Marcelino dos Santos

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Marcelino dos Santos

11:48 CAT | 15 August 2016

Marcelino dos Santos, born 20 May 1929 in Lumbo (Nampula province) is a Mozambican poet, revolutionary, and statesman. As a young man he traveled to Portugal and France for education. He is a founding member of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) party. Marcelino dos Santos, served as FRELIMO deputy president from 1969 to 1977. Later, he was pointed Minister of Economic Development and the party Political Bureau member. From 1987 to 1994 was member of the Assembly of the Republic and since 1999 is member of the FRELIMO Central Committee.

Poet and Mozambican politician, Marcelino dos Santos, or Kalungano or Lilinho Micaia as he was known, was born in 1929, in Lumbo, Mozambique. A renowned poet and Mozambican political activist, he joined the Portuguese society when he went to Lisbon to do his higher studies. Marcelino dos Santos, a young connoisseur and concerned with the realities of the Mozambican people, began his participation in the House of Students of Império in Lisbon – an unofficial organization that was forcibly removed from the Portuguese government’s end by generations of African students who ” transformed “into the most powerful and special platform for the dissemination and dissemination of African authors that it was impossible to edit in Africa.

His texts describe the fate of the colonized, a victim of society and unable to achieve a means of liberation, but an extreme believer in the possibility of turning his destiny and moving from persecuted to persecutor. On the other hand, and by opening a perfectly antithetical line, the song of Marcelino dos Santos is no longer of the so-called “mulata poetry”, which sought an identification, a proper authenticity, a definition of the land. More advanced and confronted with other socio-political constraints, another Africa, in short, Marcelino dos Santos opposed a poetry that outlined a situation and a massification of truly Mozambican wills.Already within the guerrilla period of the armed struggle in Mozambique, Marcelino dos Santos, now freed from the nightmare of censorship, raised the voice and gesture that proclaimed the material of destruction of the demons of colonialism, in the purest attempt to sing for liberation, arriving even to say, in one of his most striking poems, “Yes, mom / it is necessary to plant / by the paths of freedom / the new tree / of National Independence.” Marcelino dos Santos, whose political militancy would have displaced the poetic production of a deeply Mozambican substrate, is still considered today as one of the most significant voices of the affirmation of a truly Mozambican poetry.