The poet who caught the eye of Mozambique’s freedom fighters

Internationally acclaimed author and poet Mia Couto describes himself as an African, but his roots are in Europe.

His Portuguese parents settled in Mozambique in 1953 after fleeing the dictatorial rule of Antonio Salazar.

Couto was born two years later in the port city of Beira. “My childhood was very happy,” he tells the BBC.

Be he points out that he was conscious of the fact that he was living in a “colonial society” – something that nobody had to explain to him because “so visible were the borderlines between whites and blacks, between the…