes,
Foucault and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992; reprint. 1998), pp. 6–7.
8 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIP IN MOZ AMBIQUE: ANTÓNIO QUADROS

replaced through the creation of writing subject(s) contrasts with Barthes’s

concern with writing as a negative space: ‘Barthes is concerned only with a
certain absence, a “negative” space of writing. Foucault is concerned with the
social and historical construction of a “writing subject” and posits writing as
a space in which this disappearing is endlessly enacted.’²² Foucault’s model
focuses on the disappearance of authors, but it also consciously accounts for
their persistence.
Elizabeth Fox Genovese argues that Foucault’s project (and we might add
Barthes’s too) threaten to suppress the voices of authors who have not had
the historic privileged access to print culture that Foucault and others have
enjoyed.²³ Similarly, Odia Ofeimun writes that the timing of the proposition
of the dead author ‘rankles [because] it came at a time when African writers
were just emerging from the belly of the anti-colonial struggle onto a stage
that had been set and dominated by Euro-American writing for centuries’.²⁴
Ofeimun argues, moreover, that Barthes’s and Foucault’s confining writing
to a discursive activity in which authors can only imitate, parrot, or parody a
pre-written discourse—a discourse in which Africa and Africans have been
historically and largely represented by non-Africans—is inadequate for reck-
oning with the place of African authors living in authoritarian (‘illiberal’)
contexts.²⁵ Following Ofeimun, Dorothée Boulanger notes that to speak of
dead authors in the late-1960s in Portuguese African colonial contexts would
have been strange indeed, given the danger that Lusophone writers faced in
climates of political repression.²⁶ In Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s analysis, there is no
escaping, for African authors living in authoritarian contexts, state power:
either writers oppose authority, risking political reprisals, or they effectively
become propagandists for the state.²⁷
Following Ofeimun and Thiong’o, Dissident Authorship considers the
authoritarian features of the political contexts in which Quadros wrote as
fundamental factors that shaped the authorial strategies available to him

²² Bennett, The Author, p. 20.

²³ Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, ‘My Statue, My Self: Autobiographical Writings of Afro-
American Women’, in The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical
Writings, edited by Shari Benstock (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press,
1988), p. 67.
²⁴ Odia Ofeimun, ‘Postmodernism and the Impossible Death of the Author’, African Quar-
terly on the Arts, 2: 3 (1998), 25.
²⁵ Ofeimun, ‘Postmodernism and the Impossible Death of the Author’, p. 40.
²⁶ Dorothée Boulanger, Fiction as History: Resistance and Complicities in Angolan Postcolo-
nial Literature (Oxford: Legenda, 2023), pp. 2–3.
²⁷ Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the
Arts and the State in Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
 INTRODUCTION 9

and other writers. In contrast to Barthes, in particular, I consider the role

played by mediating agents such as publishers, editors, and the state in the
production of texts. I argue that writers in Mozambique have not experi-
enced political oppression equally. Although his fictional authors insistently
refer to the problems that a climate of political oppression poses for them
as authors, Quadros’s works were less impacted by the distinct authoritar-
ian contexts of Portuguese censorship and Frelimo rule than many other
writers—in particular, under Portuguese colonial rule, black writers—given
his privileged position under both regimes and the fact that he mostly
self-published his books.
Quadros’s works pose a fundamental challenge to his readers: how to
make sense of his often-cryptic writings within the contexts in which they
were produced? A knowingly difficult writer, and one aware of his lack of
a sizeable contemporary readership, Quadros insistently looks to poster-
ity, in whom he invests his hopes for literary recognition. In her insightful
introduction to Laurentinas, Maria Lourdes Cortez proposes the useful con-
cept of ‘processos de distanciamento’ (distancing processes)—according to
which Grabato Dias’s work can be best read by considering how the author
(Quadros) distances himself from the context in which he writes through
irony, alienating language, and the creation of discursive subjectivities (such
as Grabato Dias). Cortez’s introduction begins with a paradox. Echoing
Barthes, she disavows biography as a key factor in readings of literary texts,
and yet her preface is framed by a short ‘autobiography’ provided by Gra-
bato Dias and included at his request.²⁸ Cortez defends her inclusion of the
biography by arguing that it is a primary text through which the author
inscribes a discursive identity, a manoeuvre that she links to his distanc-
ing from the social and historical context in which he writes. She calls for a
nuanced appreciation of the relationship between author and context that
accounts for the author’s agency in ‘distancing’ himself from the context out
of which he writes, and which is disposed to readings that the author may
not have intended.²⁹
Cortez’s framing is simultaneously empowering and discouraging for
readers, who are tasked with making sense of texts authored by a coy writer,
who keeps his distance from his readership primarily through humour.³⁰
Cortez explains that humour has two functions in Grabato Dias’s poetry.

²⁸ Cortez, ‘Introdução’, in Laurentinas, p. 5.

²⁹ Cortez, ‘Introdução’, in Laurentinas, p. 7.
³⁰ Cortez, ‘Introdução’, in Laurentinas, p. 8.
10 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIP IN MOZ AMBIQUE: ANTÓNIO QUADROS

First, it guarantees critical distance from the turbulent context in which the
poet lives, thereby allowing him to analyse it lucidly.³¹ Second, it is the vehi-
cle through which the poet critiques the iniquities of the political context
out of which he writes. Playing the role of a ‘“clown” truculento e também
melacólico’ (a truculent and melancholic clown), Grabato Dias’s ‘carniva-
lesque’ poetics is subversive and given to the ‘destruição da ordem e do
regime habituais do mundo’ (destruction of the habitual order and routine
of the world).³² In this way, Cortez forestalls charges of political and social
indifference (and even betrayal) analogous to those levelled against poets
such as Rui Knopfli, and invites historicizing readings of the poet’s work.³³
Cortez’s analysis is useful in that it encourages an engagement with the
contexts of production of Grabato Dias’s texts that accounts for the agency
of the writer. According to her, a given text is not reducible to the con-
text in which it was written; texts are also responses to that same context.
Furthermore, she makes the case, in contrast to Barthes, that biography
is a significant context of literary analysis in contexts where authors’ rela-
tive positions in colonial and post-colonial society had a significant impact
on what they wrote, and under what conditions. The ‘distancing processes’
at play in Laurentinas cannot be appreciated by a reader who is unaware
of the context that ‘rodeia’ (surrounds) and ‘penetra[ … ]’ (penetrates) the
author, and the author’s relation to that context.³⁴ Cortez’s term ‘distanc-
ing processes’ shifts the focus—Barthes’s focus—from the absolute denial of
an intimate relationship between biography and literary texts, to an appre-
ciation of the ways in which the pseudo-absent author (Quadros) rewrites
himself through poetry; an emphasis is placed on the process of the denial of
identity and the whys and wherefores of the poet’s performative aloofness.
Writing out of the same censorship context as the author she introduces,
Cortex does not put her mode of reading into practice: there is no reference
to colonial rule or to censorship. In this way, she shadows Quadros’s own
coy approach to the context out of which he writes. Quadros withholds key
contextual information that he nudges his readers to uncover.
Perhaps surprisingly for a writer who engages in metatextual games of
hide and seek through his creation of discursive fictional authors, Quadros’s

³¹ Cortez, ‘Introdução’, in Laurentinas, p. 13.

³² Cortez, ‘Introdução’, in Laurentinas, p. 12; p. 9.
³³ For a discussion of Rui Knopfli’s exclusion from the Mozambican canon, see Manoel de
Souza e Silva, Do alheio ao próprio (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo; Goiâna:
Editora da Universidade Federal de Goiás, 1996), pp. 105–107.
³⁴ Cortez, ‘Introdução’, in Laurentinas, p. 7; p. 8.
 INTRODUCTION 11

literary works insistently gesture to the world outside the text and how
writings can have a tangible impact on the world. The relationship between
the text and the world is mediated by its readers, whom Quadros frequently
positions as his pupils, and he their teacher.³⁵ Indeed, Quadros’s output is
marked by an interest in pedagogy. Grabato Dias published three didactic
odes (O Morto, A Arca, Pressaga); a poetic ‘tratado de morfologia’ (trea-
tise on morphology) Facto/Fado; and, a collection of didactic short stories
(Sete Contos para um Carnaval). Quadros produced several textbooks at
the Direcção Nacional de Habitação. In the early 1980s, Quadros penned
a short-lived column in Domingo that aimed to disseminate the TBARN
project’s findings with a view to improving readers’ use of resources and
fomenting a wider appreciation of the work carried out by the different
groups of workers that make Mozambique’s society and economy function.
Although Quadros is cautious to circumscribe and limit texts’ potential to
have a concrete impact on readers and the world, his output demonstrates
an interest in theorizing how writing can be used as a vehicle to improve
society. For Quadros, the writer is a teacher who imparts knowledge on
his reader-pupils, who, he hopes, will use the author’s ideas in practice.
In particular during his time working on the TBARN project, Quadros
grapples with the question of how to make ideas resonate beyond political
elites and intellectual milieus. He asks: how can texts be vehicles for knowl-
edge in contexts of high illiteracy? How can writers meaningfully make a
difference?³⁶
The central claim of this book is that Quadros’s texts conceive of author-
ship as the fraught negotiation of distinct and conflicting functions and
features: speaking truth to power and supporting a political project; intel-
lectual independence versus intellectual compromise; authenticity versus
falsity; the poet as figure of authority versus the writer as an oppositional,
anti-authoritarian figure. The crucial paradox of being an author in the con-
texts of late colonial and post-independence Mozambique is that authors
were politicized figures the political impact of whose works was neces-
sarily minimal. Although Quadros was distanced from the anti-colonial
and nationalist politics of Mozambique, his conceptions of the author as

