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Pepetela Angola
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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:
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,
Edition südliches Afrika 1985 ● Japan:
Ryokuchisha 1993 ● Spain: Txalaparta 1990 ● 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:
Edition südliches Afrika 1986 ● Sweden:
Tranan 2005
Yaka, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1985,
395 p.
France: Éperonniers 1992 ● Germany:
Volk und Welt 1991 ● UK: Heinemann 1996
Geração da utopia,
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 1992, 316 p.
Brazil: Nova Fronteira 2000 ● 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 ●
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 2002 ● Spain: Alianza 1998 ● 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
Jaime Bunda, agente secreto
Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2001, 312 p.
Brazil: Record 2003 ● Denmark: Hjulet 2002 ● France: Buchet Chastel 2005 ● Italy: Edizioni E/O 2006 ● Sweden: Tranan ● Switzerland: Unionsverlag 2004, pb 2006 (German) ● UK: Aflame 2006
Jaime Bunda e a
morte do americano, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2003, 277 p.
France:
Buchet Chastel
Predadores, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2005,
380 p.
Bulgaria: Five Plus 2009 ● Netherlands: De Geus
O
Terrorista de Berkeley, Califórnia, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2007, 115 p.
O quase fim do mundo, Lisbon: Dom
Quixote 2008, 384 p.
O Planalto e a Estepe, Lisbon: Dom Quixote 2009, 190 p.
Brazil:
Leya