Abstract

This article revisits the ethical and political challenges of postcolonial freedom in Lusophone Africa through a dialogue between Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of bad faith and Kwame Anthony Appiah's notion of cosmopolitanism. While much postcolonial scholarship has emphasized the structural constraints inherited from colonialism, this essay argues that the difficulty of 'accepting freedom' after independence can also be understood as an ethical problem concerning the responsibility of political actors and societies to assume the openness and uncertainty inherent in freedom. The argument is developed through a reading of Luís Bernardo Honwana's short story 'Nós Matámos o Cão-Tinhoso' ['We Killed Mangy-Dog'], which is interpreted as a literary microcosm of late colonial Mozambican society and of the moral ambiguities embedded in processes of liberation. By examining how identities and moral expectations are negotiated within the story, the article suggests that the postcolonial predicament cannot be fully grasped without recognizing both the historical legacies of colonial domination and the existential responsibility of subjects to refuse the security of fixed roles and totalizing political narratives.

Elísio Macamo. "Accepting Freedom: Bad Faith and Anti-Colonial Resistance in Portuguese-Speaking African Countries." Portuguese Studies 42, no. 1 (2026): 9-26.