Narrative
Dumba Nengue: Run for Your Life
Dumba Nengue: histórias trágicas do banditismo
Lina Magaia · 1987
Synopsis
Twenty-two short narratives drawn from what her neighbours and friends told the author about the countryside of Gaza province, concerning the attacks by Renamo's armed bands on a defenceless population: goods stolen or burned, families destroyed, children, old people and women killed. In one of them, an eight-year-old boy asks his mother whether the “matsanga” have a homeland. The author rejects the term civil war: there are not two armies here, but a single armed group that preys on people who have nothing with which to defend themselves.
Context
The book was published in Maputo in 1987, while the war was still going on and its author had been directing agricultural development in the district of Manhiça, a target of attacks, for a year. The title means flight, the salvation one asks of one's legs. An English translation by Michael Wolfers appeared as early as 1988 in Trenton, and a Brazilian edition in 1990; two other books on the same war followed, one of testimonies in 1989, the other between fiction and document in 1994.
Who it is for
Short testimonies, in Portuguese, with no French translation. The violence is described without euphemism.
Prizes and reception
Translated into English as early as 1988, with an introduction by the historian Allen Isaacman, it was presented as a unique document on the war waged against the country's rural areas.
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