Luís Bernardo Honwana

Luís Augusto Bernardo Manuel Honwana , short Luís Bernardo Honwana (born November 1942 in Lourenço Marques , Portuguese East Africa ) is a Mozambican journalist and writer .

Life

Luís Bernardo Honwana was born in November 1942 as the fourth of nine children of Raúl Honwana and his second wife Nally Jeremias Nhaca in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), the capital of the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. Honwana's father worked as a translator and interpreter for the Portuguese colonial administration, which earned the father and thus the family the status of "assimilados" - a privilege only granted to a small group of Mozambicans who, from the colonial regime's point of view, are considered to be "Civilized" were considered. Among other things, this enabled the children to get a better education.

Honwana grew up with his family in Moamba , a small town 30 kilometers from the colonial capital. The family communicated bilingually throughout, both in Portuguese and in Ronga ( Xitsonga ), although, according to Honwana's father, the children expressed themselves much better in Portuguese than in Ronga. At 17 Honwana moved to the capital, in the 1950s he joined the student nationalist movement Núcleo dos Estudantes Secundários de Moçambique to . During this time Honwana became strongly politicized, in particular through his work as a journalist in which he was supported by the later famous Mozambican writer and poet José Craveirinha .

In 1964 Honwana published his best-known work, the short story collection with the title Nós Matamos o Cão-Tinhoso (in German “We killed the mangy dog”), which was translated into English by Dorothy Guedes a little later in 1969 and entitled “We Killed Mangy -Dog and Other Stories "was published. Also in 1964 the Portuguese colonial administration arrested Honwana and sentenced him to three years in prison for supporting the Mozambican liberation movement Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO). After his release, Honwana remained under arrest, which he had to serve in exile in Portugal. During this time he studied law in Lisbon and later lived for a short time in Switzerland.

During the course of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, Mozambique gained its independence in 1975, so that Honwana returned to his home country from his exile. He supported both the transitional government and later the first FRELIMO government under President Samora Machel . First he worked in the office of the President, later, from 1981 (or 1982) as the country's minister of culture. Honwana also founded the Mozambican Association of Journalists ( Organização Nacional dos Jornalistas de Moçambique ), the Mozambican Photography Association ( Associação Moçambicana de Fotografia ) and the Mozambican Writers Association ( Associação dos Escritores Moçambicanos ).

In 1987 Honwana left the cabinet under Samora Machel and began to get involved with UNESCO , whose Executive Board he was appointed. He held the office until 1991. In 1995 he became director of the newly established South African UNESCO office, which he headed until his retirement in 2002. Since his retirement, Honwana has mainly focused on art, history and ethnolinguistics.

Literary work

The literary work of Luis Bernardo Honwanas is considered to be strongly influenced by the Mozambican independence and liberation efforts. To this day, his collection of short stories, Nós Matamos o Cão-Tinhoso, is the only work that has gained notoriety beyond Mozambique. It has been translated into numerous languages, and a short story appeared in the New York Times as early as 1967. In Germany, the work was published in 1980 under the title We have killed the Räudigen Hund by Reclam-Verlag , translated by Friedhelm Liese and with an afterword by Rainer Arnold .

The publication of the short story collection coincided with the beginning of the armed struggle of FRELIMO and thus became the iconic voice for the emerging Mozambican identity ("Moçambicanidade"), which called for an end to the Portuguese colonial regime. The first edition of the collection was dedicated to his mentor José Craveirina. Honwana's work is also considered to have shaped later Mozambican authors, such as Mia Couto and Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa .

Honwana published some of his short stories on the youth page of the Notícias newspaper before Mozambique gained independence . Claudia Pazos Alonso analyzed that, thanks to his journalistic work, Honwana knew very well how to skillfully deal with euphemisms and ambiguities in Portuguese censorship. In Nós Matamos o Cão-Tinhoso , Honwana also used his ability to denounce the racism and violence of the Portuguese colonial regime in disguise, mostly from the perspective of a little boy.

Apart from the Mozambican writer João Dias (1926–1949), prose written in Mozambique was previously practically unknown, so Honwana's work is also considered to be a style-forming element for Mozambican literature.

The Mozambican Writers' Association ( Associação dos Escritores Moçambicanos ) awarded him the Prémio José Craveirinha de Literatura literary prize in 2014 for his life's work .

plant

• Nós Matamos o Cão-Tinhoso 1964; German under the title We have killed the Räudigen Hund , 1980, Reclam ( Reclams Universal-Bibliothek ; 839)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h i} Philip Rothwell: Honwana, Luís Bernardo . In: Emmanuel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr (Eds.): Dictionary of African Biography . tape 3 . Oxford Press, Oxford 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-538207-5 , pp. 72 f .
2. ↑ ^{a b} Honwana, Bernardo (Mozambique). In: stimmenafrikas.de. All World House Voices of Africa, accessed on January 30, 2019 . 
3. ↑ Spotlight: Luís Bernardo Honwana: A Short Form List. In: The Short Form. 1999, accessed January 30, 2019 .