The first international colloquium, “Gungunhana—Importance and Current Events,” will take place in Angra do Heroísmo from the 31st of this month to the 2nd of November. Mozambican writer Mia Couto and national and international researchers will attend.
The event is organized by the Historical Institute of Terceira Island (IHIT), which assumes that one intention was to present the two faces of colonialism side by side.
The president of the IHIT, José Olívio Rocha, highlights this multifaceted debate. “The perspective is not one of homage, but rather of doing justice to the importance of Gungunhana in his context and time, from the point of view of study and research. There are a number of specialists in Gungunhana, in contemporary history, the history of Africa and Mozambique who come from Europe and Portugal, and there are people like Mia Couto and two others from Mozambique, who have a reading of independent Mozambique and the importance that this figure of Gungunhana has or doesn’t have for them,” he says.
Added to this perspective is what happened in Terceira to the last emperor of Gaza, now Mozambique, who spent the rest of his life banished on the island. “The idea we have is that the way the people of Terceira behaved when he and his companions were imprisoned here has extremely positive aspects, but also those of the ‘bosses’. They had to be baptized and confirmed. We don’t know if they were baptized with conviction or if it was an act of the oppressor, who forced the oppressed to make this gesture,” he explains.
José Olívio Rocha stresses that “these two worlds can be present” to “establish a debate, obviously on the positive side.”
“It’s a theme that, of course, is a pretext for other, very varied themes,” he points out.
The colloquium begins on the 31st, with the opening session scheduled for the Salão Nobre da Câmara Municipal de Angra do Heroísmo at 8pm, with the presence of the president of IHIT, the mayor of Angra do Heroísmo, Álamo Meneses, as well as Eugénio Numayo, president of the King Ngungunhane Institute, Prince of the Empire of Gaza and Stella Pinto Zeca, Mozambique’s ambassador to Portugal.
The following day, the event moves to the Manuel Coelho Baptista de Lima Military History Center and kicks off at 9am with the writer Mia Couto.

The program includes a panel, moderated by CNN Portugal journalist Sara de Melo Rocha, on “Gungunhana and the Gaza Empire,” with Abel Mazuze, a researcher at ARPAC, the Institute for Socio-Cultural Research in Mozambique, Eric Morier-Genoud, a specialist in Anthropology and African History at Queen’s University Belfast and Mia Couto.
The colloquium includes specialists such as Vítor Barros, from the New University of Lisbon, historian Carlos Enes, Andrea Vacha, from ISCTE, Michel Cahen, a French historian, Maria-Benedita Basto, a professor at the Sorbonne Faculty of Letters, Nuno Martins, a full professor at the Portuguese Catholic University and José Avelino Santos, director of the Luís da Silva Ribeiro Public Library and Regional Archive.
On November 2, at 9 p.m., Mia Couto presents the book “A Cegueira do Rio”, at the Lar Doce Livro bookstore.
The colloquium is supported by the Angra do Heroísmo City Council, the Angra do Heroísmo Museum, the Luís da Silva Ribeiro Public Library and Archive, and the Praia da Vitória City Council.

in Diário Insular-José Lourenço-director

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL) as part of Bruma Publication and ADMA (Azores-Diaspora Media Alliance) at California State University, Fresno, PBBI thanks the Luso-American Education Foundation for sponsoring FILAMENTOS.