Antonio Rui de Noronha

Antonio Rui de Noronha, was born in Maputo, Mozambique in 1909. Son of Indian and African parents, Rui de Noronha lived a great deal of his life facing racial prejudice.
He began his literary activities writing for the weekly newspaper 'O Brado Africano', when was only 17 years old.
Later in 1932, he became a member of the directory staff, writing and editing chronicles, as well as maintaining a regular column called ‘Ao Mata-Bicho’, which had a light and humorous tone. His journalistic work makes a total of only 34 texts. One of the main reasons for a such time as a journalist seems to be the deterioration of his health conditions in 1935. He left to Nampula and only returned to Maputo in 1939.

A poet of transition, he lived at a time where Mozambicans writers didn’t have the opportunity to wake their conscience to poetical messages of social content. Writers were limited by cultural repression, where the use of the real Africa as bedding/subject-key was immediately suppressed by the daily exercise of the Censorship. The literary work of Rui de Noronha will stay marked as the first expressive signal of a new phase of the Mozambican poetry, which later came to reach a true separation with the past.

It is crucial, thus, to call the attention to the importance this poet, who came to precede, by more than ten years, the definitive start of typically unique Mozambican poetry.

.Rui de Noronha's great dream to publish his book of poetry (said to be titled New Moon ) never materialized while he was alive. It would be, posthumously, when a group of friends published, in 1943, the collection, Sonetos, partially composed from his sonnets that had been published in the local press.

Many of its poems that were published in the press, however, remain unknown or uncollected, as is the case of those published in “O Brado Africano”, in the 1930’s.