A Conversation with Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa

Francisco Esaú Cossa was born on 1 August 1957 in Inhaminga in the province of Sofala, Mozambique. A member of the Tsonga ethnic group of Southern Mozambique and a speaker of Tsonga, the author goes by his Tsonga name: Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa. Khosa attended elementary school in Sofala and high school in Zambézia. He holds a bachelor’s degree in History and Geography from the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo.Khosa, who taught high school for years and briefly worked for the Mozambican Ministry of Education, began his literary career publishing short stories and co-founding Charrua, a magazine of the Associa o dos Escritores Mo ambicanos (Association of Mozambican Writers), of which he is a member. During the 1990s, he wrote crónicas for various newspapers. He now works as the Director of the Instituto Nacional do Livro e do Disco (National Institute of the Book and Disc).The author of six books, Khosa’s career took off with the 1987 publication of Ualalapi. The text won the Grand Prize of Mozambican Fiction in 1990, and in 2002, a panel of judges in Accra, Ghana ranked Ualalapi one of the 100 best works of African fiction of the 20th century. Next, Khosa published two collections of short stories, Orgia dos Loucos (1990) and Histórias de Amor e Espanto (1993), followed by the novel No Reino dos Abutres (2002). His novel Os Sobreviventes da Noite (2005), a portrayal of the use of child soldiers and child concubines in the Mozambican war of destabilization, won the José Craveirinha Award in 2007. This interview primarily focuses on Khosa’s most recent novel, Choriro, published in 2009 by the Mozambican publishing house Alcance.