Dissident Authorship in Mozambique: The Case of António Quadros (1933-1994) (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs) 1st Edition Stennett

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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
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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
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.
1
Late Coloniality and Post-coloniality
in Mozambique
In the preface to his 1976 anthology of Mozambican poetry, As Armas Estão

Acesas nas Nossas Mãos (The Weapons Burn in our Hands), the Portuguese
writer Papiniano Carlos hints at some of the peculiarities of the place of
literature in post-independence Mozambique. Carlos states that Frelimo’s
revolution has catalysed two related processes: the unleashing of the creative
energy of the Mozambican people and the concomitant enabling of poetry
to perform hitherto impeded functions. Carlos states that these functions are
essentially ideological: because Frelimo overcame the Portuguese, Mozam-
bican poetry can now revel in the heroism of Frelimo’s victory and promote
the party’s ideological line. In this way, poetry is framed as entirely subor-
dinate to Frelimo’s political project. And yet, although poetry is identified
as an important political tool with a ‘papel excepcional’ (exceptional role)
to perform in Frelimo’s revolution, there is a defensiveness to Carlos’s pref-
ace; a need to assert poetry’s importance. Carlos’s marshalling of authorizing
agents—Mozambique’s first president, Samora Machel; the revolutionary
leader and Samora’s wife, Josina Machel; and, the poet and Frelimo’s vice
president Marcelino dos Santos—to underline poetry’s political importance
is a backhanded gesture. He notes that the fact that the three cited leaders
have graciously contributed to the anthology in their time away from their
(real) revolutionary work speaks to poetry’s importance as a political activ-
ity.¹ Carlos’s framing is in line with Frelimo’s conception—at the time—of
the ideal revolutionary writer who is first and foremost a militant. It plays
on the trope—which Frelimo explicitly opposed—of the leisurely bourgeois
writer. Furthermore, it hints at the reality that elites in Mozambique had lit-
tle time to spend on activities such as writing during the period immediately
after independence. As Quadros found in the post-independence period,
nation-building is a time-consuming process.
¹ Papiniano Carlos, As Armas Estão Acesas nas Nossas Mãos (Porto: Edições Apesar de Tudo,
1976), p. 8.
Dissident Authorship in Mozambique. Tom Stennett, Oxford University Press. © Tom Stennett (2023).
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198885900.003.0002
The paradoxical notion that poetry is both of fundamental and secondary

political importance precedes independence. This chapter aims to trace how
the place of authors in late colonial Mozambique changed after the end of
Portuguese colonial rule. Such an approach implies a rupture between the
late colonial and post-colonial. Indeed, the end of colonial rule was a water-
shed moment with profound and wide-reaching consequences in Mozam-
bique. Between April 1974 and June 1975, the colonial war ended, and
Mozambique formally became an independent nation. The route to inde-
pendence during those fourteen months was fraught. Decolonization did
not occur overnight and there were tensions between reactionary elements
of the settler population and Frelimo.
Although there are many differences between late colonial and inde-
pendent Mozambique, the role of authors in both contexts was inherently
political. In the absence of opposition parties and a free press under the
Estado Novo and Frelimo, literature was a privileged medium through
which authors could voice political discontent. At the same time, the role that
the printed word could fulfil was necessarily limited by the distinct pre-and
post-independence contexts of high illiteracy. A key difference on this point
is that in contrast to the colonial administration’s actively limiting access to
education for black Mozambicans, Frelimo placed a significant emphasis on
raising literacy rates.²
In this chapter, I will discuss the ways in which what it meant to be
an author in Mozambique changed after the end of colonial rule, with
an emphasis on the politics of Mozambican authorship. The first section
focuses on the implications of censorship on authors during the late colonial
period and on Frelimo’s definition of the role of poetry and of writers during
the liberation struggle. The second section analyses the tensions in Fre-
limo’s literary culture after independence. I make two principal arguments.
First, Frelimo blunted the oppositional nature of anti-colonial literature as
the party sought to appropriate select texts in the cementing of the party’s
hegemony as the legitimate opposition to Portuguese colonial rule and,
after independence, the legitimate rulers of independent Mozambique. Sec-
ond, although literature was an inherently political activity in late colonial
and post-independence Mozambique, the political impact of authors was
necessarily limited owing to various contextual factors.
² Malyn Newitt, A History of Mozambique (London: Hurst, 1995), p. 547.

L ATE COLONIALIT Y AND POST-COLONIALIT Y IN MOZ AMBIQUE 25
Late Colonial Mozambique (1964–1974)
The geographical borders of modern Mozambique were set following the

Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, at which leaders from various colonial
powers deployed blunt geometric instruments and their scant knowledge of
African geography to carve up the continent amongst themselves. In 1885,
the Portuguese submitted its designs, in the form of the Rose-Coloured Map,
for a land empire extending across the continent from Angola to Mozam-
bique. These plans were opposed by the British, who claimed sovereignty
over the claimed territories on the basis of effective occupation, an argument
that the Portuguese were in no position to oppose, given that Portuguese
colonial settlement in Mozambique, as in Angola, was largely confined to the
coastlines. Subsequent Portuguese attempts to establish treaties with local
rulers in Malawi were followed by a breakdown in relations that culminated
in the Ultimatum of 1890, a memorandum sent by Lord Salisbury to the
Portuguese government demanding that Portuguese troops leave the dis-
puted territories. Domestically, Portugal’s acquiescence to British demands
was seen as a national humiliation, and the government’s capitulation led to
a change in prime minister.³ The boundaries set during the 1891 land treaty
with the British have remained largely unchanged until the present day.
In 1964, the year of Quadros’s arrival in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique
was a Portuguese colony and would remain so for another eleven years, until
its independence on 25 June 1975. In the face of international pressure and
against a backdrop of decolonization in French, British, and Belgian African
colonies in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Portugal stubbornly held onto its
African territories.⁴ The Portuguese state found pseudo-scholarly justifica-
tion for the continuation of its colonial project in the works of Brazilian
sociologist Gilberto Freyre and his theory of lusotropicalism, which was
expediently appropriated by the Estado Novo in the 1950s and 1960s, having
been initially repudiated by the regime.⁵ According to Freyre, the supposed
adaptability to tropical climates and sexual compatibility with black women
³ Malyn Newitt, Portugal in European and World History (London: Reaktion Books, 2009),
pp. 186–193.
⁴ In 1951, the Estado Novo abandoned an imperialist framing of its empire in favour of the
notion of a transcontinental Portugal constituted of its domestic, Iberian territory, and ‘overseas
provinces’. Claudia Castelo, ‘Recepção em Portugal da Doutrina de Gilberto Freyre’, in O Modo
Português de Estar no Mundo: O Lusotropicalismo e a Ideologia Colonial Portuguesa (Porto:
Afrontamento, 1998), pp. 50–58.
⁵ See Castelo, ‘Recepção em Portugal da Doutrina de Gilberto Freyre’, in O Modo Português
de Estar no Mundo, pp. 69–107.
of Portuguese men made Portugal uniquely suited to colonialism, in con-

