We Others, from Makulusu

We Others, from Makulusu (Nós os do Makulusu) is a novel written between 1968 and 1971 by José Luandino Vieira and published in Portuguese in 1989, then translated by Michel Laban for Gallimard. On the way to the cemetery where his brother, an officer of the Portuguese army killed by Angolan guerrillas, is to be buried, the narrator crosses the old town of Luanda and relives his childhood in the popular neighborhood of Makulusu: The Sorcerers’ Cave, the games of a mixed-race group, the oath of brotherhood among children despite skin color. Caught between the hostility of the white world and African solidarities, the bilingual narrator is fully subjected to colonial tearing. The novel alternates funeral song and song of life in a prose woven with slang, Kimbundu, and reminiscence.