A Severed Penis

Elizabeth Lowry

• The Last Flight of the Flamingo by Mia Couto, translated by David Brookshaw
  Serpent’s Tail, 179 pp, £9.99, March 2004, ISBN 1 85242 813 9

Mia Couto is a white Mozambican who writes in Portuguese, perhaps the most prominent of his generation of writers – he is 50 this year – in Lusophone Africa. His recurring theme is post-revolutionary Mozambique’s struggle to achieve credible nationhood; specifically, to channel its resources in such a way as to benefit its people rather than its apparatchiks. Couto’s revolutionary credentials are intriguingly chequered. His medical studies in Maputo were interrupted when he was called by Frelimo to act as a journalist in the run up to independence in 1974-75; he went back to university at the age of 30. While the country was being mauled by civil war, Couto was studying biology. He went on to publish his first collection of short stories, Vozes Anoitecidas (Voices Made Night), in 1986 and his first novel, Terra Sonâmbula (‘Sleepwalking Land’), in 1992, the year a peace agreement with Renamo ended the fighting. Couto had, in the interim, served as the director of the Mozambique Information Agency. He continues to work as an environmental biologist – less tangential to his career as a writer than it might appear.