Gender and Empire in Mozambican Fictions of Ngungunyane

Abstract: This article considers twenty-first-century Mozambican works of fiction that contest the foundational status of nineteenth-century Gazan emperor Ngungunyane (circa 1850–1906) to Mozambique's postcolonial nationalism as a symbolic representation of ongoing imperial patriarchy. A century after Ngungunyane's defeat by the Portuguese, Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa published Ualalapi , widely read as a devastating critique of Mozambique's FRELIMO party's postcolonial politics as a continuation of Ngungunyane's bloody reign. A series of subsequent works respond to Ualalapi 's critique: Mia Couto's As areias do imperador trilogy, Khosa's As mulheres do imperador , and Paulina Chiziane's As andorinhas . These works deploy female protagonists and narrative experimentation to respond to Ngungunyane's famous final speech in Ualalapi . I argue that each of the contemporary works break the speech's imperial logic in different ways. Khosa, Couto, and Chiziane show that an excess of empire pervades contemporary rewritings of this history. These works draw on female voices and a constellation of anti-imperial communities of Black women—what philosopher María Lugones has theorized as a coalition and through Michelle M. Wright has analyzed through the dialogic—to break colonial-postcolonial continuities of power and imagine different futures in their wake.