Pedro
Rosa Mendes

Pedro Rosa Mendes was born in Cernache do Bonjadrin, Portugal, in 1968. After studying law, he worked as a journalist, among other things for the newspaper Público. He became well-known through his reporting on the wars in Zaire, Rwanda, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, for which he was awarded the Feature-of-the-Year-Prize on two occasions. Pedro Rosa Mendes became a writer in the course of an unusual and literally incredible journey; a journey that led him though Southern Africa to Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. In three and a half months, he covered more than ten thousand kilometres in this area forgotten by the international community. In one of the poorest areas of the world, in which war and misery dominate everyday life, Pedro Rosa Mendes discovered some incredible characters: anonymous heroes and people living on the threshold between life and death. His journey threatened to become an apocalyptic road “to the end of mankind”, but instead, he often encountered an unbroken will to live. The outcome of this journey was “Baía dos Tigres”, (1999; Bay of Tigers, 2003), which has received numerous awards.

“This is a book about simple things: peace, fear and the vitality of death. In June 1997, I landed in Luanda, intending to reach Quelimane overland (…) These pages are an atlas, in which it is possible to trace the journey while reading: the affective cartography of a route whose stages bear people’s faces, where space and time are the coordinates most given to lying. Everyone had warned me: war was still raging in these parts. I lost companions on the way. And my return was uncertain”. (from: Bay of Tigers)