The Portuguese President, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, decorated this Saturday two Mozambican artists with the Order of Infante D. Henrique, in Maputo, the sculptor Reinata Sadimba and the writer João Paulo Borges Coelho.

"Mozambique is, in fact, a great nation, a unity made of diversities that have integrated and are inseparable," declared the head of state, before the two artists, at the Portuguese Cultural Center of the Portuguese Embassy, quoted by some media outlets.

Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said that João Paulo Borges Coelho, a historian born in Porto in 1955, and Reinata Sadimba, a ceramist born in 1945 in a village in the Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado, "have a lot in common, strange as it may seem," despite being "two very different personalities.

According to the President, "they have in common, first, the creative genius and, second, the expression of freedom, the affirmation of independence and the strength and progress of Mozambique", both with "a permanent relationship between the real and the created". João Paulo Borges Coelho "studies reality as a historian" and, at the same time, "in dialogue with reality, he is a fictionist, a literary creator," living in "constant tension between reality and its recreation," Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa described.

About Reinata Sadimba, he said that in her life "there is permanently the creation", but also "the reality of the fight for the role of women, the political and civic role of women, the role of women as cultural creators". "I'm thinking of that sculpture in which the head sort of implodes or opens to the entrance of ideas, to the bubbling of ideas. But in those sculptures we find the reality of the Makonde, the Mozambican reality in general, the reality of the role of women," he pointed out.

On behalf of Portugal, the head of state thanked the two "for the sculptures, for the books, for the history studied and taught, for the liberation of women defended" and decorated them with the degree of Commander of the Order of Prince Henry the Navigator.

It should be noted that the Order of Infante D. Henrique is intended to distinguish those who have "rendered relevant services to Portugal, at home and abroad, as well as services in the expansion of Portuguese culture or for knowledge of Portugal, its history, and its values," according to the portal of the Portuguese honorary orders.