Mia Couto: ‘I am white and African. I like to unite contradictory worlds’

The novelist discusses his hopes for conservation after the death of Cecil the lion, and his memories of Mozambique’s bloody civil war

Such is the power of Mia Couto’s fiction that, after reading his chilling novel Confession of the Lioness, sculpted lions seem to be everywhere in Rome, where I meet him – from the crouching beast lapping at Bernini’s fountain in the Piazza Navona, to the stone heads guarding the Sant’Angelo bridge. Yet for Couto, a Mozambican novelist and environmental biologist who has recently finished a writer’s residency outside the city, “seeing a lion in the bush walking is the only time you really see a lion – the full dimensions of the animal. The way they face you is hypnotic.”

We met before Cecil the lion’s death in Zimbabwe at the hands of a Minnesota dentist sparked global protests. From his home in the Mozambican capital, Maputo, Couto later told me that he hoped the case would spur conservation. Lions are “colonial icons of the ‘real’ Africa”, he says. “But many lesser-known species, entire habitats and ecosystems are vanishing. It’s an easy stereotype to blame indigenous poachers. But this case, of a North American hunter using a bow and arrow, reveals something very different.”

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