Luis Bernardo Honwana, a founder of modern Mozambican literature, now works in South Africa, representing Unesco. He spoke to Stephen Gray
Mr Honwana, please describe your job.
I was despatched to this country by Unesco
[the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation]after the 1994 elections, as their director here, to negotiate the re-entry of South Africa into Unesco membership. With an office opened here in Pretoria, my brief became to see the terms of the mandate under which we could operate. And the office is growing very fast.
Your programme is slanted towards science and technology, and then communications, then culture?
Yes, but our programme must be approved by member states … and then we try and implement the parts of that programme which are interesting for a particular country, according to that country’s own priorities. As far as arts and culture go, we have your government’s White Paper, which defines the strategy line. For example, we are bringing South Africa now on to the list of World Heritage sites for protection – Table Mountain, Robben Island and so on. That’s not to mention living events we also support – we were involved with your biennale, and so on. And we will be offering scholarships to young artists to visit all over the world.
Do you speak as a Mozambican, or have you become completely international?
Well, Unesco representatives have to come from somewhere, even though my interests really are international now. But I feel I’m lucky to be here now, because from my Mozambican background I do have a special interest in the regional processes developing here.
When you first came to South Africa – to the New Nation conference in December 1991, and the Weekly Mail one during the film festival the following March, you called on South African writers to rebuild links between the two countries.
What I tried to say then, and am more and more convinced of, is that, during the apartheid years when relationships became so difficult, we did forge links with our South African colleagues nevertheless. Even though we were in occupied territories, we still managed to meet. We felt close, even beyond the inevitable divide of language and affiliations. I can assure you that the Portuguese authorities and the apartheid ones did nothing to make easy such a contact. But now that everything is in place for us to collaborate readily, the situation is not as good as we had in the past! That is why I have expressed my astonishment and sadness that this is so. It is encumbent on us to try and do something about it. But better contact will come, sooner or later, it’s a matter of time.
Going back a third of a century now, to 1964, when Richard Rive was the first to talent-scout you as your volume We Killed Mangy-Dog was first coming out in Maputo, Loureno Marques as it was. You had written the stories as a teenager and were one of very few black people to have published under colonialism. Was it important to you that your work appeared in South Africa too?
Yes, because before being widely known in my own country, I was sort of adopted here – at first by The Classic magazine, which was so prestigious. One of the stories of mine they took, in English translation by Dorothy Guedes, won their prize, and it was read internationally, and then went on to The London Magazine and so on. In Mozambique at the time, you must understand, we were in such isolation that that was really reaching the outside world for us.
And now the collection persists as a perennial favourite in English, one of the few early African Writers Series titles that keeps on being reprinted.
It’s a bit intimidating, isn’t it? But there is a mythology about the writer which has a life of its own, and goes on developing about a book. Nowadays I feel a bit distantly related to it! Since 1964 the compulsion to publish has become a bit less strong, too, I must admit; and anyway now I have other means of expression which are perhaps more rewarding to me as communication.
And since then your English has become so good.
Not quite, really, because it’s by no means my first language. Ronga is my mother tongue, you know, and after that the official language had to be Portuguese; and then for historical reasons in the school system the next language was French. And then came English.
You have called South Africa your dreamland.
Well, my grandfather studied and worked here in the 1920s, then my father was an interpreter of some of the Mozambican languages on your mines in the 1930s. My family has had a South African branch for close to a century. But I was never allowed to visit my family here – I was never granted a visa, because of being known as an activist: and I applied for one every year, too. Then, funnily enough, after the Nkomati Accord with Mozambique, I was annually invited to South Africa, which I never accepted – I refused systematically. Till in 1991 for that writers’ conference – then I thought it would be appropriate for me to come. That was the first time I set foot here. Well, let me be honest with you – legally, I mean.
You came clandestinely?
No, but I grew up in Moamba, a village not far from the border. It’s something that disgusts me now, but one of our activities was – well, in my youth I was a very dedicated hunter. And we happened once to be hunting in a territory which was no longer Mozambique. Just shooting gazelle, antelope – no more, I promise you. What I mean to say is that border didn’t then really mean much to ordinary people.
As chief of staff to Samora Machel and Frelimo’s minister of culture (1982-91), your time for writing was cut down. This has disappointed your admirers, who hope you are not a one-book author. It seems you chose to become a career politician.
Reconstruction was a unique and enriching period of our history to be involved in. But I never chose a political career: I was a Frelimo militant; as you know, I was part of the independence struggle, and when liberation came you just had to be part of the state apparatus. But I always understood this was in passing … And now I’ve come to be an international civil servant! – so I’ve hardly continued to be a writer. But here and there I still risk doing a short story in Portuguese, or a paper. Sometimes the way they’re received these days is not too encouraging, so you suspect you’ve lost your touch … But I still struggle with grammar, with the world of words.
Do you have a message for younger South Africans, ambitious as you once were – about how their isolation may be broken?
If you’ve gone through all that – the war against colonialism, and then the civil war; if you were in a country without the capacity to feed, to shelter its population – well, through all this bad process, nevertheless our bridges with the outside world became stronger and stronger. And we are now very much part of the human community, not only because of the solidarity that has been extended to us, but also because we feel that somehow we, too, have contributed to some advancements in other parts which are struggling to be free themselves. So, in spite of difficulties, we have been part of this exercise of identifying ourselves with the outside world. It is very rewarding to feel that you are part of the world. And this movement to join the human community is unstoppable now.