The night survivors:

african proverbs on the guerrilla wheel

Abstract

This work is based on a reading of the novel The night survivors (2008), by the writer mozambican Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa. The work, using African proverbs as intertexts, reveals to the reader a range of elements of mozambican/african ancestry. The characters, in the midst of the civil war camps, use proverbs as a way of trying to understand the guerrilla situation in which they live. Our reading starts from the idea that proverbs, as formal elaborations that Ba Ka Khosa uses, allow us to know more about the mozambican tradition and cosmovision. As a theoretical framework, we will start with the ideas of Laura Cavalcante Padilha (2007), Adolfo Colombres (2000), James Obelkevich (1997), Catherine Fourshey (2019).
Keywords: African Proverbs; Mozambican Literature; Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa.