Ualalapi : ngungunhane e a destruição do Império de Gaza enquanto relativizações do projeto nacional da frelimo e da guerra civil (1982-1987)

Abstract

After ten years of a violent liberation war, the independence of Mozambique was officialized in June 25th 1975, and the control of the state was unilaterally given to Mozambique’s Liberation Front, a movement leaded by Samora Machel. During those post-independence years a civil war was initiated, with the emergence of Mozambican National Resistance, a military movement which would operate grave armed opposition against the state policies. With the escalation of the civil war, along the decade of 1980 the State-Frelimo imagined and encouraged a project of constructing a new socialist nation, as well as a new Mozambican national identity conceived from the ethnic reality of the southern populations, therefore little representative of other ethnicities. Such project was based on reshaping the political significance of Ngungunhane, last ruler of the Gaza Empire, to be converted to a Mozambican national hero and approximated to Frelimo’s leaderships like Samora Machel himself. In what related to cultural matters, the official discourse behind the national project was marked by a rhetoric of revolutionary combat which would characterize the role demanded from Mozambican writers in the construction of socialism. With this scenario in mind, in the present dissertation we propose to interpret Ualalapi (1987), of Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, taken as a literary work that relativizes certain aspects of the context of its production, namely the civil war and, mainly, the iconization of Ngungunhane. We found interpretive support in works of Ungulani published after 1987, but primarily in his texts published in Revista Charrua (1984-1986), magazine published by a group of writers reunited with intentions of relativizing the rhetoric of revolutionary intellectual and combat literature so dear to the national project of Frelimo.