He writes under the name Pepetela. Much of his writing deals with Angola's political history in the 20th century.
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His most recent works include Predadores , a scathing critique of Angola's ruling classes, O Quase Fim do Mundo , a post-apocalyptic allegory, and O Planalto e a Estepe , a look at Angola's history and connections with other former communist nations. The author received this nom de guerre during his time as an MPLA combatant. Pepetela was born in Benguela, Portuguese Angola , to white Angolan parents.
His mother's family had been in Angola for five generations, whereas his father was born in Angola to Portuguese parents and spent much of his childhood in mainland Portugal. He has claimed that being raised in Benguela gave him more opportunities to befriend people of other races, because Benguela was a much more mixed city than many others in Angola were during the colonial era.
He also claims that he began to develop a class consciousness during his school days, noticing the differences between his own lifestyle and the lives of friends who lived in a nearby slum area.
In an interview with Michel Laban, he claims that his upbringing also influenced his political views. He had an uncle who was a journalist and writer and who exposed him to many important leftist thinkers. His father also had a considerable library that allowed the young Pepetela to learn more about the French Revolution, something that influenced him profoundly. In Lubango, Pepetela claimed that he became more aware of the problems of race in Angola, as Lubango was a much more segregated community than Benguela. In Lubango he was influenced by a leftist priest, Padre Noronha, who taught him about the Cuban Revolution and kept him abreast of current events.
After two years of study he decided that engineering would not fulfill his interests, and he tried to enter the History course at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. However, with the start of the Portuguese Colonial War home in Angola, he was summoned to serve in the Portuguese Armed Forces and decided to flee Portugal.
This Center became the focus of the young Pepetela's work for the next decade. The novel was written during his time in Algiers and deals with Angolan culture, using the metaphor of traditional masks of the Chokwe people to expose different dichotomies present in Angolan culture.
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His novel displays the knowledge of indigenous Angolan cultures that Pepetela gained during his time on the Eastern Front of the war for independence. The author had written the novel as an exercise for himself and several of his close friends to read; nevertheless, the novel was published in , during Pepetela's tenure in the Angolan government. In , Pepetela released his first published novel.
This work was As Aventuras de Ngunga , a novel that he intended for a small student audience. The novel introduces the reader, through the eyes of Ngunga, to the customs, geography, and psychology of Angola.
Pepetela also used this work to create a dialogue between Angolan tradition and his revolutionary ideology, exploring which traditions should be nurtured, and which should be altered. The novel was written and published while Pepetela was fighting the colonial government on the Eastern Front in Angola. The author was a part of the government for seven years, submitting his resignation in to dedicate more time to his writing. Pepetela was part of the governing board of the Angolan Writers' Union throughout this period as well.
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Pepetela's plays written during his government tenure also reflect the themes in As Aventuras de Ngunga. The first of the plays, A Corda , was the first full-length dramatic work to be published in post-independence Angola. It is a play that, in the words of Ana Mafalda Leite, is "didactic and more than a little ideological, making it of limited literary interest". One side includes the Americans and their Angolan clients, while the other side consists of five guerilla fighters of various ethnicities representing the MPLA. As mentioned above, Pepetela published several novels during his time as a government minister.
Of these Mayombe is among the best known. The novel functions on two levels, one in which the characters' thoughts about the nature of the struggle for independence are explored, and another that narrates the "action and incidents" experienced by the nationalist fighters. Ana Mafalda Leite considers the novel to be both critical and heroic, both attempting to highlight the ethnic diversity supposedly celebrated by the MPLA and also illustrating the tribal divisions present in Angolan society, which would lead to the eventual civil war that tore the nation apart in the years from independence until Leite writes that "the theme of war assumes an heroic and epic dimension since it is a conflict which defines the foundation of the 'fatherland'".
After leaving the government at the end of , Pepetela began to focus exclusively on his writing, beginning work on his most ambitious novel to date, Yaka. Yaka , first published in , is a sweeping historical novel that examines the lives of a family of Portuguese settlers who came to Benguela in the 19th century. A clear desire to research his own origins can be seen in Pepetela's choice to write Yaka.
Pepetela himself, as mentioned earlier in this entry, is a descendant of Portuguese settlers in Benguela. Where the first novel focuses on masks, Yaka uses a traditional wooden statue utilized by the yakas, social organizations dedicated to the prosecution of war, to structure the narrative. Ana Mafalda Leite writes, " Yaka symbolises at once the consciousness of traditional values and 'the anticipated spirit of nationality' of the new country".
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The novel is notable for using the story of a German shepherd's wanderings through Luanda to structure it, and for containing a variety of narrative voices. The novel juxtaposes the princess Lueji, an important figure in 17th-century Angolan history, with a young ballerina who is dancing the role of Lueji in a contemporary piece. In the words of Ana Mafalda Leite, "The author writes chronologically of the two women, whose lives eventually begin to merge in the novel.
In the s, Pepetela's writing continued to exhibit interest in Angola's history, but also began to examine the political situation in the country with a greater sense of irony and criticism. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Os Predadores by Vitor Matos. Os Predadores by Vitor Matos. Paperback , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
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