³⁵ According to José Forjaz, Quadros was first and foremost a teacher. José Forjaz, ‘António
Quadros, Professor’, in António Quadros, Curso de Comunicação Gráfica (Maputo: Universi-
dade Eduardo Mondlane, 1998), pp. 4–5.
³⁶ For Ofeimun, negotiating the bind of African authorship is a question of figuring out how
to reconcile political activism and literature. Ofeimun, ‘Postmodernism and the Impossible
Death of the Author’, pp. 46–47.
12 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIP IN MOZ AMBIQUE: ANTÓNIO QUADROS

an inherently paradoxical figure nevertheless reflect the tensions of anti-

colonial and post-independence politics in Mozambique.
In contrast to the lack of attention paid to Quadros, there is a sub-
stantial body of scholarship on Mozambican literature. Scholars that have
analysed author subject positions in Mozambique have tended to high-
light gender as a significant and historically neglected factor in Lusophone
African nationalisms, an approach that has been brought to bear on male
and female writers. Phillip Rothwell, Hilary Owen, Mark Sabine, and oth-
ers have studied gender in the works of the male writers Luı́s Bernardo
Hownana, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, and Mia Couto.³⁷ Owen’s 2007 study
Mother Africa, Father Marx stands as a ground-breaking analysis of the
works of four Mozambican women writers: Noémia de Sousa, Lina Magaia,
Lı́lia Momplé, and Paulina Chiziane.³⁸ Ana Margarida Martins and Maria
Tavares have considered gender within transnational and comparative con-
texts.³⁹ This transnational approach to studying Mozambican literature has
been accompanied by broader methodological reflections by Maria Paula
Meneses, Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, Jessica Falconi, Ana Mafalda Leite,
Chatarina Eldfelt, and Marta Banasiak on the study of Mozambican cul-
ture(s) in the contexts of the Lusophone literary system, world literature,
and the Indian Ocean.⁴⁰
Recent studies by Rothwell and Boulanger have sought to account for
the subject positions of Angolan authors in relation to Angola’s fraught late
colonial and post-independence political contexts. Rothwell’s Pepetela and

³⁷ Phillip Rothwell, A Postmodern Nationalist: Truth, Orality, and Gender in the Work of Mia
Couto (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004); Hilary Owen, ‘Women on the Edge
of a Nervous Empire in Paulina Chiziane and Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa’, in Narrating the Post-
colonial Nation: Mapping Angola and Mozambique, edited by Ana Mafalda Leite, Hilary Owen,
Rita Chaves, and Livia Apa (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 199–211; Hilary Owen,
‘Third World/Third Sex: Gender, Orality and a Tale of Two Marias in Mia Couto and Paulina
Chiziane.’ Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, July 2007: 84.4, 475-488; Mark Sabine, ‘Gender, Race
and Violence in Luís Bernardo Honwana’s Nós matámos o Cão-tinhoso: The Emasculation of
the African Patriarch’, in Sexual/textual Empires: Gender and Marginality in Lusophone African
Literature, edited by Hilary Owen and Phillip Rothwell (Bristol: University of Bristol Press,
2004), pp. 23–44.
³⁸ Hilary Owen, Mother Africa, Father Marx: Women’s Writing of Mozambique. 1948–2002
(Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007).
³⁹ Ana Margarida Martins, Magic Stones and Flying Snakes: Gender and the Postcolonial
Exotic in the Work of Paulina Chiziane and Lidia Jorge (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012); Maria
Tavares, No Country for Nonconforming Women: Feminine Conceptions of Lusophone Africa
(Oxford: Legenda, 2018).
⁴⁰ See the volume edited by Ana Mafalda Leite and Margarida Calafate Ribeiro,
Moçambique: Das Palavras Escritas (Porto: Afrontamento, 2008) and the special issue of Por-
tuguese Studies Literatures and Cultures of the Indian Ocean edited by Ana Mafalda Leite,
Jessica Falconi, and Elena Brugioni, 37:2 (2021).
 INTRODUCTION 13

the MPLA: the Ethical Evolution of a Revolutionary Writer (2019) traces

Pepetela’s trajectory as a writer in relation to the ideological shifts of Angola’s
ruling party, the MPLA.⁴¹ Where Rothwell’s focus is on a politically commit-
ted writer who was heavily involved with the anti-colonial struggle and the
early phase of the Angolan nationalist project, in a context where party poli-
tics and literature were even more interconnected than in Mozambique, my
analysis bears on an author whose engagement with politics in his writings
is largely party-apolitical. Boulanger’s 2022 book, in which she examines
works by eight Angolan writers, probes the notion that post-independence
Angolan fiction has functioned to ‘resist’ MPLA narratives of Angola’s his-
tory. Her exhortation to analyse literature’s potential to challenge hegemonic
narratives in light of complicity—understood as authors’ involvement with
the MPLA’s nationalist project and the omissions in their fiction over events
such as the purge of the so-called fractionalist faction of the MPLA of
27 May 1977—is vital to understanding the complexities of authorship in
post-independence Angola and the place and function of authors in other
Lusophone African contexts.⁴²
Unlike much recent scholarship, the present study does not take gen-
der as its central frame of analysis. Gender is a blind spot in Quadros’s
grappling with questions relating to authorship, owing, in large part, to the
fact that his works are chiefly concerned with accounting for his own posi-
tion as an author. A theme that runs throughout my analysis, and to which
Quadros’s oversight when it comes to gender is linked, is that his pennames’
discussions of their authorial positions at times betray a disconnect when it
comes to the social, economic, and political realities faced by most Mozam-
bicans. I counterpoint Quadros’s discussions of authorship with decolonial
and postcolonial theory. I use Achille Mbembe’s analysis of the assymetries
of colonial mobility to interrogate Grabato Dias’s critique of Portuguese and
Mozambican nationalism in Pressaga (chapter 2). Benita Parry’s critique of
a perceived tendency in deconstructionist postcolonial theory to privilege
discursive analysis over materialism frame my analysis of Grabato Dias’s
elusive authorial strategies (chapters 3 and 6). Frantz Fanon’s defence of anti-
colonial violence stands as a fruitful antithesis to Grabato Dias’s pacificist
anti-colonial poetics (chapter 4). Gayatri Spivak’s provocative claim that the
subaltern cannot speak is leveraged to appraise Quadros’s construction of

⁴¹ Phillip Rothwell, Pepetela and the MPLA: The Ethical Evolution of a Revolutionary Writer
(Oxford: Legenda, 2019).
⁴² Boulanger, Fiction as History, pp. 16–17.
14 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIP IN MOZ AMBIQUE: ANTÓNIO QUADROS

Mutimati Barnabé João (chapter 5). I argue that, with due modification and
contextualization, Quadros’s works stand as a useful contribution to reflect
more broadly on the themes discussed in this book: identity, canonicity,
representation, and readership. These topics overlap with the fundamental
factors of power and authority with which Quadros insistently grapples.

