THE JOYFUL CRY OF THE PARTRIDGE

A family in Mozambique navigates racism and its colonial legacy in this story from award-winning author Chiziane, the first Mozambican woman to publish a novel after the country gained independence in 1990.

In the province of Zambezia, a naked woman appears on the banks of a river. Offending the women of the village, she sits indecently in the section reserved for men. She’s been driven crazy by a traumatic past, and now searches, ghostlike, for her three missing children. Moving backward in time, Chiziane takes up the story of the unfortunate woman’s parents, born into poverty while the country is under Portuguese rule. Her father, José, becomes an assimilado, forsaking his traditions, adopting the language and culture of the colonizers. As a sepoy, he kills and tortures for the white regime: “Without the complicity of the assimilados and the sepoys, the land would never have been colonized.” After José disappears, his wife, Delfina, marries a white man and favors the children she has with him. The cruel racial hierarchy of colonization, internalized, plays out within the microcosm of her family. Woven into the narrative are origin myths explaining the age-old battle between men and women, as well as the history of Zambezia. “We were invaded by the Arabs. Waged war upon by the Dutch and the Portuguese...The invaders destroyed our temples, our gods, our language. But with them, we built a new language, a new race. That race is us.” Chiziane brings the meandering storylines of her characters to an optimistic, if unlikely, conclusion, and the book ends on a hopeful note: "Death and mourning have abandoned the land, and in the air the joyful song of the partridge prevails, gurué, gurué! Slavery is over and won’t come back! We are independent. We defeated colonialism."

A story ultimately about Mozambique itself, and the struggles and hopes of its people.