ABSTRACT
According to the main character in Germano Almeida's satirical novel O Meu Poeta, a second-rate versifier active in the tumultuous inaugural decades of Cabo Verdean independence in 1975, poetry functioned as "a lethal weapon" during the "glorious struggle" for national liberation. With key variations, stemming largely from Portuguese-speaking Africa's deep-seated commitment to the socialist revolution at the time of independence, this fraught link between literature and emancipation can of course be broadly ascribed to most African literature from the period of de-colonization. What the conditional clause seems to propose, in other words, is that for Bernardo there may be no telephone to Heaven. Bernardo's denials suggest that the beating of African drums, far from being just wild nonsense, may actually mask an idiom and a syntax whose intricacies cannot but remain an enigma to the colonists. Even in this context, however, the motive for Bernardo's alleged murder remains obscure.
