Pepetela Angola

©Ekko von Schwichow

Pepetela, born in 1941 in the city of Benguela, is recognised as a leading novelist with a consummate ability to mesh personal and political elements within a historical context. He occupied a leading position in the fight against Portugal’s colonialism and was a member of the first government after the independence. Ever since he has published novels and stories about his country. Pepetela lives in Luanda, where he teaches Sociology at the university.

Pepetela’s career as a writer started during the war for independence, when he wrote his first novel, Mayombe, published in 1980, in which he describes the conflicts in Angola’s fight for liberation.

His novels are mainly set against the backdrop of important historical events during almost a century of Angolan history. An essential theme of his work is the greatness and strength of past cultures still existing in modern Angola.

The ironical, merciless portrait of the country’s capital Luanda in O desejo de Kianda (“Kianda’s Desire”) shows a post-colonial Angola worn down and devastated by four decades of colonial and civil war. Geração da utopia (“The Generation of a Utopia”) provides a unique vision of the author’s own generation, its dreams of independence, its fights and victories, despair and hope.

O desejo de Kianda, recently translated into Spanish, is perhaps the most clear-sighted and sober book by the Angolan author Pepetela to date. Pepetela, along with José Luandino, one of the best writers of the post-colonial generation. [...]

With a fine web of irony and imperceptibly seething anger, Pepetela succeeds in telling a wonderful tale of political corruption – to the surprise of the inhabitants of Luanda, and for no apparent reason, the buildings suddenly begin to collapse– which is also a chronicle of the naked truth about the constant deterioration of living conditions in Angola.

José María Ridao, EL PAÍS

In Jaime Bunda, agente secreto (“Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent”), the author has chosen the fat, unlucky trainee at Luanda’s secret police, as the protagonist of a crime story set in Luanda, where it is easier to find a Kalashnikov than an honest official. Jaime Bunda becomes a credible guide on an anything but touristy trail through the city of Luanda. He appears again in the following novel, Jaime Bunda e a morte do americano (“Jaime Bunda and the Death of the American”). Now he has to clear up the murder of an American engineer. Pepetela pokes fun at the Americans for their seemingly pathological anxiety of terror attacks as well as mocking the antiamericanism of the Angolans. The tensions within this country, which lives in constant political insecurity since its independence, are continuously present in Pepetela’s work.

After this successful foray into crime fiction, Pepetela returns with the ambitious and powerful novel Os predadores (“The Predators”) that attempts to get to the heart of Angola's tragic recent history. The novel ostensibly revolves around the character of Vladimiro Caposso, an unscrupulous and opportunistic businessman, charting his rise and fall over the last thirty years.

Going back to the last days of Portuguese colonial rule, we find Caposso aged 18, working in a colonist's grocer's store. When the Portuguese leave, he takes over the store and begins his rise to wealth and power first through the heady days of the transition to independence, then becoming a corrupt bureaucrat as Angola joins the Soviet bloc, and onwards as an entrepreneur into the unrestrained capitalism and social upheaval of the 1990s, the civil war ever simmering in the background.

The action stretches from tribal herdsmen's villages seemingly untouched by civilisation, through Luanda's decaying urban sprawl, to life on campus in the United States for an Angolan exchange student. Caposso is the link that binds these disparate worlds together, his actions impacting on the lives of every one of the characters.

Following the strongly-drawn characters from the shanty towns to the mansions of the nouveau-riche with an engrossing plot, passionately written and keen to explain, there is no more readable introduction to Angola and its recent past.

In O Planalto e a Estepe ("The Highlands and the Steppes"), Júlio grows up in a Portuguese family on the plains of Angola. His family is poor but honest, his childhood a time of untroubled friendship with the sons of the family's black servants. As a teenager, Júlio is taught that these relaxed relationships are undesirable in the Portuguese colony, which summons up his rebellious spirit. Sent to Portugal by his father to study medicine, Júlio prefers to frequent the clandestine communist cells that sprung up at the universities in Salazar's Portugal of the 1950s and 60s. Then he goes to Moscow to join the international communist revolution.