trast to other European colonial powers⁶—a claim that served to sanitize
sexual violence perpetrated by Portuguese men against black women.⁷ The
notion of Portugal’s colonial exceptionalism has proved remarkably endur-
ing; Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s influential proposal of a discreet, Por-
tuguese postcolonial studies in his seminal essay ‘Entre Próspero e Calı́ban’,
hinges on the claimed exceptionalism of Portugal’s colonial project.⁸ As Ana
Paula Ferreira has noted, Portuguese colonial histories can be studied as
specific instances within the broader framework of European colonial his-
tory in Africa without having resource to a discourse of exceptionalism that
risks falling back into the colonialist framings that Portuguese postcolonial
studies interrogates.⁹
The main challenge to Portuguese colonial rule emerged in 1962 in the
form of the Frente da Libertação de Moçambique (Frelimo), a movement of
exiled Mozambicans mostly living abroad in Tanzania, Malawi, and Rhode-
sia (now Zimbabwe). The movement’s first president was the academic
Eduardo Mondlane, who left his university post in New York to lead Fre-
limo’s operations out of Tanzania.¹⁰ The start of the colonial war in Angola
in 1961 and the rise of Frelimo coincided with a domestic crisis for Salazar’s
regime, marked by the hijacking of the Santa Maria by Salazar’s opponent
Henrique Galvão and mass student demonstrations following the suppres-
sion of several university associations and organizations.¹¹ The Portuguese
response to Frelimo was a partial reform to colonial law, cynically designed
to appease the colonized population. The state had already repealed the
1954 Native Code, thereby ending the legal distinction between indigenous
and non-indigenous peoples. It put an end to forced labour (in 1961); it
increased spending on education and health provision; and in zones located
near Frelimo activities, peasants were grouped in aldeamentos (fortified
villages). Internationally, Portugal sought support from the white minority
governments in South Africa and Rhodesia.¹²
⁶ Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande e Senzala: Formação da Família Brasileira sob o Regime de

Economia Patriarcal (Recife: Fundação Gilberto Freyre, 2003).
⁷ Hilary Owen, Mother Africa, Father Marx: Women’s Writing of Mozambique, 1948–2002
(Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), pp. 19–20.
⁸ Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘Entre Próspero e Caliban: colonialismo, pós-colonialismo e
inter-identidade’, Luso-Brazilian Review, 39:2, 9–43.
⁹ Ana Paula Ferreira, ‘Specificity without Exceptionalism: Toward a Critical Lusophone
Postcoloniality’, in Postcolonial Theory and Lusophone Literatures, edited by Paulo de Medeiros
(Utrecht: Portuguese Studies Center, Universiteit Utrecht, 2007), pp. 21–40.
¹⁰ Newitt, A History of Mozambique, p. 522.
¹¹ Newitt, Portugal in European and World History, pp. 203–206.
¹² Newitt, A History of Mozambique, pp. 527–528.
The year of Quadros’s arrival in Mozambique was the same in which the
armed struggle against Portuguese colonial rule began. In 1964, Mondlane
gave the green light to a series of attacks on Portuguese bases in the north of
the country. Whilst the colonial war waged—intermittently—in the north-
ern and central regions of Mozambique, Lourenço Marques, the seat of the
colony and Quadros’s home in the country, was largely isolated from the
conflict. The beginning of military action in Mozambique was followed by
a political clampdown on various artists suspected of being Frelimo agents.
The poet José Craveirnha, the painter Malangatana Ngwenya, and the prose
writer Luı́s Bernardo Honwana were arrested by the secret police (PIDE) in
1964 and journalist and writer Lina Magaia was arrested in 1965.
The experience of being an author in late colonial Mozambique was con-
ditioned by a given author’s relationship to colonial power structures. In
the late colonial context, non-settler authors relied on the good favour of
patrons—such as architect Pancho Guedes, and even António Quadros him-
self, who is named as a tutor of the painter Malangatana—for financing,
mentorship, and protection from the authorities.¹³ These patrons, along with
critics such as Eugénio Lisboa and Alfredo Margarido, played a fundamental
role in the shaping of Mozambican art and letters before independence.
In the late colonial period, literature was a medium through which
authors could speak truth to power, denounce colonial violence, and assert
Mozambican literature as a valid category, distinct from Portuguese or
‘overseas’ literature. This oppositional function of anti-colonial literature
was necessarily conditioned by the authoritarian political environment of
colonial Mozambique and the context of censorship, both of which drove
authors—including those, like Quadros, protected from political reprisals—
to couch any subversive content in cryptography or ambiguity.¹⁴ Not all
literature produced in colonial Mozambique stood as a challenge to the colo-
nial status quo. There is a substantial body of so-called colonial literature,
which, since independence, has been generally ignored by readers and
critics.¹⁵
The state’s response to subversive art and literature varied according to
artists’ racial identification and political affiliation. The regime did not see
¹³ Russel Hamilton, Voices from an Empire: A History of Afro-Portuguese Literature (Min-

neapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1975), p. 167.
¹⁴ See, for example, Cláudia Pazos-Alonso’s discussion of Nós Matámos o Cão Tinhoso: ‘The
Wind of Change in Nós matámos o cão-tinhoso’, Ellipsis, 5 (2007), 67–85.
¹⁵ The notable exception is Francisco Noa’s study, Império, Mito e Miopia: Moçambique como
Invenção Literária (São Paulo: Kapulana, 2019), which analyses select works of male-authored
colonial literature produced in Mozambique.
all subversive authors as threats, with white writers, overall, escaping politi-
cal reprisals. Indeed, colonial Mozambique had greater intellectual freedom
than the metropolis and, it would appear, Angola.¹⁶ In Mozambique, the
colonial regime did not see artworks and artists as such as dangers to
Portuguese colonial rule. Malangatana, Craveirinha, and Honwana were
arrested in 1964 and Magaia in 1965 for their suspected associations to polit-
ical organizations, rather than their art. According to Allen and Barbara
Isaacman, Mozambican writers and intellectuals, writing in a language that
most Mozambicans did not understand, had little political impact through
their writings and, as such, were not considered a threat by the colonial
state.¹⁷
The conservative critical response to the emergence of authors and texts
that challenged colonialist ideology was to deny any link between politics
and literature. An exemplary case is Rodrigues Júnior’s essay Alguns Poetas
de Moçambique (1972), in which the critic refutes the idea of a relationship
between literature and politics at the same time that he imposes a colo-
nialist ideological framing on the literature produced in Mozambique, in
refusing the notion of Mozambican literature as a category separate from a
transcontinental Portuguese literature.¹⁸
In contrast, Frelimo promoted the notion that poetry should be politi-
cally engaged. In the Struggle for Mozambique (1969), Mondlane’s praise of
the ‘eloquent denunciations of Portuguese colonialism’ of José Craveirinha
and Noémia de Sousa is caveated by his contention that these writers and
their peers were socially isolated from the Mozambican ‘people’ in whose
name they claimed to speak.¹⁹ Mondlane describes the works of Sousa and
Craveirinha as falling short on two counts: he evokes a gap between intellec-
tuals and the rest of the Mozambican population and a gap between theory
and practice. On the first issue, Mondlane notes that ‘despite the[ir] efforts to
be “African”, the[y] have taken more from the European tradition than from
the African’.²⁰ Furthermore, he identifies the lack of authenticity of Craveir-
inha’s and Sousa’s (and Marcelino dos Santos’s earlier) writings, as a flaw:
‘None of these writers had themselves experienced forced labour; none of
¹⁶ The white Angolan writers António Jacinto and Luandino Vieira were arrested by the
colonial authorities. Both were sent to the Tarrafal concentration camp in Cape Verde.
¹⁷ Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, Mozambique: From Colonialism to Revolution,
1900–1982 (Boulder, CO: Westview; Aldershot: Gower, 1983), p. 78.
¹⁸ Rodrigues Júnior, Alguns Poetas de Moçambique (Braga: Paz, 1972), p. 14.
¹⁹ Eduardo Mondlane, The Struggle for Mozambique (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969),
p. 184.
²⁰ Mondlane, The Struggle for Mozambique, p. 111.
them was subject to the Native Labour Code, and they write of it as outsiders,
reading their own intellectualized reactions into the minds of the African
miner and forced labourer.’²¹ According to Mondlane, Santos, in contrast,
is the only intellectual who has succeeded in marrying his poetry with his
practice as a revolutionary.²²
Mondlane’s critique of Craveirinha’s and Sousa’s lack of authenticity
is curious given the similarities between his assimilado background and
theirs.²³ He was educated in a Swiss mission and, at university level, abroad
in South Africa, Lisbon, and the United States. Arguably, his political
thought owes as much to European intellectual traditions as Sousa and
Craveirinha’s poetics do to European poetics. Indeed, the background of
much of Frelimo’s leadership—acculturated, some educated abroad—was a
point exploited by Frelimo’s critics, who underlined the disconnect between
Frelimo’s largely intellectual and urban leadership and the Mozambican
populace.²⁴
Mondlane’s assertion that the poetry of Santos represents a ‘new liter-
ary tradition’, because it has inspired a younger generation of intellectuals,
points to the process of selective canonization that is enacted in an article
titled ‘The Role of Poetry in the Mozambican Revolution’.²⁵ The article was
published in two parts in 1969 in Mozambique Revolution and is signed by
Frelimo’s Executive Committee. The article defines the key features of Fre-
limo’s literary culture and anticipates the role of Mozambican literature after
independence.
In the article, the authors configure Mozambican poetry as inextricably
bound to the anti-colonial struggle.²⁶ They give a brief thematic overview
of select poetry produced in Mozambique since the end of the nineteenth
century, before setting out the specific role that poetry, according to the
authors, plays in the liberation struggle. The article is concerned with estab-
lishing a history of Mozambique’s literature and in establishing a national
literary canon. According to the teleological trajectory traced by the authors,
²¹ Mondlane, The Struggle for Mozambique, p. 110.

