[1][2] His parents, Raúl Bernardo Manuel (Honwana) and Naly Jeremias Nhaca, belonged to the Ronga people from Moamba, a town about 55 km north-west of Maputo.
[2] In 1987, he was elected a member of the Executive Council of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
[6] He was also the executive director of Fundação para a Conservação da Biodiversidade (BIOFUND, Foundation for the Conservation of Biodiversity).
We Killed Mangy Dog is a collection of short stories set in the (Portuguese) colonial era at the turn of the 1960s and is reflective of the harsh life black Mozambicans lived under the Salazar regime.
"[9] Several of the stories are told from the point of view of children or alienated adolescents and most feature the rich mix of races, religions and ethnicities that would later preoccupy Mozambique's most internationally celebrated writer, Mia Couto.
[10][11] According to Patrick Chabal, "Honwana greatly influenced the post-colonial generation of younger prose writers and has rightly been regarded as stylistically accomplished.