There he meets Sarangerel, a young Mongolian student, and they fall in love. In the beginning Sarangerel does not tell Júlio about her father's position in the Mongolian communist government. But a supposed friend tails them and reveals their secret relationship. Mongolia has only been modernised and revolutionised on the surface, and it is impossible for the daughter of the foreign minister to marry a non-Mongolian. “Friendship between the peoples” has its limits after all, and the collective comes before individual feelings and wishes. The fact that Sarangerel is carrying Júlio's child complicates matters even more. The two of them fight a desperate battle to stay together and bring up their child as a family. Neither her parents nor their political contacts are willing to help them. Soon Sarangerel is unexpectedly taken back to Mongolia and they lose contact. As hard as Júlio tries to get Sarangerel back, he runs up against firm walls of an iron will at every turn.

At the end of the 1980s the Iron Curtain falls. Júlio finds out that Sarangerel is the wife of the Mongolian ambassador in Cuba and travels there, finally meeting up with Sarangerel after so many years. She leaves her husband and goes with Júlio to Angola, where the two of them live a contented life together for several years before Júlio dies of cancer.

Pepetela tells a true story of great passion and suffering, scarred by the absence of a loved one over many years, a love nourished by hope and waiting. This love is also a story about an ideology that had a formative influence over world politics in the 20th century, but which never honoured the promises it made: friendship between the peoples and international solidarity.

Besides several other prizes Pepetela was awarded the Prémio Camões in 1997, the most important literary prize of the Portuguese speaking world and in 2002 the Prémio Nacional de Cultura e Artes of Angola.

For further information, please also visit:

www.pepetela.com.pt

Original editions and rights sold:

Novels (selection):

As aventuras de Ngunga, Lisbon: Edições 70 1977, 128 p., Dom Quixote 2002

Angola: UEA 1977 ● Brazil: Ática 1980 ● Germany: Der Kinderbuch Verlag 1981 ● Russia: Khudozhestvenaia 1977 ● Spain:Txalaparta 1997 ● Spain (Basque):Txalaparta 1966 ● Sweden: Afrikagrupperna i Sverige 1983 ● UK: Writers and Readers Publ. Coop. 1980 ● Uruguay: Livros del Artillero, 1986

Mayombe, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1980, 288 p.

Chile: LOM ● Germany: Volk und Welt 1983, issa 1985 ● Italy:Lavoro 1989 rights available ●

Japan: Ryokuchisha 1993 ● Spain: Txalaparta 1991 ● UK: Heinemann 1994

A revolta da casa dos ídolos (theatre), Lisbon: Edições 70, 1980, 157 p.

O cão e os Caluandas, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1985, 186 p.

Finland: Like 1991 ● Germany: issa 1986 ● Sweden: Tranan 2005

Yaka, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1985, 395 p.

Belgium: Éperonniers 1992 (french) ● Germany: Volk und Welt 1988 ● UK: Heinemann 1996

Geração da utopia, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1992, 316 p.

Brazil: Nova Fronteira 2000 ● Italy: Diabasis 2009 ● Spain: Txalaparta 2003

O desejo de Kianda, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1995, 119 p.

Finland: Helsinki University Press 2001 ● France: Actes Sud 2002 ● Greece: Kritiki 2001 ●

Italy: Lavoro 2010 ● Netherlands: De Geus ● Spain: Alianza 1999 ● UK:Heinemann 2002

Parábola do cágado velho, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1996, 183 p.

Brazil: Nova Fronteira 2005 ● Italy: Besa 2000 ● Norway: Cappelen 2003 ● Spain: Alianza 1999 ● Sweden: Tranan 2000

A gloriosa família, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1997, 406 p.

Brazil: Nova Fronteira 1999 ● Netherlands: Meulenhoff 2001 ● Norway: Cappelen 2006 ● Spain: Texto Editores 2006

A montanha das águas lilás, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2000, 164 p.

Italy: Sette Città

Jaime Bunda, agente secreto

Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2001, 312 p.

Brazil: Record 2003 ● Denmark: Hjulet 2002 ● France: Buchet Chastel 2005 ● German: Unionsverlag 2004, pb 2006 ● Italy: Edizioni E/O 2006 ● Poland: Claroscuro ● Sweden: Tranan ● UK: Aflame 2006

Jaime Bunda e a morte do americano, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2003, 277 p.

France: Buchet Chastel

Predadores, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2005, 382 p.

Bulgaria: Five Plus 2009 ● Netherlands: De Geus 2008

O Terrorista de Berkeley, Califórnia, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2007, 115 p.

O quase fim do mundo, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2008, 384 p.

Sweden: Tranan

O Planalto e a Estepe, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2009, 190 p.

Brazil: Leya