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Guinea-Bissau / All works

Novel

Eterna paixão

Not translated into English

Abdulai Sila · 1994

Synopsis

Daniel, an African American, university professor and agronomist, has come to Africa to develop a solidarity-based agriculture and to find his roots. He lives in a country that is never named, married to Ruth, a figure of the bourgeoisie that came to power with independence, and rubs shoulders with Mbubi, the servant, attached to the land. The Africa he discovers, repressive and corrupt, is nothing like the one his friend Mark dreamed of, and his post at the Ministry of Agriculture becomes precarious.

Context

The book was published in Bissau by Ku Si Mon in 1994 and was followed by two other novels in 1995 and 1997. Composed in six movements, like an ode, it makes passion the thread linking Africa and Black America. Sebastião Marques Cardoso reads in it the negative of the social and political life of Guinea-Bissau in the decades following the war of liberation, under the veil of a country without a name.

Who it is for

A novel in Portuguese, with no French translation; an accessible read on Africa after independence.

Prizes and reception

The book made its author one of the major voices of African literature in Portuguese.

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