Pseudonymy, Heteronymy, and Anonymity

In the contexts of late colonial and post-colonial Mozambique, the author

was an inherently political role.⁴³ In the absence of opposition parties and a
free press under the Estado Novo and Frelimo-ruled Mozambique, poetry
was a privileged medium through which authors could voice political dis-
content. Given the high levels of illiteracy in Portuguese, most Mozambicans
did not have access to print culture or to national political discourse. In the
late colonial and post-colonial contexts, literature was potentially a vehi-
cle for voicing the concerns of those who were excluded from colonial and
nationalist politics.
In the Mozambican context, several authors were prominent political
figures in the anti-colonial struggle. Many of these authors became impor-
tant members of Frelimo’s leadership after independence: Marcelino dos
Santos (who published poetry under the pseudonyms Kalungano and Lil-
inho Macaia) was a founding member of Frelimo, who served as vice-
president of the party from 1969–1977 and as a minister of economic
development; the poet Jorge Rebelo was the head of Frelimo’s Central
Committee; the prose writer Luı́s Bernardo Honwana was an advisor to
Mozambique’s first president, Samora Machel.
Writing was a perilous activity for mestiço (mixed race) and black writers
under Portuguese colonial rule. The circulation of the poems of Noémia de
Sousa, collected in Sangue Negro (Black Blood), led to her being exiled to
Lisbon in 1951, until 1964, and thereafter to Paris.⁴⁴ Craveirinha was impris-
oned by the Portuguese secret police (known as the PIDE until 1969, and

⁴³ Where I use the terms ‘postcolonial’ and ‘post-colonial’, I deploy them according to the
distinction made by Jane Hiddleston: ‘Post-colonialism is [ … ] narrow in scope and names a
specific, identifiable moment. Postcolonialism, with no hyphen, is larger and more problematic.
[ … ] Overall, it can be agreed that postcolonialism names a set of political, philosophical or
conceptual questions engendered by the colonial project and its aftermath’. Jane Hiddleston,
Understanding Postcolonialism (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2009), pp. 3–4.
⁴⁴ Noémia de Sousa, Sangue Negro (Maputo: Associação dos Escritores Moçambicanos,
2001).
 INTRODUCTION 15

thereafter as the DGS) in 1965 and remained in incarceration until the Car-
nation Revolution of 1974.⁴⁵ Honwana was jailed in 1964, the same year his
short story collection, Nós Matámos o Cão Tinhoso (subsequently translated
as We Killed Mangy Dog and Other Stories by Dorothy Guedes), was pub-
lished and the year in which the struggle for independence officially started
in Mozambique.⁴⁶
Quadros’s experiences of political persecution were mild compared to
those of Sousa, Craveirinha, and Honwana. He experienced little inconve-
nience from the colonial authorities, who do not appear to have considered
him a threat.⁴⁷ Although Caliban (1971–1972), the literary magazine that
Quadros ran under the name Grabato Dias with Rui Knopfli, was closed by
the DGS in 1972, Quadros was not imprisoned. In the post-Carnation Rev-
olution period, Quadros had informal connections to the intellectuals and
writers who were part of the Frelimo party machinery.
In the cases of Sousa, Craveirinha, and Santos, the use of pseudonyms
functioned to protect their identities from the colonial authorities. In
Quadros’s case, there was less of a need to hide his identity from the author-
ities given his privileged position within colonial society. Indeed, it appears
that Quadros’s pennames were never intended to conceal his identity. In
contrast to the coyness displayed during the Lourenço Marques town hall
poetry competition, Quadros sold copies of Grabato Dias’s first collection,
40 e Tal Sonetos, door to door.⁴⁸ Grabato Dias’s, Mutimati’s and Garabatus’s
texts are littered with references to their status as fictional authors and signs
pointing to Quadros’s hand in the production of the texts. When Cortez,
in her prefatory essay to Laurentinas, writes that Grabato Dias’s embedding
himself in a dense textuality allows him to appear ‘devidamente escudado’

⁴⁵ For more details of Craveirinha’s imprisonment and trial see Fátima Mendonça, ‘José
Craveirinha, o Sonhador de Sonhos’, in Poemas da Prisão, edited by José Craveirinha (Lisbon:
Texto Editora, 2004), p. 7; note 2, p. 16.
⁴⁶ Howana was released in 1967. Luís Bernardo Honwana, Nós Matámos o Cão Tinhoso
(Lourenço Marques: Sociedade de Imprensa de Moçambique, 1964); Luís Bernardo Hon-
wana, We Killed Mangy Dog and Other Stories, trans. Dorothy Guedes (London: Heinemann
Educational, 1969).
⁴⁷ According to records held in the Torre de Tombo, Quadros was interviewed by PIDE
agents on one occasion before he moved to Mozambique. He was misidentified as the co-author
of a manifesto co-signed by António Quadros Ferro, the son of António Ferro, a former head
of the Estado Novo’s propaganda service. In a letter dated 4 September 1968, from a PIDE sub-
director in Lourenço Marques to the director-general of the secret police in Lisbon, Quadros is
identified as a member of a group of leftist intellectuals. Lisbon, Torre de Tombo, PIDE/DGS,
SC, CI(2) 10,941 NT 7608; PIDE/DGS, SC, SR-3015/56 NT 2783.
⁴⁸ Interview with Eugénio Lisboa, Lisbon, August 2019.
16 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIP IN MOZ AMBIQUE: ANTÓNIO QUADROS

(duly shielded) before his readers, she is not referring to the kind of pro-
tection that Craveirinha’s, Sousa’s, and Santos’s presudonyms offered.⁴⁹ The
notion that the construct Grabato Dias—as a fictional identity—acts as a
shield to protect the author from his readers refers to a Barthesian-inflected
coyness whereby authors anonymize themselves through the creation of a
textual persona.
The constructs Grabato Dias, Garabatus, and Mutimati have been
described as Quadros’s ‘heteronyms’—a reference to the literary personae
under which Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa published much of his
work. I contend that Quadros’s pennames combine features of heteronyms,
pseudonyms, and anonyms and, for this reason, I deliberately do not refer
to them as pseudonyms or heteronyms. Instead, I describe Grabato Dias,
Ioannes Garabatus, and Mutimati as pennames or fictional authors. As
noted above, his pennames perform a function very different from that of
the pseudonyms used by several of his contemporaries in Mozambique.
Furthermore, his usage of fictional authors is distinct from Pessoa’s trin-
ity of heteronyms: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis.
In contrast to Pessoa, who, as Richard Zenith and Fernão Cabral Martins
note, rarely hesitated in the attribution of texts to his various heteronyms,
Quadros deliberately plays on the indeterminacy of his speaking subjects’
identities.⁵⁰ Furthermore, Quadros never attempted to schematize his fic-
tional authors into a heteronymic universe. Pessoa, in contrast, fleshed out
his heteronyms with texts, many of them attributed to the heteronyms,
documenting the biographies, belief systems, physical appearances, and
temperaments of Caeiro, Campos, and Reis. Where Quadros furnishes bio-
graphical information, he ludically nudges and winks at his readers, pointing
to the artificiality of the pennames.
Quadros’s publishing under the name of Mutimati Barnabé João, whose
name invites readers to consider him a mestiço or black author, raises
ethical questions over representation. Is Quadros’s creation of Mutimati lit-
erary blackface? What are the ethics of a Portuguese writer’s elaborating a

⁴⁹ Maria Lourdes Cortez, ‘Introdução’, in Uma Meditação, 21 Laurentinas e Dois Fabulírios

Falhados (Lourenço Marques: João Pedro Grabato Dias, 1971), p. 9.
⁵⁰ In the publication plan sent to João Gaspar Simões in 1932, Pessoa stipulated that ‘toda a
obra heterónima é para ser publicada sob o seu próprio nome, Fernando Pessoa, sem nenhuma
espécie de hesitação ou ambiguidade’ (the entirety of the heteronymic oeuvre is to be published
under his own name, Fernando Pessoa, without any kind of hesitation or ambiguity). Fernão
Cabral Martins and Richard Zenith, ‘Prefácio’, in Teoria da Heteronímia, edited by Fernando
Pessoa (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2012), p. 18. Pessoa, ‘Carta a João Gaspar Simões—28-7-1932’,
in Teoria da Heteronimia, pp. 255–257.
 INTRODUCTION 17

collective discourse attributed, in the title, to the Mozambican people? In his

creation of Mutimati, Quadros does not perpetuate anti-black racist stereo-
types, nor did he profit from the book. Read alongside the poetry of Grabato
Dias, I posit that the collection can be most productively examined as a
prank carried out against Frelimo’s leadership. Quadros strategically uses
Mutimati’s identity to ensure that the collection was published by the party,
given that Frelimo would not have published a collection attributed to a Por-
tuguese with a name like António Quadros. A striking perversity of Eu, o
Povo (I, the People) is that the poems reveal a concern with foregrounding
the issues with an individual claiming to represent a collective, in a book
whose title and framing texts put the poet forward as a spokesperson for
the Mozambican people.⁵¹ Quadros’s puncturing of the role of spokesper-
son attributed to his authorial construct reveals a suspicion, also expressed
in the texts of Grabato Dias, with collective discourses and the formation of
the collective construct o povo moçambicano.

