Introduction

Best known as Tony Tcheka, António Soares Lopes Júnior was born in 1951 in Bissau, Portuguese Guinea, in present-day Guinea-Bissau. His professional life in journalism and broadcasting has seen him work in Guinea-Bissau and Europe, and he currently resides in Portugal. His media work played a role in Guinea-Bissauan postcolonial nation-building, most notably as the director of the Rádio Nacional da Guiné-Bissau (National Radio of Guinea-Bissau), then the editor in chief of the newspaper Jornal Nô Pintcha where he also inaugurated the literary and cultural supplement, Bantabá. He also worked as a correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corporation, Voice of America, and the Serbian news agency, Tanjug. He went on to work with the Agência Noticiosa Portuguesa (Portuguese News Agency) (later known as Lusa), the Portuguese daily Público (Public), the Portuguese state-held media network Rádio e Televisão Portuguesa (Portuguese Radio and Television) and TSF news radio in Portugal.

Tcheka has been a central literary figure in postcolonial Guinea-Bissauan literature, specifically poetry, with his work traversing the years prior to independence up to the present and appearing in several anthologies. The most important of these is undoubtedly, the 1990 volume, Antologia Poética da Guiné-Bissau (Poetic Anthology of Guinea-Bissau). Of equal note were the anthologies published internationally such as Anthologies Littéraire de l’Afrique l’Ouest (Literary Anthology of West Africa) published in France, No Ritmo dos Tantãs (To the Beat of Drums) published in Brazil, Na Liberdade (In Liberty) published in Portugal, and Anna released in Germany.

He has written and published two of his own collections of poetry, beginning with Noites de insônia na terra adormecida (Nights of Insomnia in a Land Asleep), published in 1996, but largely written prior to 1987. This particular collection, featuring poems in Portuguese and Guinea-Bissauan Creole, traverses an important span of 15–20 years of works marked by decolonization's illusory promises of a new world and “new day” and followed by the disenchantment and exhaustion of a world that remains unchanged as empire reinvented itself.

His second and most recent collection, Guiné—sabura que dói (Guinea—Painful Pleasure, 2008), was published over 20 years after he completed Nights of Insomnia in a Land Asleep.