A General Theory of Oblivion

FOREWORD

Ludovica Fernandes Mano died in Luanda, at the Sagrada Esperança clinic, in the early hours of 5 October 2010. She was eighty-five years old. Sabalu Estevão Capitango gave me copies of ten notebooks in which Ludo had been writing her diary, dating from the first years of the twenty-eight during which she had shut herself away. I also had access to the diaries that followed her release, as well as to a huge collection of photographs taken by the visual artist Sacramento Neto (Sakro) of Ludo’s texts and the charcoal pictures on the walls of her apartment. Ludo’s diaries, poems and reflections helped me to reconstruct the tragedies she lived through. They helped me, I believe, to understand her. In the pages that follow, I have made use of much of her first-hand accounts. What you will read is, however, fiction. Pure fiction.