The Difficulties of Reading Quadros

Quadros’s works have never had a sizeable readership, owing to the marginal
literary context in which he published them and the difficulties that his
poetry presents to readers. Most of his works had small, single print runs
and many have been historically difficult to access.⁵² Little of his work has
been translated into other languages.⁵³ António Cabrita has described Gra-
bato Dias as a ‘poeta intratável’ (inaccessible poet) for critics.⁵⁴ There is
a paucity of critical studies on Quadros, limited to the works of Maria

⁵¹ Where I refer to ‘the people’ or ‘the Mozambican people’ I use the term as it is deployed
in Frelimo discourses; that is, a nationalist construct.
⁵² This issue has been alleviated recently by the welcome publication of an anthology of
Grabato Dias’s work, organized by Pedro Mexia, which includes extracts from 40 e Tal Sonetos,
O Morto, A Arca, Laurentinas, Pressaga, Facto/Fado and SagaPress. João Pedro Grabato Dias
[António Quadros], Odes Didácticas (Lisbon: Tinta da China, 2021). A pocketbook edition of
Eu, o Povo (Lisbon: Cotovia, 2008) is also still in print.
⁵³ All the poems from Eu, o Povo were translated by Chris Searle into English, in Sun-
flower of Hope: Poems from the Mozambican Revolution (London: Alison and Busby, 1982),
pp. 84–109. Frederick Williams translated select stanzas from As Quybyrycas and five poems
from Eu, o Povo (‘Relatório’, ‘Camarada Inimigo’, ‘Eu, o Povo’, ‘Venceremos’, and ‘Pés da Mesa’)
into English. The translations appear in his bilingual anthology, Poets of Mozambique/Poetas
de Moçambique: A Bilingual Selection (New York, New York: Luso-Brazilian Books; Provo,
UT: Brigham Young University Studies; Maputo: Universidade Eduardo Mondlane; Lisbon:
Instituto Camões, 2006), pp. 276–287.
⁵⁴ António Cabrita, ‘Tudo é Escrita e até Certas Coisas Escritas’, in António Quadros,
O Sinaleiro das Pombas (Porto: Árvore, Cooperativa de Actividades Artísticas, 2001), p. 213.
18 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIP IN MOZ AMBIQUE: ANTÓNIO QUADROS

Lourdes Cortez, Eugénio Lisboa, Amélia Muge, Frederick G. Williams,

Maria-Benedita Basto, António Cabrita, Murilo da Costa Ferreira, and Rita
Maia Gomes.⁵⁵ Studies of Quadros’s work have tended to focus on Muti-
mati Barnarbé João and Frey Ioannes Garabatus, despite the fact that only
one collection is attributed to each of those fictional authors, whereas nine
collections are attributed to Grabato Dias. Dissident Authorship is the first
attempt at a book-length study of the works of Quadros’s three pennames.
The difficulties of reading the poetry of Grabato Dias, Mutimati, and
Ioannes Garabatus are many and varied. Quadros self-published most of his
poems, many of which appear not to have passed through a rigorous editing
process. The texts contain typographical errors and uneven use of punctua-
tion. At times, it is unclear who is the subject in a given verbal construction.
Quadros’s idiosyncratic use of vocabulary means that his use of imagery is,
on occasion, ambiguous.⁵⁶ It is not always clear whether the ambiguities in
the poetry are the result of a conscious artistic choice or the unfortunate
by-product of a misprint.
Quadros’s use of pennames also presents a challenge to his readers.
Quadros’s deployment of his pennames is ludic, corresponding to the imp-
ishness that Carmela Ciuraru identifies in some usages of pseudonyms:

A nom de plume can [ … ] provide a divine sense of control. No writer can

determine the fate of a book—how the poems or novels are interpreted,
whether they are loved or grossly misunderstood. By assuming a pen name,
though, an author can claim territory, seize possession of a work before
the reader or critic inevitably distorts it. In this way, the author gets the
last laugh: despise my book as much as you like; you don’t even know who
wrote it. However petty, such trickery yields infinite pleasure. Obfuscation
is fun!⁵⁷

The games of hide and seek that Quadros’s pennames play with his readers
establish a perverse relationship of resistance and dependence with them
that is subtly distinct from that envisaged by Ciuraru for the author hiding

⁵⁵ The works of these authors can be consulted in the bibliography.

⁵⁶ A notable instance is the lengthy section in A Arca dedicated to ‘a ola’, discussed by Cabrita
in his essay on Quadros’s poetry published in O Sinaleiro das Pombas: Cabrita, ‘Tudo é Escrita
e até Certas Coisas Escritas’, in António Quadros, O Sinaleiro das Pombas (Porto: Árvore,
Cooperativa de Actividades Artísticas, 2001), p. 204.
⁵⁷ Carmela Ciuraru, Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms (New York: Harper-
Collins, 2012), p. xxv.
 INTRODUCTION 19

behind a pseudonym. Quadros counts on some of his readership being in

the know as to the identity of the author and others being in the dark.
Like many other writers in Mozambique opposed to colonial rule,
Quadros coded his anti-authoritarian and anti-colonial politics in what his-
torian Oliveira Marques describes as a ‘highly original crypto-writing’ and
Russell Hamilton as a ‘hermetismo ambı́guo’ (ambiguous hermetism) that
allowed authors to bypass the censors.⁵⁸ However, the censorship context
does not entirely explain the difficulty of Quadros’s poetry. He continued to
use the cryptic style that he had deployed in his oblique anti-colonial poetry
in the post-independence period. The cryptic bent of his poetry entails a
conscious withholding of information from his readers. As Grabato Dias
notes in Facto/Fado, his texts conceal as much as they reveal: he remarks
that he ‘feigns’ (‘finjo’, a loaded verb that recalls Fernando Pessoa’s claim that
the poet is a ‘fingidor’ [feigner/faker]) and that ‘Estou sempre ocultando algo
no abrir da escrita’ (Even when my writing appears to open up, I am always
hiding something, p. 28). This quotation points to the fact that Grabato Dias
is conscious of the difficulties that his poetry presents to his readers and that
he deliberately closes parts of his texts off from them. It also demonstrates
a curious perversity of Grabato Dias’s writings, in particular. Although Gra-
bato Dias’s poetry is often opaque, he is keen to flag, in relatively legible
terms, that his poetry is difficult to comprehend.
A further difficulty in reading Quadros’s works—in particular, those of
Grabato Dias—is highlighted elsewhere in Facto/Fado: ‘Digo-me, redigo-
me, contradigo-me’ (I talk to myself, I repeat myself, I contradict myself,
p. 13). Although, at times, he flags that he is conscious of the inconsisten-
cies in his poetry, as with the ambiguities that arise from alienating syntax,
vocabulary, and typography noted above, readers can never be sure that a
given disjunction in Grabato Dias’s texts is calculated or accidental. One
area where Quadros’s fictional authors are consistent is the distinctive anti-
authoritarian strand that runs throughout his work. During the late colonial
period, the poet’s idiosyncratic anti-authoritarian politics are directed at the
colonial state. After independence, Mutimati (in Eu, o Povo) and Grabato
Dias (in O Povo é Nós) detect and critique Frelimo’s latent authoritarian
tendencies.

⁵⁸ A. H. de Oliveira Marques, History of Portugal, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1972–1976), II, p. 187; Russell Hamilton, Literatura Africana, Literatura Necessária, 2
vols (Lisbon: Edições 70, 1981–1984), II, p. 65.
20 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIP IN MOZ AMBIQUE: ANTÓNIO QUADROS

According to the individuals that I have interviewed, Quadros had no for-

mal political affiliations. Although sympathetic with Frelimo’s project before
the party’s Third Conference, he was not a member of the party, nor was he
a member of the Associação dos Escritores de Moçambique (Association
of Mozambican Writers), a writers’ collective founded by Frelimo. How-
ever, even if Quadros was not interested in current affairs or party politics,
his poetry deploys various political discourses: the language of medieval
hierarchies, colonialism, and, in the post-independence period, the Marxist-
Leninist-inflected buzzwords favoured by Frelimo. At times, Quadros’s use
of language relating to colonialism is infelicitous. In A Arca, the poet makes
the aggrandized and ironic claim that he, alone, is slave (‘escravo’) to the
powers-that-be. Grabato Dias’s likening of his position as a poet benefit-
ing from the patronage of his authoritarian masters to slavery in 1971,
only a decade after forced labour in Mozambique was officially abolished,⁵⁹
reveals a disconnect from the harsh realities faced by many Mozambicans
under Portuguese colonial rule. Quadros’s ironic and self-aggrandizing use
of terms such as ‘escravo’ (slave), in particular, to describe his position under
colonial rule is the result of a mapping of the language of colonial authoritar-
ianism onto the literary politics of being an anti-colonial Portuguese writer
with a privileged social position in colonial Mozambique.
This book is divided into six chapters, in which I consider the poli-
tics of authorship in Mozambique in relation to the themes of identity,
canoncity, representation, and readership through readings of Quadros’s
literary output.
In chapter 1, I trace how the role of authors in Mozambique changed
from the late colonial to the post-colonial periods. I locate the central para-
dox of authorship in Mozambique—that to be an author is to be politically
essential and politically useless—in the curious consonance of discourses
on authorship promulgated by the Portuguese dictatorship and by Mozam-
bican nationalists.
In chapter 2, I use Grabato Dias’s identity as a case study to discuss
the paradoxes of moçambicanidade (Mozambican identity). I contrast the
configuration of Grabato Dias’s identity in the late colonial period with
its framing in the post-Carnation Revolution context, arguing that the
shift in Grabato Dias’s identity maps onto the sudden change in political
paradigm. The trajectory of Grabato Dias’s identity reveals the disjunction

