1616 (Feb 2015)
João Paulo Borges Coelho, João Albasini And The Worlding Of Mozambican Literature
Abstract
In O Olho de Hertzog (2010), set in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the Mozambican writer João Paulo Borges Coelho presents a cosmopolitan panorama of colonial south-eastern Africa. «Mozambique» emerges here not primarily as a Portuguese colonial space but as a site of multipleentanglements between interests: transnational and local, European and African, South African and Mozambican, British and German, colonial and proto-nationalist. In such a way, and differently from previous Mozambican literature, O Olho de Hertzog performs a complex act of worlding that exceeds the bounded colonial/ national space of Mozambique, but resists synthesis. This cosmopolitanism can be read expressive of the strained relations and constitutive hierarchies ofcolonial society as well as, by implication, of contemporary globalisation. The most important index of such a critical cosmopolitanism is the trope of the «two worlds» of Lourenço Marques, embodied in the central character João Albasini, legendary mestiço activist and founder of the proto-nationalist journal O Brado Africano (1918-1974). Albasini functions as a Virgil for the protagonist Hans Mahrenholz’s descent into the colonial inferno of Mozambique. Not least byciting documentary material –Albasini’s editorials and shop signs in Lourenço Marques– Coelho problematises the divisions of the colonial city, sustained by international capital, and provides a sharp contrast to the otherwise dominant «European» narrative of novel, which revolves around a fabled diamond and white South African intrigue.
