Mobility and Public Transport in Post-independence Mozambican Fiction (1992-2022)

This article analyzes representations of mobility and public transport in the following Mozambican novels: Terra Sonâmbula Sleepwalking Land (1992), O Outro Pé da Sereia The Mermaid's Other Foot (2006) by Mia Couto, O Comboio de Sal e Açúcar The Train of Salt and Sugar (1999) by Licínio Azevedo, and Museu da Revolução Museum of the Revolution (2022) by João Paulo Borges Coelho. Despite the importance of mobility and public transport in these works, existing scholarship has not considered these themes but has opted for more traditional categories such as 'travel', 'diaspora', and 'migration'. Focusing on the literary portrayals of public transport and infrastructure of mobility – i.e. buses, ships, and railway stations (Couto), a slow-moving train (Azevedo), and a Toyota Hiace car (Borges Coelho) – this article aims to demonstrate the central role that the mobility/immobility binomial plays in the representation of post-independent Mozambique. The main argument of this article is that the images of the railway, the road, automobility, and maritime travel are the literal driving force of the narratives and contribute to the (un)building of the national space. I use literary perspectives on mobility studies and world-system approaches developed within the framework of world-literature (Warwick Research Collective) to demonstrate that the tropes of mobility and the representations of public transport in the four novels register and encode the social, political, and economic transitions in Mozambique's colonial and post-colonial history and its incorporation into the capitalist world-system.