On August 16, 1972, a twenty-year-old Mozambican migrant, Mustafah Dhada, got off the train at Paddington to chase a dream, become a voice-digger for the subaltern.
Forty years later he accomplished just that! Among the 111 scholarly texts, twenty-three sculptures and 2500 sketches he produced, two works stand out: The Portuguese Massacre of Wiriyamu in Colonial Mozambique is one. The American Historical Association, the world’s largest body of 12,000 historians awarded it the Martin A. Klein prize as the most distinguished work on African history for its “meticulously researched, multi-layered… definitive social history of Wiriyamu.”
Dr. Dhada’s bronze sculpture, Eve’s Awakening, garnered third prize at the 59th National Juried Art Exhibition in New York.