Chronicles from the "Vulture Kingdom": The Postcolonial State in Question in Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa's Historical Fiction

In this paper I make two principal and related arguments. First, I contend that the protracted crisis in state legitimacy that afflicts the Mozambican postcolonial state toward the end of its revolutionary period (1975–86), and perhaps well into its neoliberal phase (1986–present), is lucidly and astutely analyzed in the fiction of Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa. Second, I seek to map out the ways in which Khosa proposes a scrupulous reconsideration of Mozambique's hidden, neglected, and indeed often repudiated "traditional" ways of knowing and engaging with the world.