Conclusion

Summary

Published in 1989, Jornada de África [Expedition to Africa] is the first novel by Manuel Alegre, who had until then been one of Portugal’s most prolific and best known lyric poets. Manuel Alegre has since published another three narrative works, all well received by the critics, at the same time as he continues to produce poetry, so that he is now as much a well-established novelist as an acclaimed poet.

Poetry plays a major role in the composition of Jornada de África, with many of the novel’s chapters directly quoting lines by Portuguese and other European, as well as African, poets; thus, in the first chapter, for example, there appear passages of poems by the Portuguese Herberto Hélder and by the Angolan Agostinho Neto (who, like Manuel Alegre himself, was both a poet and a politician in his country). Of the three epigraphs placed at the opening of the novel, though, only one is taken from a poet, from Rilke’s prose-poem Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke [The lay of love and death of Lieutenant Christoph Rilke] quoted in a Portuguese version; cited are the opening lines, referring to endless riding day and night and to a heavy heart. The other two epigraphs are taken from prose works, one by René Char, alluding to a war in which political considerations are at stake; and the last one from Jerónimo de Mendonça’s homonymous chronicle Jornada de África, subtitled ‘Depoimentos de contemporâneos de D. Sebastião sobre este mesmo rei e sua jornada de África’ [Statements by King Sebastian’s contemporaries about this king and his expedition to Africa]. The African expedition in question was that undertaken by King Sebastian in 1578 against the Moors at Alcácer-Quibir (now Ksar-al-Kebir, in Morocco), where the visionary young king lost his life, leaving the way open for Spain’s temporary rule of Portugal.

It is from this chronicle that the novel derives its most immediate inspiration: Manuel Alegre’s twentieth-century Jornada de África takes not only its title but also the names of its principal characters from Jerónimo de Mendonça’s early seventeenth-century work. The extensive quotation that appears as the novel’s third epigraph mentions the internal opposition to King Sebastian’s determination to engage the Moors in battle at Alcácer-Quibir, which many of his noblemen saw as ‘jeopardising the honour and the reputation of the Kingdom’ and endangering its survival.