Da Silva was born in Laurenço Marques (today Maputo) to a Portuguese father and a Ronga [de] mother.[2] In his most popular work, Dos Meninos da Malanga, he detailed memories of living as a black teenager in the high-crime suburbs of Maputo.[3]
As a student, da Silva followed the ideals of the Núcleo de Estudantes Secundários Africanos de Moçambique, a Mozambican nationalist movement founded by Eduardo Mondlane in 1949, although he never joined it.[4] He served in the Portuguese Army from 1965 to 1968 in Nampula. He began working for the newspaper Notícias and Tempo. He founded organizations such as Tchova Xi Ta Duma, a theatre troupe where he was a director and an actor, as well as the Associação dos Escritores Moçambicanos [pt].[5] In the 1990s, he became a professor at Maputo University. In 2003, he published a book detailing the contributions of Ronga, his native language, to the speaking of Portuguese in Mozambique.[6] He defended a thesis at the University of Porto in 2009 titled Do lexico à possibilidade de campos isotópicos literários.[7]
Calane da Silva died of COVID-19 in Maputo on 29 January 2021, at the age of 75, during the COVID-19 pandemic in Mozambique.[8]