²² Mondlane, The Struggle for Mozambique, p. 112.
²³ Assimilation was the cultural policy whereby by colonized Africans could apply for a
more favourable legal status by undergoing humiliating assessments and, if successful, periodic
reviews to prove that they had become ‘civilized’.
²⁴ Newitt, A History of Mozambique, p. 544.
²⁵ Mondlane, The Struggle for Mozambique, p. 112.
²⁶ Maria-Benedita Basto notes that various critics have identified the author of the article
as Luís Bernardo Honwana. Maria-Benedita Basto, A Guerra das Escritas: Literatura, Nação e
Teoria Pós- Colonial em Moçambique (Lisbon: Vendaval, 2006), pp. 69–70.
Mozambican poetry has evolved in line with the struggle for national libera-
tion, which stands as a watershed moment in Mozambique’s modern history.
Three time periods are delineated: the end of the nineteenth century until
the beginning of World War Two; the end of the War until the beginning of
the national struggle (which the authors date 1962); and, 1962 until the year
of the publication of the article (1969). This last period corresponds to the
‘new literary tradition’ identified by Mondlane.
The first instalment of the article concerns itself with the first two peri-
ods. According to the authors, Mozambican poetry produced before 1962
is an abstract expression of the desire for national liberation. The ‘abstract’
nature of pre-revolutionary poetry is a weakness; the poems analysed, they
argue, are unable to overcome the schisms between theory and practice, art
and life, that characterize European cultures.²⁷ According to this framing,
poetry risks being ‘abstract’ and merely ‘theoretical’ unless it complements
the practical work of Frelimo’s revolutionary project:
poetry alone, without its practical counterpart, is unable to sever all the ties
with the old world. These poets have not participated actively in the prepa-
ration of the Revolution. None of them has given himself to the liberation
struggle. For this very reason they are before the Revolution, in spite of
being contemporary with it.
The historical or personal incapability to fulfil the hopes expressed by
the poetry leaves it in an abstract sphere, far away from the struggle with
which it longs to identify. In this context poetry is still the exceptional
moment, reserved for a privileged few who, inevitably, fall back into a
routine which does not know anything of freedom but the name.²⁸
The quoted passage points to several important features of the place of lit-
erature in colonial and post-independence Mozambique as understood by
Frelimo. First, the authors pointedly discuss the place of poetry, rather than
literature, in Mozambique. This is owing to a dearth of prose writing (of the
sort that Frelimo would have willingly claimed as Mozambican) until the
end of the twentieth century and the prominent positions occupied by the
poets Craveirinha and Sousa, in particular.²⁹
²⁷ Frelimo, ‘The Role of Poetry in the Mozambican Revolution’, Mozambique Revolution, 38

(1969), 20.
²⁸ Frelimo, ‘The Role of Poetry in the Mozambican Revolution’, Mozambique Revolution, 37
(1969), 30–31.
²⁹ In contrast, prose writers have occupied prominent positions in Angola. Since the 1990s,
the dominance of poetry in Mozambican literature has given way to prose, with Mia Couto,
Second, the authors, in consonance with Mondlane’s book, establish a

tension between theory and practice according to which practical revolu-
tionary political work will deliver on poetry’s aspirations. Poetry’s shortcom-
ings are not explained by the limits of poetry itself. Poetry’s failings, rather,
are linked to the fact that it is limited to a privileged few, who are not engaged
in revolutionary activities. In the second instalment of the article, this point
is developed by the authors, who adumbrate their theory of revolutionary
authorship. The exemplary Mozambican author is first and foremost a mil-
itant. They are a guerrilheiro-poeta (as opposed to a poeta-guerrilheiro), to
borrow Basto’s term. The authors, on this topic, are dogmatic, asserting that
poetry produced by individuals ‘who [are] still a poet or a writer or an intel-
lectual, instead of being first of all a militant, cannot be of any interest to
us’.³⁰ Frelimo’s configuration of the exemplary guerrilheiro-poeta falls in line
with the party’s conception of the Homem Novo (New Man): a sweeping
ideological project that sought to mould the identity of Mozambican sub-
jects along socialist and modern lines, at the expense of ‘tribal’ (regional,
ethnic, or racial) affiliations. The importance attached to poetry is linked to
Frelimo’s leaders’ emphasis on education, including literacy, in the forma-
tion of a post-independence nation-state through the moulding of modern,
educated citizens, the so-called New Mozambican Men.³¹
Third, the passage points to the ways in which Frelimo co-opted literary
texts. The pre-revolutionary works analysed in the article’s first instalment
are framed as expressions of Frelimo’s nationalist project and Mozambican
literature is made to fit into a constructed narrative of Frelimo’s revolu-
tion. The article’s authors perform a double-edged gesture: they appropriate
the pre-1962 writings cited—and a constructed notion of Mozambican
literature—while critiquing that same poetry and circumscribing it to a
limited role.
The second instalment discusses the role of poetry in the struggle for
national liberation. Central to the authors’ analysis is the premise that the
liberation struggle and the attendant dissolution of ‘life’ and ‘art’ under
the revolution transform poetry into something that it could not otherwise
Paulina Chiziane, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, and João Paulo Borges Coelho (all primarily
novelists) now the most recognized writers from Mozambique.
³⁰ Frelimo, ‘The Role of Poetry in the Mozambican Revolution’, Mozambique Revolution, 38
(1969), 17.
³¹ In The Struggle for Mozambique, Mondlane identifies education as one of the four priority
areas defined at Frelimo’s First Congress in 1962. Mondlane, The Struggle for Mozambique,
p. 123.
be: the struggle unleashes hitherto unseen potential for literature and gives
new meaning to pre- and non-revolutionary poems. Where Craveirinha’s
‘Grito Negro’ is read in the first instalment, against the backdrop of the
pre-revolutionary context, as a violent denunciation of colonial labour
exploitation and a prophecy of Frelimo’s revolutionary activities,³² once
appropriated by militants, who republished the poem in Frelimo publica-
tion 25 de Setembro, its meaning and value can be fully realized: ‘The words
become true in a literal sense: the African has become the fire which is burn-
ing his former master. There is no metaphorical residue left between the fire
of poetry and the fire of the grenades and mortars used against the enemy.’³³
For the authors, the liberation struggle confers on poetry new func-
tions. Echoing Amı́lcar Cabral’s notion of critical assimilation, according
to which national revolutionary culture emerges through the synthesis of
triaged (‘good’ and ‘progressive’) elements of the cultural activities of dif-
ferent social classes,³⁴ the authors argue that pre- and non-revolutionary
cultural activities can be selectively salvaged for ‘whatever we can use’.³⁵ Rev-
olutionary poetry is charged with the dual didactic function of a teaching
manual and political propaganda. It has, following in the tradition of oral
storytelling, the role of imparting information in a memorable way and of
‘communicat[ing], and sometimes creat[ing], values’.³⁶ Furthermore, poetry
is a vehicle through which individuals become part of the collective struggle.
According to the authors: ‘subjective creativity is strengthened by the ascer-
tainment of the existence of the same process in others: when we see the
same will in others, we become more determined and at the same time we
understand that the only way for putting it into action is to do this together
with the whole community’.³⁷ Here, the authors attempt to reconcile the
apparent tension between their claims that authorial authenticity (the iden-
tity of the guerrilla-poet) and anonymized collective authorship are central
³² Frelimo, ‘The Role of Poetry in the Mozambican Revolution’, Mozambique Revolution, 37

