Literary Voices of Luanda and Maputo: A Struggle for the City

Abstract

In this article, I provide an overview of literary portrayals of the cities of Luanda and Maputo over the course of their histories from the colonial period to the post-independence era. In particular, I draw on the literary images and descriptions of the cities to demonstrate a design of inequality that their urbanism determines. Finally, I argue that a struggle for terrain and citizenship—in the conquest of space by colonizers and the reconquest of lost places by the colonized—draws the lines of that inequality.