⁵⁹ Eric Allina, Slavery by Any Other Name: African Life under Company Rule in Mozambique
(Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012), p. 9.
 INTRODUCTION 21

between the utopian universalism of moçambicanidade as a loose cultural

identity accepting of settler writers like Quadros and the relatively rigid
nationalist definition underlying Frelimo’s conception of Mozambican civic
identity. In the late colonial period, Grabato Dias’s Luso-Mozambican iden-
tity functions as a form of resistance to Portuguese colonial rule; in the
post-independence period, he fears that his identity will exclude him from
the new nation of Mozambique.
In chapter 3, I analyse Quadros’s engagement with Os Lusı́adas, a major
work of the Portuguese canon by Luı́s de Camões that was appropriated by
the Estado Novo as a foundational imperial text. As Quybyrycas and its pref-
ace, authored by dissident critic Jorge de Sena, provide subversive rereadings
of Camões’s epic. Quadros’s and Sena’s reframings of Camões draw out the
tensions and ambiguities in Os Lusı́adas as a counter to the authoritative
interpretations of conservative literary critics. In As Quybyrycas, opacity is
highlighted as a textual strategy that forestalls attempts, by political author-
ities, to appropriate literary texts. I deploy Quadros’s nuanced discussions
of the pitfalls of such a strategy to challenge deconstructionist postcolonial
criticism, which posits ambiguity as an historically effective anti-colonial
tool.
Chapter 4 analyses the cryptic anti-colonial ode A Arca, in which Gra-
bato Dias raises questions over the role and function of writers in contexts
of collective political struggle. Grabato Dias’s idiosyncratic anti-colonial pol-
itics stand as a counterpoint to Frelimo’s militarized political stance and to
the party’s position on the role of literature in the anti-colonial struggle. I
interrogate Grabato Dias’s idiosyncratic pacifist anti-colonial poetics using
Fanon’s defence of anti-colonial violence.
In chapter 5, I examine the phenomenon of collective poetry published
by Frelimo through the case of Mutimati Barnabé João’s Eu, o Povo. I analyse
Quadros’s attempt in Eu, o Povo to reconcile the anti-colonial and post-
colonial functions of poetry in Mozambique: resistance to power and the
expression of the nationalist project, respectively. Mutimati’s text is con-
cerned with challenging Frelimo’s populist discourses and with emphasizing
the role that individuals can play in the project of national reconstruction.
In chapter 6, I examine questions relating to readership in three texts
authored by Grabato Dias: the short stories Sete Contos para um Car-
naval, the preface to Eu, o Povo’s spiritual sequel, O Povo é Nós; and, a
cryptic gloss of Mutimati’s Eu, o Povo, authored by Grabato Dias, from
Sagapress. I use these texts to propose a means of reconciling the debate
in postcolonial studies concerning the modes of reading—historicist and
22 DISSIDENT AUTHORSHIP IN MOZ AMBIQUE: ANTÓNIO QUADROS

deconstructionist—most appropriate for approaching texts written in colo-

nial contexts. Furthermore, I examine Quadros’s framing of literature’s
potential to have a tangible, positive, and material impact on society,
through its readers, in light of decolonial theory’s emphasis on a critical
practice directed towards radically transforming the world.
A figure who straddled the colonial and post-independence periods
in Mozambique, Quadros’s case reveals the continuities and disjunctions
between what it meant to be an author in colonial and Frelimo-ruled
Mozambique. Although Quadros’s disconnect from the political, social, and
economic realities faced by most Mozambicans distorts his framings of his
own relationship to power, his works often display a remarkable perspicac-
ity regarding the complexities of colonial and post-colonial Mozambican
politics and the problematic of authorship in Mozambique.
Another random document with
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and although work has been begun, yet we [Sidenote: School
have but little expectation of its accomplishment at Robeson]
in a short time;
That there is a ... school at Maiden Creek kept by Thomas
Pearson, a Friend, who is at present engaged for a year, has
15 scholars entered for that time and 8 quarterly ditto scholars
at the rate of 40/ per annum for each, which is under the
direction of three overseers chosen by the employers. The
school house built on a piece of ground belonging to a Friend
which contains about five acres. There is likewise a school at
Reading kept by Benjamin Parks and wife in their own house;
they are members of the society and have about 50 scholars;
such as spell at 7/6 and others at 10/ per quarter but is not
under the direction of the meeting, nor are there any
overseers chosen to superintend the same, yet we are of the
mind a school established there under proper regulations and
care of the monthly meeting, might be useful and deserves
encouragement.
The schools within the verge of Robeson Monthly Meeting
are kept by a person who inclines to go to our meetings, has
about 20 scholars, amounting to about £34 per annum.
Endeavors are also used to get a school established there
upon a better plan and near the direction of the yearly
meeting, but how far they may be successful is at present
unknown. We do therefore recommend the whole to the
notion of alleviation of the Monthly Meeting as a matter
wherein friends are deeply interested.
Which we submit to the Meeting.
Amos Lee, Thomas Lightfoot, Samuel Hughes, Fannie
Ambree, Owen Hughes, (which was approved by the Monthly
Meeting, and decided that the substance be made a report to
the Quarterly Meeting—The Committee to be continued to the
service of Schools and report in the future).[339]
 Maiden Creek was at this time (1784) making [Sidenote: Maiden
earnest efforts to meet the standards set by the Creek secures
general meeting. In the eleventh month they land for school]
requested a number of persons to be named to [Sidenote:
whom they might give a deed of trust for the Attempt to
ground agreed upon for the use of their school.[340] establish school
at Reading]
Three were suggested and the deed and
declaration of trust accordingly drawn up. Efforts in the meantime
had been made towards establishing a school at Reading and a
committee to conduct a subscription for that purpose named.[341]
Help was solicited from the yearly meeting, but James Pemberton
answered for that body that there was no money to be spared at the
time, so Reading was advised to build such a house as their
circumstances would permit.[342] Near the close of 1787 those
having direct charge thereof made the following report of their
progress:
[Sidenote:
We the committee appointed to have the Committee report
school education of youth under care, have on Reading
given close attention to a school proposed to be school]
opened in a short time at Reading by Caleb Johnson, in a
house now in building by Friends there, and nearly finished,
which we are of the mind should be under particular care and
direction of the monthly meeting; and that it may be well that a
committee be thereby appointed to superintend and monthly
to visit said school; we have also drawn up and agreed on
certain rules to be observed and attended to by the
employers, master and scholars concerned therein for the
regulation and well ordering thereof: which we have ready for
the examination and inspection of the monthly meeting if
thought necessary. All which we submit thereto. Signed on
behalf of the committee, Francis Parvin.... Which minute
being read was allowed of and it was directed that a copy
thereof be kept in open view in said school and that the
original be lodged among the meeting papers; Benjamin
Pearson, Samuel Jackson, John Mears, Francis Parvin,
 Johannes Lee, Jr., and James Iddings are appointed to have
the said school under care and visit it once a month or oftener
as necessity may require and report of their care. The former
committee is continued.[343]

After the school had been in progress two years, [Sidenote: School
Samuel Jackson reported that it “appeared to be in discontinued]
an increasing way”[344] but its prosperity was not to
be long continued. In 1705 it was reported “discontinued,”[345] and
no reason assigned for it excepting “the situation of the Friends
there” which, taking into consideration the shortage of funds when it
was begun, we may infer, had reference to the financial situation.
The action of the monthly meeting in regard to it was left entirely to
their own judgment.[346]