(1969), 27.
³³ Frelimo, ‘The Role of Poetry in the Mozambican Revolution’, Mozambique Revolution, 38
(1969), 17.
³⁴ Amílcar Cabral, A Arma da Teoria: Unidade e Luta (Lisbon: Seara Nova, 1976), I, pp.
225–232; Amílcar Cabral, Análise de Alguns Tipos de Resistência (Lisbon: Outro Modo, 2020),
pp. 64–70; 85.
³⁵ Frelimo, ‘The Role of Poetry in the Mozambican Revolution’, Mozambique Revolution, 38
(1969), 18.
³⁶ Frelimo, ‘The Role of Poetry in the Mozambican Revolution’, Mozambique Revolution, 38
(1969), 26.
³⁷ Frelimo, ‘The Role of Poetry in the Mozambican Revolution’, Mozambique Revolution, 38
(1969), 30.
pillars of revolutionary authorship through their suggestion that individual

subjectivity and collectivism are mutually reinforceable. They emphasize the
dialogical nature of the reinforcement of a collective will through poetry:
‘If the creation of new men and of a new society cannot happen separately
poetry is the perfect interpreter for all this. It is in fact the expression of a will,
the will to reaffirm one’s own creativity, but at the same time to communicate
it to others and see their reactions’ (my emphasis).³⁸ Under this process, the
poet’s voice becomes synonymous with a collective voice:
It is one and the same voice, though the freedom fighter speaks the voice of
the people, an individual who writes and yet writes for the whole people.
There is no difference, whether the poetry is written in the first person
singular [ . . . ] or with a collective subject.³⁹
The notion that a collective revolutionary project is strengthened through

the production of poetry by individuals working towards a common goal, set
out prescriptively by a political party, risks falling into authoritarianism. As I
discuss in chapter 5, Frelimo’s notions of anonymous and collective author-
ship functioned, in fact, to appropriate ideologically apt works. Indeed,
as Russel Hamilton notes, anonymous and collective authorship were ide-
ologically apposite: ‘A ideia de autoria anónima e colectiva corresponde
à linha polı́tica visando suprimir o individualismo dentro de um esforço
forçosamente dependente da mobilização massiva’ (The idea of anonymous
and collective authorship corresponds to the political line which sought to
suppress individualism in a move that was necessarily dependent on mass
mobilization).⁴⁰ Although the authors confer on some poetry the function
of political theory (the creation of values), evidence suggests that Frelimo
was searching, in fact, for writers that complied with their ideological line.
Collectivism functioned as a cover for authoritarianism.
The article’s position, according to which poetry is only useful and
valuable when produced by revolutionaries in a revolutionary framework,
³⁸ Frelimo, ‘The Role of Poetry in the Mozambican Revolution’, Mozambique Revolution, 38

(1969), 30.
³⁹ Frelimo, ‘The Role of Poetry in the Mozambican Revolution’, Mozambique Revolution, 38
(1969), 31.
⁴⁰ Russell Hamilton, Literatura Africana, Literatura Necessária, 2 vols (Lisbon: Edições 70,
1981–1984), II, p. 55.
anticipates problems faced by Frelimo in the cultural arena after indepen-

dence, when the theoretical orientation informing Mondlane’s book and the
article of 1969 was put in place by Frelimo with uneven results.
Post-colonial Mozambique (1974/5–1984)
When the post-colonial—understood in the sense of the historical period

that follows the end of colonial rule—begins in Mozambique is a com-
plex question. By the early 1970s, the war in Mozambique had reached a
stalemate between the colonial army and Frelimo’s forces. The deadlock
was broken by an internal coup in the Portuguese armed forces, protago-
nized by the Movimento das Forças Armadas (Armed Forces Movement),
a group of disaffected officers who opposed the continuation of the colo-
nial war. The summer of 1974 was fraught. Portugal’s first post-dictatorship
president, António de Spı́nola, a general in the Portuguese army, moved
to frustrate the independence of Portugal’s former African colonies. In the
face of Portuguese intransigence, Frelimo refused to negotiate a ceasefire
with the Portuguese armed forces, resulting in the prolongation of the colo-
nial war until 7 September, when a transitional government was formally
put in place by the Lusaka Accords.⁴¹ That same day, the building of the
Rádio Clube de Moçambique in Lourenço Marques was occupied by the
Movimento Moçambique Livre (Free Mozambique Movement), a political
organization opposed to Mozambican independence. When independence
was finally proclaimed 25 June 1975, fourteen months after the Carnation
revolution, the sudden change from colony to independent nation did not,
as is to be expected, translate into immediate and positive changes in all sec-
tors of Mozambican society. Shortly after independence, Frelimo’s rule was
tested by the threat posed by the militarized opposition of Renamo. The
transition from colony to independent nation and the first few years of Fre-
limo’s governance were, effectively, no more than a lull in the violence that
has afflicted modern Mozambique.⁴²
One striking continuity between the colonial and post-independence
period was Samora Machel’s decision to elect Portuguese as the national
language of independent Mozambique. Machel’s seemingly strange decision
⁴¹ Newitt, A History of Mozambique, p. 539; Patrick Chabal, ‘The End of Empire’, in A History
of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 4.
⁴² Malyn Newitt, A Short History of Mozambique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017),
p. 146.
to make Portuguese the national language was informed by an ideological

