Mia Couto: The Mozambican author who turned his back on coloialism

When Couto was 10, the fight against Portuguese rule in Mozambique began.

The author remembers the night when, as a 17-year-old student writing poetry for an anti-colonial publication, and keen to join the liberation struggle, he was summoned to appear before the leaders of the revolutionary movement, Frelimo.

Arriving at their quarters, he found he was the only white boy in a crowd of 30.

The leaders asked everyone in the room 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 realised he was the only privileged person in the room.

So, he made up a story about himself – otherwise he knew he had no chance of being selected.

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

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

“The guy that was leading the meetings asked me: ‘Are you the young guy that is writing 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 its independence from Portugal in 1975, Couto continued working as a journalist in local media until the death of Mozambique’s first president, Samora Machel, in 1986. He then quit as he had become disillusioned with Frelimo.

“There was a kind of rupture; the discourse of the liberators became something I was not believing in any more,” he says.

After giving up his Frelimo membership, Couto studied biological sciences. Today, he stills works as an ecologist specialising in coastal areas.

He also returned to writing.

“I initially began with poetry, then books, short stories, and novels,” he says.

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

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

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

Couto went on to win recognition for more novels and short stories that dealt with war and colonialism, the pain and suffering Mozambicans went through, and their resilience during those tough times.

Other themes he focused on included mystical descriptions derived from witchcraft, religion and folklore.

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

Couto is well-known throughout the Portuguese-speaking world – Angola, Cape Verde, and Sao Tome in Africa, as well as Brazil and Portugal.

In 2013, he won the €100,000 ($109,000; £85,500) Camões prize, the biggest prize for a writer in Portuguese.

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