Mia Couto brings magic and wholeness to a world that is dissected, shattered, divided – a world that suffers from a profound loss of enchantment. This loss of enchantment, brought about in Europe around the sixteenth century imposed on African communities during colonization, upholds and believes first and foremost in the rational scientific paradigm. This paradigm anthropomorphizes the world and presents humans and human reason as capable of attaining objective truth and knowledge about the self, the world and the cosmos. It is a system that thinks itself capable of bringing about the development of the world and the human being, leading to human happiness, realization and overall progress. Within such a hierarchizing (and arrogant and self-indulgent) modus operandi, the object is gazed at by the human mind and incorporated into the self. As Senegalese writer and politician Léopold Senghor puts it when discussing what he terms the European personality vs. the African personality,

Like Senghor, Mia Couto writes against this European worldview by presenting the individual as always yearning to connect with the other (the human) or the otherness (the non-human, the transcendental) in order to exit the individual self – because to be closed in oneself hurts, and in fact prevents the self from fulfilling its ontological relational destiny, a destiny that demands a connection with the non-self, an entrance into a whole that is out there and of which the self is a part.