ABSTRACT
In the colonial period the preferred literary genre in Mozambique was poetry. Many reasons can be cited to explain this. Among them, was the fact that the intellectual elite was relatively small; another was the late development of the schooling system in the colony. The ways of writing fiction in Mozambique in the present day are very different. The tendency towards storytelling seems to be the great common denominator. Ualalapi is a fictional work organized around six tales, and it is about the figure of the Nguni emperor Ngungunhane, who in the previous century colonized what is today southern Mozambique. Like most African countries, Mozambique came to inherit the colonial frontiers established in the previous century. Terra Sonambula is a magisterial book in the manner in which it is structured and in Mia Couto's very individual usage of language, granting the holiness of myths and the soulful plasticity of dreams.
