Henrique Teixeira de Sousa (born 1919) of Cape Verde was regarded as one of the most prolific and best-known novelists of Portuguese-speaking Africa.

Henrique Teixeira de Sousa was born on September 6, 1919, in Bernardo Gomes on the small volcanic island of Fogo. Fogo, which means "fire" in Portuguese, was one of Cape Verde's leeward islands situated in the South Atlantic some 350 miles from the west African country of Senegal.

Although of Portuguese stock and thus superficially white, Sousa believed that on his mother's side he had African ancestry. His father, originally from Cape Verde's Brava Island, was the captain of a sailing ship that traveled regularly to neighboring Fogo, where he settled after meeting and marrying Sousa's mother.

At the age of 17, while attending high school in the city of Mindelo, on the windward island of São Vicente, Sousa published his first piece of fiction. This story, written...