4 - Recreating African Futures through literary imagination. The newest gender, racial, national and African identities as revealed in Mario Lúcio Sousa’s O Novíssimo Testamento (The newest Testament) (Cape Verde)

Abstract

The role of literature in imagining and building African identities, social roles, economic dynamics
and political structures cannot be underestimated. Indeed, from anti-colonialism through the preand
immediate post-independence periods up to the contemporary postcolonial state, literature has
been path breaking: it was through literature that pre-existing realities and historical processes
were critically revised in important ways. And it was also through literature that future projects
were designed that inspired political agents of all sorts, the most important example being the
very construction of African states as described by the poets and storytellers that were decisive in
creating the “imagined communities” that would sustain political struggle.