Author-politicians in Angola and Mozambique
Tom Stennett is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow (2022-2025) working on the project ‘Author-politicians in Angola and Mozambique’
The project analyses the intimate relationship between party politics and literature in Angola and Mozambique, through a study of the intellectual and literary activities of Angolan and Mozambican author-politicians, that is, authors who were actively involved in the Angolan and Mozambican liberation struggles or post-independence governments. There were many such individuals: Angola’s first president, Agostinho Neto, was a poet, as was the effective second-in-command of Mozambique’s socialist government, Marcelino dos Santos. The prize-winning Angolan novelist Pepetela was an education minister during the socialist period. Angolan poet António Jacinto and short-story writer Luandino Vieira were sent to Tarrafal concentration camp, in Cape Verde, for their anti-colonial political activities.
The project has the following objectives:
- Assess the implications of the interconnections between party politics and literature in Angola and Mozambique from the 1950s until the present;
- Identify and problematize the political expectations created by the liberation movements and post-independence governments in Angola and Mozambique concerning literary production;
- Analyse the contradictions and tensions within the Marxist nationalist ideologies of political parties the MPLA (Angola) and Frelimo (Mozambique) using the political poetry of author-politicians who were high-ranking members of those parties;
- Consider the parallel development of literature and politics in Angola and Mozambique within regional, colonial, post-colonial and international contexts, including the development of Marxist politics in Africa.
The project will draw on archival materials from Portugal, Mozambique, Angola and Cape Verde.