imperative towards national unity, which, he feared, would be threatened
by electing one of the many indigenous languages spoken in the country.⁴³
Machel’s decision had several drawbacks. At independence the rate of illit-
eracy in Portuguese was 97 per cent,⁴⁴ owing to the colonial state’s historic
racist educational policies. Furthermore, the election of Portuguese as the
national language threatened to leave Mozambique regionally isolated, as a
lusophone country surrounded by English-speaking neighbours. Although
gains have been made since independence, literacy and education more
broadly remain a problem in Mozambique, with around 37 per cent of adults
in 2021 unable to read Portuguese according to UNESCO.⁴⁵
The late 1970s and 1980s in Mozambique were marked by the long and
violent so-called Civil War between Frelimo, backed by the USSR and Cuba,
and Renamo, supported by apartheid South Africa and initially by the
United States. The use of the term ‘Civil War’ to describe the conflict between
Frelimo and Renamo (and their respective international backers) has been
disputed owing to the Cold War context in which the war took place and
the fact that Renamo started out as a paramilitary unit funded by Rhodesia
and later by apartheid South Africa.⁴⁶ The war was extraordinarily violent.
Renamo carried out massacres against rural populations and was known
for recruiting child soldiers through initiation processes that involved forc-
ing children to kill villagers or members of their own family.⁴⁷ Although the
conflict was brought to an end through a UN-brokered peace deal in 1992,
⁴³ Machel’s policy on language can be traced back to comments made by Mondlane in

1969 concerning the pragmatism of electing Portuguese as the language of communication in
Frelimo’s liberation zones. Mondlane, The Struggle for Mozambique, pp. 130–131.
⁴⁴ Mouzinho Mário, ‘The Mozambican Experience in Adult Literacy and Education’, Pro-
ceedings of the International Conference on Adult Basic and Literacy Education in the SADC
Region (Pietermaritzburg: Centre for Adult Education, University of Natal, 2002).
⁴⁵ https://en.unesco.org/countries/mozambique.
⁴⁶ With the fall of the Portuguese empire and white minority rule in Rhodesia, apartheid
South Africa had become isolated in the region. It went to war with the MPLA, Angola’s ruling
party since independence in 1975, and carried out a destabilization campaign in Mozambique.
In both cases, South Africa was unsuccessful in toppling the ruling parties, but its activities
contributed to considerable loss of human life and significant economic damage. Elizabeth
Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa after the Cold War: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the
War on Terror (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2018), pp. 127–128; Newitt, A History of
Mozambique, pp. 560–574.
⁴⁷ Hilary Andersson, Mozambique: A War against the People (London: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 1992), pp. 58–59. Lina Magaia’s short story collection Dumba Nengue is a graphic account
of atrocities committed by Renamo forces, based on testimonies from victims. Lina Magaia,
Dumba Nengue: Histórias Trágicas do Banditismo (São Paulo: Ática, 1990).
violence between Frelimo and Renamo flared up again in the twenty-first

century.
Much like during the colonial war, Maputo was largely isolated from the
violence of the conflict with Renamo. Nevertheless, the war, coupled with
Frelimo’s move towards authoritarianism and neoliberalism, left many elites
in Mozambique disillusioned, with a significant number leaving the coun-
try during the 1980s, including Quadros. Frelimo’s Third Party Congress
of 1977 was a watershed moment. The Congress saw the approval of a new
constitution, according to which the state was an instrument of Frelimo, as
a vanguard Marxist-Leninist state.
Following independence, Frelimo effectively neutralized the function of
literature as resistance to power by instrumentalizing a constructed his-
torical memory of the anti-colonial struggle to legitimize it as the ruling
party of Mozambique.⁴⁸ Paradoxically, anti-authoritarian (anti-colonial)
poetry was appropriated by Frelimo as part of its cementing of a politi-
cal hegemony. This process was compounded by the reality that several
writers were integral members of the Frelimo party machinery, such as
Santos, Honwana, Rebelo, and Nelson Saúte. Similarly, the practice of self-
criticism (autocrı́tica) stood in place of the right for other parties to form
and challenge Frelimo’s hegemony.⁴⁹
In a continuation of its stated aim during the anti-colonial struggle, Fre-
limo sought to make poetry into an ‘arma ao serviço da Revolução’ (weapon
in the service of the Revolution).⁵⁰ As with the contention that poetry could
make a tangible and useful contribution to the toppling of a colonial regime,
Quadros’s poetry challenges the notion that poetry could—or should—
make a useful and significant contribution to a nationalist project. Indeed,
Quadros’s works continue, in a limited way, the oppositional function of
anti-colonial literature in the post-independence period, whereas the oppo-
sitional function of the more overtly anti-colonial works of writers such as
Santos and Rebelo was blunted.⁵¹
⁴⁸ Drawing on Anthony D. Smith’s writings on nationalism, Basto argues that Frelimo’s spe-
cific form of nationalism was a ‘nacionalismo cívico’ (civic nationalism) which was legitimized
by Frelimo’s rule in the anti-colonial struggle and its anti-imperialist stance (Basto, A Guerra
das Escritas, pp. 63–64).
⁴⁹ Newitt, ‘Mozambique’, in Chabal, A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa, p. 207.
⁵⁰ Basto, A Guerra das Escritas, p. 36
⁵¹ I develop this argument in Tom Stennett, ‘Dissident Authorship in Post-Colonial Mozam-
bique and Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Cases of António Quadros and J. M. Coetzee’, in
Literary Connections between South Africa and the Lusophone World, edited by Anita de Melo,
Ludmylla Lima, and John T. Maddox IV (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022), pp. 115–133.
The neutralizing of the oppositional function of anti-colonial literature by

