Internationally acclaimed author and poet Mia Couto describes himself as an African, but his roots are in Europe. His Portuguese parents settled in Mozambique in 1953 after fleeing the dictatorial rule of Antonio Salazar. Couto was born two years later in the port city of Beira.
“My childhood was very happy,’ he tells the BBC. Be he points out that he was conscious of the fact that he was living in a "colonial society" - something that nobody had to explain to him because "so visible were the borderlines between whites and blacks, between the poor and the rich". As a child, Couto was cripplingly shy, unable to speak up for himself in public or even at home.
Instead, like his father who was also a poet and a journalist, he found solace in the written word. “I invented something, a relationship with paper, and then behind that paper there was always someone I loved, someone that was listening to me, saying: ‘You exist’,” he tells the BBC from his home in Mozambique's capital, Maputo, with a colourful painting and wooden carving on a rich, mustard-yellow wall in the background. Being of European origin, Couto related most easily to the black elite that existed in Mozambique under Portuguese colonial rule - the "assimilados" - those, in the racist language of the day, considered "civilised" enough to become Portuguese citizens.
The writer counts himself as lucky to have played with the children of assimilados and to have learned some of their languages. He says this h.