The obó king: memory and myth in Fernando de Macedo’s San Tomean dramaturgy

Abstract

This study intends to analyze a representative text from African Portuguese­-written today’s dramaturgy: O rei do obó (1999), by the playwright Fernan­do Macedo, from São Tomé and Príncipe. The memories that underlie the founding narratives become often in tales, legends, fables and myths, whose stories recount historical facts of the archipelago and discuss traditional values of people from different backgrounds who live there. These stories reaffirm the collective memory, whose cultural heritage formed by regional particularities and the social diversity observed in literature from oral tra­dition, interconnects references sociocultural, historical and geographical.