The Mozambican Author Who Turned His Back on Colonialism

Mia Couto, an internationally renowned author and poet, describes herself as African, but her roots are in Europe.

His Portuguese parents settled in Mozambique in 1953, after fleeing the dictatorial regime of Antonio Salazar.

Couto was born two years later in the port city of Beira.

“My childhood was very happy,” she tells the BBC.

He stresses that he was aware of the fact that he lived in a “colonial society”, which no one needed to explain to him because “the boundaries between black and white, between poor and rich were so evident”.

As a child, Couto was terribly shy and unable to speak in public or even at home.

Instead, like his father, also a poet and journalist, he found solace in the written word.

“I invented something, a relationship with paper, and then behind that paper there was always someone I loved, someone who listened to me and said: ‘You exist,’” he tells the BBC from his home in the Mozambican capital, Maputo, with a colourful painting and wooden sculpture on a mustard-yellow wall in the background.

Being of European origin, Couto related more easily to the black elite that existed in Mozambique during Portuguese colonial rule: the “assimilados”, those who, in the racist language of the time, were considered “civilized” enough to become Portuguese citizens.

The writer considers himself lucky to have played with the children of the assimilados and to have learned some of their languages.

He says this helped him integrate into the black majority.

“I only remember being a white person when I’m outside of Mozambique. Inside Mozambique it’s something that doesn’t really come out,” he says.

However, even as a child, he was aware that his whiteness set him apart from others.

“Nobody was teaching me about injustice… the unjust society I was living in. And I thought, ‘I can’t be myself. I can’t be a happy person without fighting against this,'” she says.

When Couto was 10 years old, he began fighting against Portuguese rule in Mozambique.

The author recalls the night when, as a seventeen-year-old student writing poetry for an anti-colonial publication and eager to join the liberation struggle, he was summoned to appear before the leaders of the revolutionary movement Frelimo.

Arriving at their lodgings, he found himself the only white boy in a crowd of thirty people.

The leaders asked everyone present to describe what they had suffered and why they wanted to join Frelimo.

Couto was the last to speak. As he listened to stories of poverty and deprivation, he realized he was the only privileged person in the room.

So he made up a story about himself, otherwise he knew he would have no chance of being chosen.

“But when it was my turn, I couldn’t speak and was overwhelmed with emotion,” he says.

What saved him was the fact that Frelimo leaders had already discovered his poetry and decided that he could help their cause.

“The guy who was leading the meetings asked me, ‘Are you the guy who writes poetry in the newspaper?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I’m the author.’ And he said, ‘Okay, you can come, you can be part of us because we need poetry,'” Couto recalls.

After Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975, Couto continued to work as a journalist in the local media until the death of Mozambique’s first president, Samora Machel, in 1986. He then retired because he had become disillusioned with Frelimo.

“There was a kind of rupture; the discourse of liberators became something I no longer believed in,” he says.

After abandoning his membership in Frelimo, Couto studied biological sciences. Today he still works as an ecologist specializing in coastal areas.

He also started writing again.

“I started with poetry, then with books, stories and novels,” he says.

Her first novel, Sleepwalking Land, was published in 1992.

This is a magical-realist fantasy that draws inspiration from Mozambique’s post-independence civil war, taking the reader through the brutal conflict that raged from 1977 to 1992, when Renamo, then a rebel movement supported by the white-minority regime in South Africa and Western powers, fought against Frelimo.

The book was an instant success. In 2001, it was named one of the 12 best African books of the 20th century by the judges of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair, and has been translated into more than 33 languages.

Couto gained recognition for other novels and short stories that dealt with war and colonialism, the pain and suffering of Mozambicans and their resilience in those difficult times.

Other themes he focused on were mystical descriptions drawn from witchcraft, religion, and folklore.

“I want to have a language that can translate the different dimensions of Africa, the relationship and conversation between the living and the dead, the visible and the invisible,” he tells the BBC.

Couto is very well known throughout the Portuguese-speaking world: in Angola, Cape Verde and Sao Tome in Africa, but also in Brazil and Portugal.

In 2013, he won the €100,000 ($109,000; £85,500) Camões Prize, the highest award given to a Portuguese-language writer.

In 2014 he was awarded the $50,000 (£39,000) Neustadt Prize, considered the most prestigious literary award after the Nobel Prize.

Asked whether his works reflect the reality of modern Africa, Couto replies that it is impossible because the continent is divided and there are so many different Africas.

“We don’t know each other and we don’t publish our writers within our continent because of the boundaries of colonial languages, such as French, English and Portuguese,” he says.

“We have inherited something that was a colonial construction, now ‘naturalized’, that is, the so-called Anglophone Africa, the so-called Francophone Africa and the so-called Portuguese-speaking Africa,” he adds.

Couto was due to attend a literary festival in Kenya last month, but was sadly forced to cancel the trip after mass protests against President William Ruto erupted. move to raise taxes.

She hopes there will be further opportunities to strengthen ties with writers from other parts of Africa.

“We have to get out of these barriers. We have to give more importance to the meetings we have, as Africans and among Africans,” says Couto.

He complains that African writers continually look to Europe and the United States as points of reference and are ashamed to celebrate their own diversity and relationship with their gods and ancestors.

“In fact, we don’t even know what’s being done in terms of art and culture outside of Mozambique. Our neighbors – South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania – we don’t know anything about them, and they don’t know anything about Mozambique,” says Couto.

When asked what advice she would give to young writers starting out, she emphasizes the need to listen to the voices of others.

“Listening is not just about listening to the voice or looking at the iPhone or gadgets or tablets. It’s more about being able to become the other. It’s a kind of migration, an invisible migration to become the other person,” says Couto.

“If you are touched by a character in a book, it is because that character was already living inside you, and you didn’t know it.”