Harare Review of Books

236 pages.

Expected publication date: Mar. 14, 2023 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Fiction/historical.

Lyrical and poetic, this is the third book in the series, Sands of the Emperor, Mia Couto’s historical fiction about Mozambique at the end of the nineteenth century. The Drinker of Horizons is the fictional account of how the Emperor of Gaza, Ngungunyane, was forced into exile, eventually ending up in the Azores.

The story is told mostly from the perspective of Imani, a young woman who is taken on the ocean voyage into exile because she is fluent in Portuguese, and is able to serve as a translator and spy. Along with Imani on the ship are other women, seven of Ngungunyane’s three hundred wives, and three of Zixaxa’s, Ngungunyane’s enemy who has also been captured and is on the voyage. Imani is treated differently from the other women, not being held with them and given some freedoms, but her situation is, in the end, just as dire. In addition, Imani is pregnant by a Portuguese soldier she hopes to eventually be reunited with.

The once-proud and ruthless Ngungunyane descends into illness, stripped of dignity and power. The Portuguese soldiers, his captors, are cruel and inhumane; but even they have their motives and justifications, and, at times, some show glimmers of—if not kindness, at least a tiny bit of fellow feeling for the captives. The overall story, however, is bleak; these captives lose land and home, identity, and their connection to their own people, mostly never to be restored.

I had the privilege of visiting the Fortress of Maputo in 2022. I learnt, there, about Ngungunyane’s exile and death, about his many wives, saw a reproduction of his coffin, and learnt about the attempts to resurrect his memory in post-Independence Mozambique—a reminder that, as Baldwin says, history is not the past.

Although I have not read the previous two books in the series yet, The Drinker of Horizons worked well as a standalone book.

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and to NetGalley for this ARC.