Mozambican writer Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa described Agualusa's article as an "insult to Mozambicans", accusing him of having made a hasty and "in-depth" analysis of Mozambique's reality.

For Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa, the recent article by the Luso-Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa entitled "An African Bolsonarist" in which, among other things, he connects the presidential candidate Venâncio Mondlane to evangelical churches and to the controversial former President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, is an attempt to assassinate Mondlane's character and to devalue all the candidate's work as a member of Parliament.

In a publication by DWThe Mozambican writer lamented the fact that Agualusa "talks about the country more outwardly than inwardly".

"What revolted me is not so much a foreign person analyzing the country where I live, there is no xenophobia here, but the fact that this same person, who has been here in Mozambique and who sometimes makes this country a dormitory, talks about the country more from the outside than from the inside, and often in hasty analyses," said the Mozambican writer.

Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa went on to say that "this is a country where we are in an electoral process, where the crises have been going on for a long time. "And suddenly you call [Venâncio Mondlane] a populist and again you call him a Bolsonaro, I mean, epithets that take it to the extreme at a time when 63% of Mozambique's population is under 35 years of age, and this unemployed population - with major problems of work, of finding their bearings in life - finds in someone [Mondlane] something that can bring about change."

"Agualusa makes an analysis that would be hasty and without knowing in depth the reality in which we live, that's what irritated me," he emphasized.

For the Mozambican writer, there is no doubt that Agualusa's analysis aims to "assassinate the character" of Venâncio Mondlane by marrying him to Jair Bolsonaro and evangelical churches.

"More than Mondlane's character assassination, it's an insult to the intelligence of all of us Mozambicans, to political analysts and everyone else who has spoken of Mondlane as someone from the opposition, who has done his job, has been in Parliament and has had brilliant and well-studied interventions at parliamentary level. [But] someone comes along and overturns everything that analysts, politologists, academics, sociologists have analyzed [in relation to] the situation in this country, and comes up with epithets. More than assassinating that person's character, this is insulting all of us Mozambicans who are aware of our reality," said Ba Ka Khosa.

Later on, Ungulani says: "Please don't step on our toes. Let us Mozambicans [sort it out] and we have [people] who are mature enough, for over 40 years, to have analyzed this reality."

(Photo DR)