by Luís Bernardo Honwana

Luís Bernardo Honwana was born in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), Mozambique, in 1942. He spent his childhood and early adolescence in the rural area of Moamba where his father served as interpreter for the government. Completing his high school education in Lourenço Marques at age 17, he took up journalism, writing his first short stories for the young people’s page in the newspaper Notícias and establishing himself as an author of that genre. Honwana was imprisoned by colonial authorities from 1964 to 1967 for his support of the nationalist party FRELIMO (the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique). His short story collection We Killed Mangy-Dog and Other Stories—published in 1964, the year he was imprisoned—exposes some of the colonial realities suffered by Africans in Mozambique before independence. In 1970 Honwana...