Frelimo after independence had to contend with the fact that the Portuguese
colonial state had ended. The antagonism directed at Portuguese colonial-
ism was transposed onto internal enemies—embodied by the figure of the
saboteur Xiconhoca, ‘o inimigo’ (the enemy) and antithesis to the ‘Homem
Novo’,⁵² and white reactionaries opposed to majority rule⁵³—and onto the
external threats of neo-colonialism and capitalism.⁵⁴ Under such a context,
Michel Laban argues that Frelimo’s warnings about internal enemies, as well
as the authoritarian excesses of the state and of the police, created a climate of
fear amongst writers in Mozambique, who tended towards self-censorship.⁵⁵
The exemplary case of Frelimo’s appropriation of anti-colonial poetry
in the post-independence period are the three volumes of Poesia de Com-
bate (Combat Poetry) published by Frelimo in 1971 (1st edn; 2nd edn,
1979), 1978 (II), and 1980 (III) and which Basto has analysed extensively
in her 2006 study A Guerra das Escritas: Literature, Nação e Teoria Pós-
Colonial em Moçambique. The preface to the first volume of Poesia de
Combate establishes an intimate relationship between ideology and poetry
(‘há identificação absoluta entre a prática revolucionária e a sensibilidade do
poeta [nos poemas]’) and attributes an important role to poetry in the revo-
lution: ‘A POESIA É AQUI UMA ARMA DE LUTA PARA A LIBERTAÇÃO’
(POETRY, HERE, IS A WEAPON IN THE LIBERATION STRUGGLE).⁵⁶
The ‘aqui’ distinguishes the specific function of the poetry selected by the
editors of Poesia de Combate from the ‘bourgeois’, ‘colonialist’, and ‘capital-
ist’ poetry that it is set against. The poems selected are framed by what they
are not: ‘esta poesia não fala de mitos, de coisas abstractas mas sim da vida
de luta do povo, das suas esperanças e certezas, da sua determinação, da
natureza, de Moçambique’ (this poetry does not speak of myths, of abstract
things, but rather of the life of the people’s struggle, of their hopes and cer-
tainties, of their determination, of nature, of Mozambique). As in Frelimo’s
article of 1969, abstraction is identified as poetry’s potential weak point. In
⁵² Lorenzo Macagno, ‘Fragmentos de uma Imaginação Nacional’, Revista Brasileira de Ciên-

cias Sociais, 24:70 (2009), 25–26.
⁵³ President Samora Machel’s speech about the events in Lourenço Marques—8 September
1974. The speech was originally published in Tempo (208) 22 September 1974 and A Voz de
Mozambique 14 (406) September–October 1974. The text of the speech is available online at
http://www.mozambiquehistory.net/smm_discursos_1974.php [accessed 16 March 2018].
⁵⁴ Basto, A Guerra das Escritas, p. 51.
⁵⁵ Michel Laban, ‘Écrivains et pouvoir politique au Mozambique après l’Indépendance’,
Lusotopie, II (1995), 180.
⁵⁶ Frelimo, Poesia de Combate, 2 vols (Lisbon: Frelimo, 1974), I, p. 6; p. 7.
the preface to Poesia de Combate, abstraction impedes poetry’s truth-telling

function—a function guaranteed by the fact that the poems are informed
by the authentic experiences of their authors’ work as combatants in the
anti-colonial struggle.
Basto’s research into the journals from which the poems selected for
Poesia de Combate were taken has revealed two principal features of Fre-
limo’s approach to literature. First, the editors of Poesia de Combate liberally
edited—through corrections, omissions, and changes to content and style—
the poems that they sourced in liberation journals. Second, they selectively
chose texts—which were then edited—that give a semblance of homogene-
ity to the collection, which serves to support the preface’s assertion of unity
(read: ideological homogeneity) in the genre of poesia de combate. For Basto,
Frelimo’s homogenizing approach registers a failure of Frelimo’s nationalism
to account for the diversity of Mozambican society through its creation of a
‘derivative discourse’ that rests on (anti-)colonial Manichean logic.⁵⁷
At the heart of Frelimo’s literary culture there was a fundamental ten-
sion between the authoritarian approach to literary production evidenced
by the interventionist and selective editorial processes at play in the pro-
duction of Poesia de Combate and a democratizing initiative, according to
which poetry—previously, in Frelimo’s discourses, a bourgeois and elitist
activity—would be made accessible to all. Basto describes this tension as a
double movement between a desire for poetry, as a profession or artistic
activity, to be accessible to all and the establishment of a model according
to which poetry has a specific (ideological and didactic) function and place,
as well as prescriptive recommendations governing the themes suitable for
Mozambican literature, the ideological line that literary texts had to follow,
and the kind of (simple) language that should be used by authors in their
works.⁵⁸
The authoritarian strand of Frelimo’s policy on literary production, which
entailed the collapsing of the political and the ideological into the literary,
had its drawbacks. The explicitly ideological nature of Mozambican post-
independence literature was identified by the panel of the first national
literary competition in Mozambique as a principal factor explaining the
exercise’s failure, as none of the submissions were deemed prize worthy.⁵⁹
⁵⁷ Maria-Benedita Basto, ‘Writing a Nation or Writing a Culture? Frelimo and Nationalism

During the Mozambican Liberation War’, in Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau
and Mozambique, edited by Eric Morier-Genoud (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 119–120.
⁵⁸ Basto, A Guerra das Escritas, p. 30.
⁵⁹ Basto, A Guerra das Escritas, pp. 23–62.
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Hangchow, 31-6
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Hart, Sir Robert, 92
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Heyworth, Dr., 185, 212
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Hong Kiang, 145
Hong Kong, 36, 197, 216-7
Hosie, Sir A., 40, 88
Hospitals, American, 146, 151-2
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Changsha (Yale), 152
Chao Chowfu, 214
French (Yünnanfu), 70
Hangchow, 32-4
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Hotels:
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International Life, 66
Japan, 23, 59, 154, 191-3, 218, 220

Japanese boycott, 183, 208
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Japanese Steamers, 42
Jordan, Sir John, 37, 51, 106
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Kahn, Dr. Ida, 185

