The poet who caught the attention of Mozambique’s freedom fighters

The internationally renowned author and poet Mia Couto describes himself as African, but his roots lie in Europe.

His Portuguese parents settled in Mozambique in 1953 after fleeing the dictatorial rule of Antonio Salazar.

Couto was born two years later in the port city of Beira.

“My childhood was very happy,” he tells the BBC.

However, he stresses that he was aware of the fact that he lived in a “colonial society”. No one had to explain this to him because “the boundaries between whites and blacks, between rich and poor, were so clearly visible”.

As a child, Couto was cripplingly shy and unable to speak for himself in public or at home.

Instead, like his father, who was also a poet and journalist, he found solace in the written word.

“I invented something, a relationship with paper, and behind that paper there was always someone I loved, someone who listened to me and said: 'You exist,'” he tells the BBC from his home in Mozambique's capital, Maputo, with a colourful painting and a wood carving on a bright mustard-yellow wall in the background.

Because Couto was of European descent, he could most easily identify with the black elite that existed in the Portuguese colonial empire of Mozambique – the “assimilados,” who, in the racist language of the time, were considered “civilized” enough to become Portuguese citizens.

The author considers himself fortunate to have played with the children of the Assimilados and learned some of their languages.

He says this helped him fit in with the black majority.

“The fact that I am white only occurs to me outside of Mozambique. In Mozambique, it really isn’t mentioned,” he says.

But even as a child he was aware that his white skin color distinguished him from others.

“Nobody taught me about the injustice… the unfair society I lived in. And I thought, 'I can't be myself. I can't be a happy person without fighting this,'” he says.

When Couto was ten years old, the fight against Portuguese rule in Mozambique began.

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

When he arrived at their quarters, he found that he was the only white boy in a crowd of 30 people.

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 heard the stories of poverty and deprivation, he realized that he was the only privileged person in the room.

So he made up a story about himself – he knew that otherwise he would have no chance of being selected.

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

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

“The man who led the meetings asked me, 'Are you the young man who writes poems for the newspaper?' And I said, 'Yes, I am the author.' And he said, 'Okay, you can come, you can be part of us, because we need poems,'” Couto recalls.

After Mozambique gained its independence from Portugal in 1975, Couto continued to work as a journalist for the local media until the death of Mozambique's first president, Samora Machel, in 1986. He then gave up his job because he became disillusioned with Frelimo.

“There was a kind of break; I no longer believed in the discourse of the liberators,” he says.

After leaving Frelimo, Couto studied biological sciences and still works today as an ecologist specializing in coastal areas.

He also started writing again.

“I started with poems, then came books, short stories and novels,” he says.

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

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

The book was an immediate success. In 2001, it was named one of the twelve best African books of the 20th century by the jury of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair and has been translated into more than 33 languages.

Couto later gained recognition for other novels and short stories that dealt with war and colonialism, the pain and suffering of Mozambicans and their resilience during these difficult times.

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

“I want to have a language that can translate the different dimensions of Africa, the relationships and the conversations between the living and the dead, the visible and the invisible,” he tells the BBC.

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

In 2013 he won the Camões Prize, worth 100,000 euros (US$109,000; £85,500), the most highly endowed award for a Portuguese writer.

In 2014 he received the Neustadt Prize, worth $50,000 (£39,000), which is considered the most prestigious literary award after the Nobel Prize.

When asked whether his works reflect the reality of Africa today, Couto replies that this is impossible because the continent is divided and there are so many different Africas.

“We do not know each other and do not publish the works of our authors on our continent because there are borders between colonial languages ​​such as French, English and Portuguese,” he says.

“We have inherited something that was a colonial construction and is now ‘naturalised’: the so-called Anglophone, the so-called Francophone and the so-called Lusophone Africa,” he adds.

Couto was due to attend a literary festival in Kenya last month but had to cancel his trip after mass protests against President William Ruto's tax hike plans.

He hopes there will be further opportunities to strengthen relations with writers from other parts of Africa.

“We need to overcome these barriers. We need to give more importance to the encounters we have as Africans and among Africans,” says Couto.

He complains that African writers continue to look to Europe and the United States for inspiration and are ashamed to celebrate their own diversity and their relationship with their gods and ancestors.

“Actually, we don't even know what's happening outside Mozambique in artistic and cultural terms. We know nothing about our neighbors – South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania – and they know nothing about Mozambique,” says Couto.

When asked what advice he would give to young writers just starting out in their careers, he stresses the importance of listening to other people's voices.

“Listening is not just about listening to the voice or looking at the iPhone or the gadgets or tablets. It's about being able to become the other. It's a kind of migration, an invisible migration to become the other person,” says Couto.

“If you are touched by a character in a book, it is because that character was already living inside you and you did not know it.”

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