[ANTI-COLONIAL LITERARY JOURNAL FROM MOZAMBIQUE] Caliban. Nos. 1-4 in in three issues (all published)

Lourenço Marques (today Maputo): self-published, 1971-1972. Octavos (21.6 × 15.1 cm). Original staple-stitched pictorial self-wrappers; 32; [33-68; 69]-124 pp. with numerous, full-page author portraits. Slightly toned, else very good.

Complete run of the rare anti-colonial periodical, whose main editor was the Euro-Mozambican Rui Knopfli (1933-1997). A descendant of Portuguese immigrants and a declared opponent of colonialism, after his studies he worked as a journalist and literary and film critic in Lourenço Marques, now Maputo, and campaigned for Mozambique's independence from Portugal. After independence in 1975, however, he left the country and worked for the Portuguese embassy in Great Britain. After Mozambique's independence, a debate raged in the intellectual circles of the new nation as to whether the work of poets like Knopfli belonged in an emerging national canon, with most considering him to be Portuguese rather than Mozambican. (Cf. The Princeton Handbook of World Poetries, p. 7.)

Knopfli and his colleagues saw "Caliban" as a journal of decidedly African literature in European languages. Another initiator of the periodical was the Portuguese-born painter and poet Antonio Quadros Ferreira, who is listed in the issues under the pseudonym Joäo Pedro Grabato Dias. He is best known for his Op Art, which was influenced by Victor Vasarely. But he also attracted attention in Mozambique with his poetry. In 1975, soon after the end of the Mozambican War of Independence, the FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) government published a work of Revolutionary poetry purportedly written by a Frelimo guerrilla fighter named Mutimati Barnabé João who was killed in action, but it was later revealed that this was yet another pseudonym of Quadros.

The title "Caliban" comes from Shakespeare's character in The Tempest, held especially in the 1960's as a symbol of the oppressed native. Publication of the short-lived journal was ceased after issue no. 3/4 at the behest of the Portuguese police.

Contains texts by Herberto Helder, Jorge de Sena, António Ramos Rosa, José Craveirinha, Eugénio Lisboa, Luís Amaro, João Rui de Sousa, Sebastião Alba, Fernando Assis Pacheco, among others.

As of November 2024, OCLC lists seven copies in North America.