SUMMARY
In this chapter we have considered the schools [Sidenote: Scope
of Philadelphia (city and county), and also those at of chapter]
Exeter Monthly Meeting, which belonged to the
Philadelphia Quarter.
Education in the Quaker colony was initially [Sidenote:
provided for in the instrument of government, Education to be
drawn up before the Proprietary left England; in function of
government]
accord with said provisions the first school
(Flower’s) was set up by the Council in 1683. [Sidenote: First
Thereafter, however, the initiative was usually school]
taken by the Quaker meeting, which in 1689 set up [Sidenote: School
a school and in 1697 applied for a charter under established by
the laws of the province. This petition was granted monthly meeting]
and Penn gave the first charter in 1701. Later
[Sidenote:
charters, in 1708 and 1711, granted extended Overseers made
privileges; by the last one the body of overseers independent]
were made self-perpetuating, and thus as
independent of the meeting as they wished to be. The letter said to
have been written to Thomas Lloyd, which credits Penn with
suggesting the school of 1689, has not yet been discovered.
The earliest masters were Keith, Makin, [Sidenote: Earliest
Pastorius, and Cadwalader. Mistresses were masters and
mentioned in connection with the schools from mistresses]
about 1699, Olive Songhurst being the first one [Sidenote: Growth
named. Salaries were not high and seem in some of system]
cases to have hardly sufficed for the family of the
master; increases were made upon complaint. Extra duties for the
teacher included keeping charge of the boys and girls in meeting.
From 1689 to 1779 the system increased from employing one to one
which required nine. In 1784 ten were reported.
Philadelphia Friends’ schools were first [Sidenote: Means
supported by (1) rates and (2) subscriptions, while of support]
(3) legacies and special gifts soon came to form a
considerable item in their support. Bequests were also a factor in the
support of the Negro School. Funds were occasionally raised by
bond issues, and derived from tenements built on school property.
Schools were first held in rented property and in [Sidenote: Place
the meeting house, but in 1698 steps were taken to of first schools]
purchase property of Lionell Brittain for the use of
schools. Property was received as a gift from [Sidenote:
Property by
Samuel Carpenter in 1701. The first record of a purchase and gift]
schoolhouse was the one to be begun in 1701. In
accord with their charter rights the power and [Sidenote:
Overseers more
independence of the overseers increased. In 1725 independent]
the monthly meeting conveyed to them all money
and the titles for all school property. The Negro School was provided
with a building in 1771. The end of the century is marked by the
establishment by the yearly meeting of a Boarding School at
Westtown in Chester County.
The exact date of Byberry’s first school is not [Sidenote:
determined; but must have been early, since Byberry]
Richard Brockden is reported to have been
schoolmaster there in 1711. School activity, however, seems to have
increased greatly near the middle of the century. The school was
under the care of a standing committee, which was to visit schools
every six weeks and make two reports thereon each year. Poor
children were schooled by the trustees of the school funds.
Germantown school began in 1702, though [Sidenote:
perhaps an evening school existed before that Germantown]
date. Pastorius continued in this school as master,
at least until 1718. The official language used in the school was
probably English. The names of the first patrons were all German; a
large number of English names among them in 1708 is an indication
of how the school and its master were regarded.
In 1758 youths’ meetings were established by [Sidenote: Exeter
Exeter, but no school committee was appointed Monthly]
until 1778. This committee accomplished nothing
[Sidenote:
and made no report of value. By a report of 1784, Maidencreek
Maidencreek, Reading, and Robeson were credited Reading
with one school each, which measured up in some Robeson]
ways to the desired standards. Exeter had none.
The Reading School was discontinued in 1795.
The total number of schools reported at Philadelphia,
Germantown, Byberry, and Exeter monthly meeting, was fifteen.
 CHAPTER V
SCHOOLS OF BUCKS COUNTY

The establishment of schools in Bucks County [Sidenote:

will be discussed (1) under the head of the monthly Schools of five
meetings therein situated and (2) in the order of monthly meetings
to be discussed]
their establishment in point of time. The several
monthly meetings and their dates of establishment, respectively, are
as follows: Falls, 1683; Middletown, 1683 (known as Neshaminy until
1706); Buckingham, set off from Falls, 1720; Wrightstown, set off
from Buckingham, 1734; and Richland, set off from Gwynedd (in
Montgomery County) in 1742.[347] Of these meetings, all were a part
of Bucks Quarterly Meeting save Richland, which belonged to that of
Abington.[348]
The first way in which the early Quakers usually [Sidenote:
looked after education was to arrange for a useful Apprenticeship
apprenticeship suitable to the individual, which was looked after by
meetings; placed
calculated to enable him or her to earn a living. The among Friends]
moral training was always considered when an
apprentice was to be placed. The placing of youths as apprentices
was in the charge of Friends appointed by the monthly meeting. The
early records of Falls Monthly Meeting show them active in regard to
this type of education. In 1704 this report was made before the
meeting.

A complaint having been made to this meeting that the

children of Abraham Clement are not placed out to the
satisfaction of Friends, it is the mind of this meeting that the
Friends formerly appointed do take care to speak with Samuel
Carpenter and Benjamin Collins about them, and make report
to next meeting.[349]
 A similar one of 1714 points out the continued interest and
attention in that respect.

It being proposed to this meeting that there is a necessity of

some Friends being appointed to take care about placing out
John Linton’s children as apprentices, therefore this meeting
doth appoint Joseph Kirkbride, Thomas Watson, Jr., and
Joseph Fell to care about placing them out.[350]

Another phase of education, more particularly [Sidenote: Moral

the moral, was cared for in the youths’ meetings, education in
which were established at intervals, usually not youths’ meetings;]
more than four or five times during the year. It was
the practice for the youths’ meetings to be established by the
quarterly meetings, in conjunction with representatives of the
monthly meetings. In 1713, Bucks Quarterly took up the re-
establishment of those within their limits, and ordered them
accordingly, as the following extract states.
[Sidenote:
It being thought necessary by this meeting established by
that the youths’ meeting be once a year at Bucks Quarterly]
Buckingham, once a year at Bristol and but
once a year at Falls and once at Middletown, therefore
agreed that they be on the days ... etc.[351]

To locate the date of the first school at Falls is [Sidenote:

difficult; it seems impossible to do so from the Question as to
information to be gleaned from the records. We early school at
Falls]
may be certain, however, that there was a school in
the neighborhood at a very early date, though we can hardly
determine the year. In 1730 the following request was made of the
meeting:

Some Friends of Falls Meeting requested to have the use

of the old schoolhouse, and it wanting repairing, they would
 repair it at their own charge, which is left to be considered at
next meeting.[352]

The presence in their vicinity, of an old [Sidenote:

schoolhouse which, moreover, needed repairs Contradiction in
before it could be used, would indicate that a the minutes of
Falls]
school had been there for a number of years.
Taking fifteen years as a very moderate span for the life of the
building, before it should need any considerable repairs we could
state with a good degree of assurance that the school building had
probably been built not later than 1715, and that the school dated
back to that time at the very latest.[353] But at the next meeting this
encounters a very dangerous obstruction. That meeting, referring to
the request of the seventh month, second, speaks of “the request
about having the old meetinghouse,” instead of, old schoolhouse.
[354] It further mentions that it was desired for the purpose of a

school.[355] From this it appears that the truth of our above

conclusion depends upon the accuracy of the records for seventh
month, second, 1730 and for eighth month, seventh, 1730. If the
record of the first date is correct our conclusion is unfounded and the
date for the first established school can probably be placed about
1730, or shortly thereafter.[356]
The records for the next thirty years reveal but [Sidenote: House
little of the activities of the schools in Falls Monthly for masters’
Meeting, though we are led to believe them in accommodation
proposed in 1759]
continuance, but perhaps not regularly. In 1759 the
meeting had agreed to allow a house to be built on [Sidenote:
their grounds for the accommodation of a school Property
conveyed to
master, but the house was not built there, since trustees for use of
Mahlon Kirkbride had already purchased some schools]
adjoining ground on which there was a house built
for that purpose.[357] The said Kirkbride offered to convey the same
property to some Friends, in trust for the meeting, and Robert Lucas,
Story Kirkbride, Mahlon Kirkbride, Jr., Jonathan Palmer, Jr., and
Edward Bayly, Jr., were appointed to receive the conveyance. This is
the first record of any permanent benefaction received. In 1783 the
urgent Advices of the Yearly Meeting being brought to their attention,
[358] a committee was appointed which reported the results of their
investigation up to that time in the following manner.
[Sidenote: Report
We, the committee appointed, in the first of school
month 1779 respecting the institution of schools committee]
for the instruction of our children in useful [Sidenote: Ground
learning, having conferred together ... agree to purchased for use
report that we have divers times met and had of school]
this important matter under our ... consideration,
and are desirous that this important subject and [Sidenote:
Standing
necessary care should meet with every proper committee on
encouragement and improvement; and we may education
recommended;
inform the meeting that there have been several and visitation]
improvements made on the lot of ground lately
purchased from Samuel Rhoads for the advantage of the
school and benefit of the master, and that the committee have
endeavored to encourage and pay for the schooling of such
poor children as are in the limits of the school kept at or near
this place whose parents are in low circumstances and are
willing to accept thereof. We have likewise extended our
consideration and views to the schools belonging to the other
preparative meetings, and although the circumstances of
things at present do not afford so promising and encouraging
a prospect as we could desire, yet we are desirous that every
proper encouragement may be afforded to promote the good
and necessary work, therefore, we are free to propose to the
meeting’s consideration that of having a standing committee
appointed for this purpose by the monthly meeting, and that
each preparative meeting should likewise appoint a
committee for the like purpose that should have this important
matter under their consideration in order to promote this so
necessary care in their respective meetings; and that the said
meeting’s committee should at proper and suitable times visit
the several preparative meetings’ schools and unite with the
said preparative meetings’ committees in affording and giving
 such help and assistance as to them from time to time may
appear necessary in order to promote this so good and
necessary a work and care. Signed at the desire and on
behalf of the committee, by James Moon.[359]

