Of Verbal Dexterosity
NINA SIBBAL
THE WORLD OF ‘MESTRE’ TAMODA by Uanhenga Xitu Readers International, New York, 1989, 157 pp., US S8.95, UK 14.95
March-April 1989, volume 13, No 2

Uanhenga Xitu insists on using his Angolan village name, rather than Agostinho Mendes Carvalho, his Portu¬guese name. Already we see the important and subversive possibilities of the use of language, within reach of an activist writer. ‘Mestre’ Tamoda puts together his jumpy short stories written in prison, hidden from unrelenting surveillance and constant searches by warders, captured, rewritten. The Portuguese occupation of Angola is a palpable presence in the book, you bump into it, quite casually and inevitably, at various twists and turns of its winding, village story-telling plots.

Mestre Tamoda himself, we are told in a short, packed introduction by Antonio Jacinto, the well-known Angolan poet, and he should know, ‘is typically Angolan in his profound loquacity’, the product of a colonial milieu with all its games, its forms of alienation, its contradictions and contrasts.

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