THE ROLE OF POETEY IN THE
MOZAMBICAN REVOLUTION
The history of Mozambican poetry is the history of the Mozambican revolution. It is one and the same process, stemming from the premises of the
socio-economic oppression by colonialism, involving the repression of African
personality and culture. It strives for a similar goal, that of political
and cultural liberation.
Colonial domination had been imposed through the disruption of traditional
ways of living and thinking, and the correlative introduction of alien ideas
and values, since the essential feature of the colonisation of a people is
the systematic destruction of their identity. Such a process, operated
jointly by the State and the Church, was not confined merely to the cultural
sphere; the heritage of African art and culture waned not only because it
had been humiliated and derided, but above all because it was deprived of
the economic structures on which it had been based in the tribal societies*
However, if many Africans were alienated from their cultural background to
the point of rejecting it. if they were so uprooted that they no longer
dared assert it openly, this "background never died completely. It survived
the death of the tribal economic structures and remained hidden, ready to
be used as a basis for future developments. At the same time the foreign
culture was being assimilated and being radically transformed by African
realities, although the process engendered bitter conflicts for the individuals,
I, From the end of the XKth Century to the Second World War
The situation in a colony like Mozambique, where repression has always been
exerted v/ith equal strength, except for slight variations, upon all of the
African population, was such that not even a pseudo-poetry expressing the
ideology of a privileged group could come into being, since such a group did
not exist as yet. Even those who could be a part of such a social group,
assimilados and mulattos .could not help expressing in their poetry some
sort of resentment and rebellion against the white supremacy and the white
bourgeoisie which had never really accepted them (it is the case, for
instance, of J,E. Dias). Thus, there was not in Mozambique the possibility,
granted to poetry in less fascist capitalist societies, v/here It always had.
a limited space for expressing through euphemism and metaphors some sort of
opposition to the existing order and of nostalgia for a golden age (which
could be used as a basis for a future reign of freedom). This explains
the silence of Mozambican art during the first decades of the XXth century.
However, this does not mean that the silence v/as total and unbroken. There
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