In accord with the above report the monthly [Sidenote:

meeting urged each preparative meeting to appoint Monthly meetings’
a committee on schools; the monthly meeting committee to join
those of the
named James Moon, John Merrick, Jonathan preparatives]
Kirkbride, William Satterthwaite, William Bidgood,
Jr., John Stapler and Joseph Gillingham to join with [Sidenote: Three
schools reported]
those of the preparatives for that service.[360] Five
months thereafter they reported,

The three several schools kept within compass of our

respective preparative meetings are conducted in some
measure under the care of a committee of Friends appointed
for that purpose and that the several teachers are members of
our society.[361]

The three preparative meetings were Falls, Makefield, and Bristol,

the last named being transferred to Middletown in 1788.[362]
Makefield Meeting was considerably assisted by help from private
sources; they reported to the monthly meeting in 1787:
[Sidenote:
We hereby inform the monthly meeting that Individual aid]
lately there has been a house built on the
ground belonging to Makefield Preparative Meeting for the
accommodation of a school master, chiefly at the expense of
Bernard Taylor, which he is desirous should be under use for
that purpose, to be subject to a moderate yearly rent to be
paid to Friends of that meeting for the use of the said
meeting: the said house to be their property and under the
care and the direction of said meeting with the advice and
 assistance of the Falls Monthly Meeting as occasion may
require.[363]

In 1790 a committee of the quarterly meeting [Sidenote: New

was appointed to confer with those of the monthly building proposed
meetings on schools, hoping that the union of all at Falls; not built
till later]
might be more productive of results than all
working separately.[364] In 1794 plans were set on foot for a new
schoolhouse at Falls Preparative, said house to be two stories in
height and about twenty-two feet by thirty.[365] It was to be placed
“near the line” of the meeting’s land at the west end of the meeting
house. The monthly meeting was to pay £75, the employers who are
members, £75, and the school committee £50 from the money
arising from donations left for the purposes of schools. The house
was not built until 1799, due to some unknown delay; its dimensions
were twenty-four by twenty-six feet, one story high, with a cellar of
the same dimensions.[366]
In 1797 the attention of the monthly meeting was [Sidenote:
called to the proposals of the yearly meeting for the Attention called to
the boarding
founding of a boarding school.[367] Copies of the school]
printed rules proposed for its government had been
received, and a committee was appointed to distribute them and to
take subscriptions from any who were interested to contribute.[368]
The problem of school support occupied a [Sidenote:
considerable part of Falls Meeting’s time. The Support of
means of support were here, as in others already schools
Monthly]
in Falls
mentioned, (1) subscriptions, (2) donations and (3)
rates. In 1760 it was considered necessary to appoint a committee of
fourteen members to take an inventory of all legacies and donations,
lands and benefactions which had been left to the meeting.[369]
Some had been given for definitely stated uses; and others allowed
the application to be determined by the members of the meeting. It
was the will of the assembly that the committee appointed should
especially determine what funds might be applied to the use of the
schools. They reported at the next meeting that the legacy left by
Elinor Bryner might be applied to the use of schools, along with
those given definitely for that purpose.[370] The method by which the
funds were to be applied to that use were indicated in the
suggestions of the committee at a later meeting, as follows:
[Sidenote: A
We ... are of the opinion that the most that committee to
can be done at present, will be to appoint have oversight of
Friends to have the care of the schools and to education
poor]
of the

examine what poor children may be amongst

us, they being the proper objects of the charity designated by
the givers of the money, and that the said Friends have power
to agree with a master to teach such children; and also to
draw orders for the payment thereof out of the interest arising
from the money appropriated to the use of schools.
Nominated seven Friends for that service and submitted the
names and the report to the monthly meeting. The Friends
above named are appointed to that service with the powers
therein mentioned and are desired to lay an account before
the monthly meeting at least once in each year and oftener if
the meeting shall see fit to call for it.[371]

Such a plan as here indicated was consistently followed

throughout the century in regard to school support. The interest on
legacies had to be paid annually.[372]
In 1781 the meeting was advised that Samuel [Sidenote:
Rhoads of Philadelphia had offered to sell four Rhoads proposes
acres of ground adjoining the schoolhouse lot, to to sell land for a
school;
be used for the promotion of the school, and the considered]
benefit of the schoolmasters.[373] The
consideration asked was £60, and Rhoads and his two brothers-in-
law, Joseph Pemberton and Samuel Pleasants, offered to donate
£20, making it cost the meeting but £40. The committee on school
support was directed to consider this proposal. Bristol Preparative
also received very valuable assistance for the use of poor children’s
schooling, in the bequest of £50 Pennsylvania currency which was
left them by John Baldwin of Philadelphia.[374] The great concern of
the meeting for the best expenditure of these donations for educating
not only the poor Whites but also the Negroes, is seen in their
minute of 1787.[375] Careful account was kept and the accounts
frequently audited, sometimes at the request of individuals.[376] In
1790 the committee reported their concerns as follows:
[Sidenote: Report
We the committee appointed by the monthly of committee on
meeting to have the care of schooling poor education of the
children; also to have the distribution of the poor]
interests accruing on the several donations given for that use,
have given attention to the service to which we were
appointed: and the schooling a considerable number of
children has accordingly been paid for, but as it is allowed that
a change of the teacher at times may be useful or
advantageous to a school, we are united in the sentiment that
if such a change was to take place in the school kept at this
place, it would be a means whereby the school might be
considerably enlarged and the design and end of the several
donations left for the use of the said school more fully
answered. (Report submitted and accepted and the
committee continued to the further service.)[377]

The establishment of these permanent funds [Sidenote:

was frequently expressed by the numerous Establishment of
committees as the most important consideration for funds of basic
importance]
the execution of the school idea. They attempted
again and again to provide a uniform means of establishing such
funds, but due to the unequal circumstances of the several meetings
it was impossible to do so.[378] The uniform plan was kept as an
ideal to be striven for and recommended to the quarterly meeting for
its advisement in the matter;[379] in the meantime individual
contributions were urged on all who felt inclined to endow a worthy
cause.[380] The amounts given were frequent though small, many of
them being about £5.[381]
 In addition to the local expenses of the meetings, (1) for worship,
(2) for the use of schools, (3) for the maintenance of the poor, etc.,
there were also quotas to be raised for the yearly meeting stock,
which added materially to the burden of each of the preparative
meetings. The quota for the meetings belonging to Falls in 1797 was
£500.[382]
If we may look over the Quaker treasurer’s shoulder as he runs his
accounts at the end of the century, we find him situated financially as
follows:
[Sidenote:
We the committee appointed to examine and Financial status of
settle the Treasurer’s accounts, having Falls at end of
attended thereto, find a balance in his hands of century]
£136/8/11 school money; also, £3/10/7 poor money; and
£9/00/00 of interest received on John Large’s legacy, making
the whole £148/19/6, in the treasurer’s hands, and the monies
upon interest stand as in the following statement, viz.