Kalachin, Princess, 185
Keh-lao Tribe, 97
Keller, Dr., 73, 152-3
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Ku-Chin, 72
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“La Jeunesse,” 194
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Miao, 120-1
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Lao-Kay, 37
League of Nations, 190
Leper Hospital, 33, 34
Li Ching Chien, Miss, 71
Lingle, Mr. and Mrs., 150
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Lo-yung-kio bridge, 35
Lugard, Sir F., 197
Macao, 217
Main, Dr. and Mrs., 31
Malong, 40, 79
Mandarin Chinese, 24, 57
Maternity Hospital, 32, 33
Medicine, Schools of, 22, 24, 33
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Mettle, 17, 164
Military Escort, 76, 107-11
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Missions, Baptist, 25, 152, 214-5
C.I.M. (China Inland Mission), 97, 105, 143, 146, 149, 206
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English United Methodist, 206
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Morals, 117, 120
Morrison, Dr., 88
Mott, Dr., 163
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Changteh to Changsha, 42
Hankow to Shanghai, 42
Hong Kong to Haiphong, 36
Hong Kong to Macao, 217
Hong Kong to Swatow, 216
Shanghai to Hong Kong, 36
Standard Oil Coy., 148
Stone, Dr. Mary, 72
Student Movement, Ch. IX, 182
Student Strikes, 182-4, 191
Sun Yat Sen, 171
Swatow, 131, 185, 212-6
Symbolism, 83
Szechuan, 159
Taiyuanfu, 17, 18, Ch. II

Tan Family, 213-4
Taoism, 43, 94
Ta-ting, 102
Temples, 43, 54, 112, 194, 215, 219
Tengyueh, 39, 71
Ten-ten, 98
“Tide of New Thought,” 191
Tientsin, 24
Ting Fang Lew, 194
Tin-mines, 72
Tong Ting Lake, 42, 150
Trade and Commerce, 43, 171, 166, 209
Tribes-people, Ch. V
list of, 123-4
Trinity College, Foochow, 209
Tsai Yuanpei, 197
Tsao, Lady, 176
Tseng, Miss, Ch. VIII
Marquis, 178
Tsinanfu, 23-7
Tsingchoufu, 25
Tsingtau, 192
Tungsten, 42
Universities—
Hong Kong, 197-8
Peking, 197
St. John’s, Shanghai, 147
Shantung Christian, 24
Varnish tree, 98
Wang Ch’ang Ling, 24

Wang, L. K, 208
Wang of Amoy, 211
War Lords, 171
Warren, Dr., 154
Wênchowfu, 205
West Lake, Hangchow, 24, 35
Hotel, 35
White wax, 144
Whyte, Dr., 215
Wight, Dr., 214
Witchcraft, 135-6
Witt, Dr., 146
Women, Chinese, 174-7, 185
Nurses, 185
“Wooden Combs,” 124
Wordsworth, 116
Workhouse, 54
Wu-chang, 43
Wu Pei Fu, General, 164, 222
Wu-Ting-Fang, 135
Yale in China, 151, 184

Yangtze River, 42-5
Yen Hsi Shan, Ch. II, 70, 194
Yi-ling, 78
Y.M.C.A., 29, 70, 153, 211
Youth of China, Ch. IX
Yuan-Chowfu, 143
Yuan Shi Kai, 192, 221
Yüen Kiang, 41
Yünnanfu, 37, 66-75
Yünnan Pass, 40
Yünnan Province, Ch. III, 38
Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London

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Dissident Authorship in Mozambique: The Case of António Quadros (1933-1994) (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs) 1st Edition Stennett

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Dissident Authorship in Mozambique:

the Case of António Quadros

Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis (Oxford Modern

Gender, Authorship, and Early Modern Women’s

Trapped: Brides of the Kindred Book 29 Faith Anderson

Neuroscience for Neurosurgeons (Feb 29,

Cardiology-An Integrated Approach (Human Organ Systems)

Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature 1st

Representing the Dynasty in Flavian Rome: The Case of

Gifts, Glamping, & Glocks (A Camper & Criminals Cozy

Introduction: António Quadros and the Problematics

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

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

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

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

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

Authorship and Readership: Two Interlinked Questions

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

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

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

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

²² Bennett, The Author, p. 20.

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

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

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

an inherently paradoxical figure nevertheless reflect the tensions of anti-

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

Pseudonymy, Heteronymy, and Anonymity

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

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

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

The Difficulties of Reading Quadros

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

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

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

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

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

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

between the utopian universalism of moçambicanidade as a loose cultural

deconstructionist—most appropriate for approaching texts written in colo-

In the preface to his 1976 anthology of Mozambican poetry, As Armas Estão

The paradoxical notion that poetry is both of fundamental and secondary

² Malyn Newitt, A History of Mozambique (London: Hurst, 1995), p. 547.

Late Colonial Mozambique (1964–1974)

The geographical borders of modern Mozambique were set following the

of Portuguese men made Portugal uniquely suited to colonialism, in con-

⁶ Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande e Senzala: Formação da Família Brasileira sob o Regime de

¹³ Russel Hamilton, Voices from an Empire: A History of Afro-Portuguese Literature (Min-

²¹ Mondlane, The Struggle for Mozambique, p. 110.

²⁷ Frelimo, ‘The Role of Poetry in the Mozambican Revolution’, Mozambique Revolution, 38

Second, the authors, in consonance with Mondlane’s book, establish a

³² Frelimo, ‘The Role of Poetry in the Mozambican Revolution’, Mozambique Revolution, 37

pillars of revolutionary authorship through their suggestion that individual

The notion that a collective revolutionary project is strengthened through

³⁸ Frelimo, ‘The Role of Poetry in the Mozambican Revolution’, Mozambique Revolution, 38

anticipates problems faced by Frelimo in the cultural arena after indepen-

Post-colonial Mozambique (1974/5–1984)

When the post-colonial—understood in the sense of the historical period

to make Portuguese the national language was informed by an ideological

⁴³ Machel’s policy on language can be traced back to comments made by Mondlane in

violence between Frelimo and Renamo flared up again in the twenty-first

The neutralizing of the oppositional function of anti-colonial literature by

⁵² Lorenzo Macagno, ‘Fragmentos de uma Imaginação Nacional’, Revista Brasileira de Ciên-