Novel
Ualalapi: Fragments from the End of Empire
Ualalapi
Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa · 1987
Synopsis
Six tales, each preceded by “fragments from the end”, around Ngungunhane, last ruler of the empire of Gaza, at the end of the nineteenth century. The Nguni warrior Ualalapi is ordered to kill Mafemane, the brother who stands in the way of the future emperor's rise to power; Mputa, a general accused by the emperor's first wife of having insulted her, asks to prove his innocence by ordeal; Damboia, the emperor's aunt, is struck by an illness that covers her in blood; Manua, the emperor's eldest son, educated in Europe, keeps his diary; finally come a siege and Ngungunhane's last speech.
Context
The first book by its author, it appeared in 1987 and was reissued in Lisbon by Caminho. Each story is preceded by short opening pages: biblical quotations, sayings about the emperor, extracts from sources that the author invents. This empire fell in 1895, when the Portuguese took its sovereign prisoner and exiled him; the government of independence had made him a national hero, and the book paints a portrait of a despot. An English translation appeared in 2017.
Who it is for
In Portuguese, translated into English but not into French. Knowing who Ngungunhane was, and what place official memory gave him after 1975, sheds light on the reading.
Prizes and reception
Grand Prize for narrative fiction in 1990; in 2002, it was selected among the hundred best African books of the twentieth century.
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