Bonds for School Money

1 bond for ” ” £250/
1 ” ” ” £7/9/4½
1 legacy without a bond £50
1 bond for ” ” £50
1 ” ” ” £50
1 ” ” ” £130
1 ” ” ” £100
1 ” ” ” £50
1 ” ” ” £40
Included in a bond of £75 £40
£777/9/4½

Interest due on school money £40/00/11

And one year’s rent on house and lot £12/00/00
And one year’s rent on house and lot £12/00/00[383]
 The Middletown Meeting began its educational [Sidenote:
work more promptly than did Falls.[384] Ten years Middletown]
after the first establishment of the meeting a
request was brought forward as follows:
[Sidenote: School
Some Friends have signified the likeliness of requested in
having a schoolmaster hereabouts to instruct Middletown
children and also requested that they might meeting house]
have the privilege to teach in the meeting house, to which this
meeting does give their free consent, provided it be no
hindrance to Friends Meetings.[385]

It is quite probable that the school established as [Sidenote: Again

requested, was a temporary and irregular affair, requested]
depending on the will of the individual patrons.
Certainly, it had not any official connection with the meeting, and
probably did not have for many years. In 1699, a request similar to
that of 1693 was made by Thomas Stackhouse and others, desiring
the use of the meeting house for a schoolmaster,[386] which implies
they had not advanced much beyond their state of 1693. This
request was likewise granted, provided no hindrance be caused to
the meetings.
Because of very inadequate records in this [Sidenote:
regard, much is left to be surmised concerning the Middletown not in
continuation of the schools thus early begun. The harmony with
yearly meeting’s
meeting was in continual touch with the desires proposals]
and proposals of the yearly meeting,[387] and it
does not seem justifiable to suppose that education languished,
because scant records of it remain. The general tone of their minutes
is one of self-satisfaction, and implies that they themselves were well
pleased with their state. The elaborate recommendations of the
yearly meeting in 1750[388] did not meet with their approval as they
thought it quite impossible for those members living remote in the
country districts.[389] That they disagreed with the plan indicates
neither a lack of interest in the subject, nor a lack of schools in their
locality. Rather, it may indicate the opposite.
In 1755 there was made the first donation to a [Sidenote:
permanent foundation for a free school. At a Donation 1755 for
meeting in that year an extract of Adam Harker’s a free school]
will was produced, where it appeared he had, [Sidenote: Under
control of monthly
meeting]
given a sum of money to them with others in
trust to be employed toward raising a fund for settling and
maintaining a Free School under the care and direction of this
meeting ... shall and will therewith purchase an annuity or
yearly ground rent, or in such other manner as they may think
most proper employ the said sum (£40) towards raising a fund
for settling and maintaining a Free School in Middletown
aforesaid, under the direction and control of the monthly
Meeting of Friends there.[390]

Whether there was a new school erected as a result of the

bequest or whether it was turned to the use of one already existing
does not appear; the latter suggestion is much the more probable.
The advices of 1777 and 1778 and the years following aroused the
members to the responsibilities which they must accept. In 1779 they
made report as follows:

Although it appears that the education of the youth has

been too much neglected, we believe there is an increasing
care that Friends may be more careful in that weighty
concern.[391]

And in 1780:

We believe a good degree of care is taken by some in

regard to the education of those under their care, and that an
increase in that is necessary.[392]
 All questions in regard to schools or educational [Sidenote: All
affairs whatsoever were dismissed summarily, and details under the
given to the charge of the committee on schools. care of a
[393] A committee reported in 1782 that nothing had committee on
schools]
been done more than to visit the school they
already had.[394] The failure to bring forth results may have been
with the committee; at any rate the meeting decided to try a new
one.
[Sidenote: New
This meeting taking into consideration the committee
several matters recommended in the extracts ... appointed]
respecting the education of the youth and their
school tuition, are of the opinion that a reappointment on
those important subjects is necessary; wherefore, Woolston J.
Paxson, W. Blakeley, J. Watson and R. Hartshorne are
appointed as committee to those services, and they are
desired to closely attend thereto in order that the present and
former advices may be carried as fully into execution as
possible.[395]

In 1785 this committee reported that visits had [Sidenote:

been made to families in the interests of education Activities of the
committee not
but that little was effected.[396] The committee was effective]
released and the consideration of education left to
the next meeting,[397] at which a new committee of three was
appointed. This one, so far as their record goes, was neither more
active nor more successful than the others. In 1788 they report
“nothing much has been done in respect to schools since last year,”
which report was sent to the yearly meeting.[398] The record is not
complete to the end of the century, but for the period considered
does not offer any evidence of more than passing educational
interest and activity. Nothing unusual is to be noted in the finance
and support of the school at Middletown. Mention was made of
Harker’s will, which, it seems, was the first legacy left to its benefit.
[399]
 The attention of the meeting was early given to [Sidenote: Care of
the care of the orphans and the poor, and poor orphan;
especially to their satisfactory placement among apprenticing]

people as apprentices. The following from the

records for 1699 will serve for illustration.

It is agreed and concluded upon by this meeting that the

meeting take care of all Friends children that are left as
orphans and unsettled, to inspect and see that all such be
taken care of and settled in the best and suitablest manner
according to their capacity, that thereby they may discharge
their duty and all such be eased by taking such due care....

The attention of Buckingham Meeting was also [Sidenote:

turned toward the education of apprentices, and Buckingham]
careful scrutiny given those who removed to
[Sidenote:
apprentice themselves elsewhere, as also those Apprentices; care
who removed to Buckingham Meeting. In 1764 in their
Mahlon Michener, son of John, removed his certification]
certificate to Philadelphia, “having been placed as
apprentice” in the vicinity of that meeting.[400] John Parry, minor, an
apprentice to Thomas Fell, blacksmith, produced a certificate in
Abington Monthly,[401] which was accepted and also that of Isaac
Gommere from the same place.[402] The poor were provided for by
the legacy left for that purpose by John Holcomb in 1749.[403]
Whether this might, a part of it, have been spent for schooling is not
known.
In 1755 there was a minute entered in the [Sidenote: Harker
records to the effect that a legacy had been left to legacy for a free
Buckingham by their deceased friend Adam school]
Harker, for the purpose of establishing a free [Sidenote:
school in that place.[404] The amount of the Committee
bequest was the same (£40) as that left to the appointed
schools]
on

Middletown Meeting by Harker.[405] This was the

first bequest for definite school purposes; the indications are that
many followed. In 1778, a minute gives their financial status as
£244/4/11½ and they entertained a proposition and concluded to
raise £500 more.[406] At the same time, the recommendations from
the yearly meeting being read,[407] a committee of the following
persons was appointed for investigation and assistance on the
subject of schools, viz.: Paul Preston, Joseph Watson, Joseph
Preston, John Gillingham, Benjamin Paxson, Benjamin Kinsey,
Thomas Watson, Joseph Eastburn, John Kinsey, John Balderston,
Jonathan Shaw, Benjamin Cutler, Thomas Good, Jr., John Brown,
and Robert Kirkbride.[408] The action of this committee is not brought
out in the minutes of the meeting.
The quarterly meeting made a new appeal in [Sidenote: Visiting
1780 for a more decided action by the various schools required]
tributary meetings which was followed by the
appointment of a new committee.[409] They were requested to “visit
the school” for the “help and assistance” of the master and to report
their action to a future meeting. In the twelfth month of the same year
they made these recommendations:
[Sidenote:
The committee appointed for the proper Committee’s
establishment and regulation of schools made recommendations
report in writing that it is their sense and ]
judgment that the monthly meeting should recommend to the
particular meetings severally, to promote subscriptions toward
the setting up and building upon their meeting’s lands as may
be convenient for schoolhouses and such conveniences as
may accommodate settled persons who live near the same,
as also to encourage their contributions toward making up
funds or salaries for the constant support of schools therein
which is recommended to the preparative meetings.[410]

A new committee was appointed in 1784.[411] [Sidenote:

They convened with the committees of the Appointment of
trustees
preparatives and discussed the recommendations necessary]
and means suggested by the yearly meeting. Their
conclusion was to the effect that one thing in the recommendations
was absolutely necessary, namely, that all funds, legacies,
properties, etc., provided for the schools, should be vested in
trustees for that purpose.[412] Without taking this step they saw no
way to attain even the least success. It was further suggested that
the trustees or committee thus appointed should investigate the
present houses for schools, their condition and location, in each of
the particular meetings, that a wiser plan might be followed in
locating the new ones. The meeting considering the report decided
to adopt its suggestions and accordingly appointed thirteen men,

to inspect into the state of such schools as are now kept and
where it may be necessary, to promote others,

and make a report as soon as possible.[413] Its report, produced in

the first month, 1785, was quite long. Only the essential points of it
are given in the following digest.[414]
1. Most of the committee appointed met and [Sidenote:
decided to confirm the former committee’s report. Summary of
committee’s
2. We find that there are many schoolhouses report of 1785]
within the bounds that include the members of the
meeting.

a. These are not well situated for the service of schools.

b. Some are well situated, however, as (1) one on land
granted by Samuel Eastburn and vested in the school
trustees, (2) one on land granted by Thomas Goode, vested
in members of the meeting, but not in trust for the meeting.

3. They suggest that these two houses be used as previously and

that new houses be erected not more than three miles apart.
4. They maintain an uncertain state has prevailed among the
schools.