Luis Bernardo Honwana: We Killed Mangy-Dog

[Stewart]

No review, but just a mention at the moment for this small collection of short stories that I'm dipping in and out of. The volume I have is seems to have been published either in 1979 or in the early 1980s, although the copyright page says it was first published in 1969 (translated by Dorothy Guedes) in Heinemann's African Writers Series, although it doesn't seem to be available in their current selection.

I picked it up off eBay about a year ago, purely on the basis that I'd never heard of him, and had an attempt at some point on the first story, Dina. I never understood much. Now I think I do, because it isn't so much what Honwana says as what he doesn't say. The short stories (well, Dina and Inventory Of Furniture & Effects, being the only two I've read so far) have their details and incidents but these only serve half the purpose. Honwana seems to specialise in lacunae. Or, at least, specialised, as this collection is his sole literary work.

The stories deal with colonial issues, concerning Portuguese rule over his native Mozambique, and are quite stark on reflection. In Inventory Of Furniture & Effects, the story is barely more than a child telling of everything in the house with the barest mention of his father, who was taken away for reasons unknown. But looking around at the objects mentioned - books, for example - then there are hints (or suspicions) of resistance. And slowly the story comes together.

I'll keep reporting as I go. The title story, We Killed Mangy-Dog, is the seventh and final one in the collection.

 

[pragic1]

Will you please mail the publication detail (Publisher, Edition, Price, ISBN) of the book so that I can order it here (India)?

 

[Stewart]

Will you please mail the publication detail (Publisher, Edition, Price, ISBN) of the book so that I can order it here (India)?

pragic1, I don't know where my copy of the book is to get the ISBN but I can tell you that the publisher was William Heinemann as part of their African Writers series. It's out of print now, so I have no idea about price, as the copy I have was bought off eBay and was published in, I think, the early 1980s.

 

[Jan Mbali]

I lived in Mozambique for two years, shortly after independence, and before then spent a year in Lisbon. The title story captures the essence of colonialism, Portuguese style. Bleak, as you say. In the 1960s the twin colonialism theory goes, Portugual was herself a semi-colony of the UK and USA and a pawn of NATO in the cold war. Indeed the oldest surviving (from pre-WW2) fascist regime with a 30-40% rate of illiteracy in the mother country and backward in almost every respect. Mozambique even more so, with the Catholic church promoting schools that promoted illiteracy and hard work in the fields oftheir missions (the Bishop of Braga wrote that this was desirable as they did not want political natives as they had in South Africa) Thus a neo-colonial solution was not possible and a protracted war inevitable. Fanon's The wretched of the Earth thesis on violence applies more to the urban areas of Mozambique which were largely out of the war, but simmering underneath. All the threads and psychology are there, in the short story. Masterful, but apparently he produced little else in fiction other than that collection.