Long after most of the French and British colonies in Africa had gained independence, Portugal still clung to the scattered territories it nominally controlled. Guinea-Bissau was the first to break free, in 1973, and after the Portuguese Carnation Revolution of 1974 that finally saw the overthrow of the fascist government in Portugal, the other colonies also gained independence. Stability was more elusive. The insurgencies that had started in 1961 were succeeded by the devastating civil wars that persisted in Mozambique until 1992 and in Angola, with a brief hiatus after 1991, until 2002. Not surprisingly, under these conditions, these countries in recent decades have had only limited literary production. Much of what has been translated into English focuses on the struggle against colonial rule, as well as the enormous toll in these countries’ long periods of political instability.
ANGOLA
With its use of the local Kimbundu creole and realistic depiction of contemporary Angolan life under Portuguese rule,
José Luandino Vieira’s (b. 1935) collection of stories
Luuanda (1964, English 1980) was considered subversive enough for the book to be banned until 1974. The more overtly political
The Real Life of Domingos Xavier predates it but was first published in French only in 1971, before becoming available in Portuguese (1974) and then English (1978). Both books offer a good impression of the conditions of and opposition to Portuguese colonialism. In
The Loves of João Vêncio (1979, English 1991), a prisoner awaiting his sentence recounts his life and loves. Even though only his voice is presented, João Vêncio is responsive to the reactions and questions of the other prisoner to whom he is telling his story, thus enlivening the text.
The few novels by Pepetela (b. 1941) that have been translated give the best insight into Angolan history and conditions, ranging from Mayombe (1980, English 1983), immersed in the Angolan guerrilla war, to the sweeping Yaka (1984, English 1996), a novel spanning the colonial period from 1890 to 1975 and using both African and European mythology. In The Return of the Water Spirit (1995, English 2002), a “Luanda Syndrome” strikes the capital city, with buildings on a central square collapsing in an allegory of corruption. The novel is a vivid indictment of postcolonial Angola. Pepetela also offers an amusing contemporary local spin on the police procedural in Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent (2001, English 2007), one of the few African thrillers. With its good-natured but far from heroic protagonist, Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent is the most enjoyable and current of Pepetela’s works.
Younger authors José Eduardo Agualusa (b. 1960) and Ondjaki (b. 1977) are the leading voices of the generation emerging after the end of Portuguese colonial rule, and much of their fiction depicts the struggle for national stability and identity in the newly independent nation and southern Africa generally.
• Uanhenga Xitu’s (1924–2014) The World of “Mestre” Tamoda (1974, English 1988) takes place before the civil war dominated local life and is an amusing clash of colonial education and traditional suspicion with an appealingly pompous protagonist in Tamoda.
• Manuel Rui’s (b. 1941) Yes, Comrade! (1977, English 1993) is another interesting collection of stories about the revolutionary period.
Ondjaki’s novels about childhood in Luanda near the end of the civil war, Good Morning Comrades (2001, English 2008) and Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret (2008, English 2014), as well as the slightly overwrought village fantasy, The Whistler (2002, English 2008), with its almost too colorful cast of characters, display a light, playful touch of an author just beginning to mature. In The Whistler, a traveling salesman and a stranger with an extraordinary ability to whistle come to a sleepy town, shaking and waking things up. A charming lyrical fantasy, it is—with the epigraphs opening its chapters from authors ranging from Jorge Luis Borges and Pepetela to Friedrich Hölderlin and Henri Michaux—also a text in which Ondjaki’s many ambitions sometimes get the better of him.
Agualusa is perhaps the most pan-Lusophone of authors. He is an Angolan-born writer living also in Portugal and Brazil, and his early novel
Creole (1997, English 2002) covers at least part of all those worlds, based on the nineteenth-century slave trade reaching from Angola to Brazil.
The Book of Chameleons (2004, English 2006) is narrated by a gecko who lives in the house of a “seller of pasts” (which is also the original Portuguese title,
O Vendedor de Passados), creating entirely new identities for people in a world where many are in need of such personal re-creation. On a much larger scale,
My Father’s Wives (2007, English 2008) reaches from Angola across southern Africa to Mozambique in the story of a musician who had many women in his life. Much of the novel involves the story of the filmmaker Laurentina, the youngest of the many daughters of the famed musician Faustino Manso, as she travels to meet her relations, but her story is nested in Agualusa’s own story of traveling with another filmmaker, Karen Boswall, collecting material for a documentary film. It is a thoroughly engaging novel full of invention and lies, despite its sometimes bewildering shifting narrative voices.
MOZAMBIQUE
Since the end of the civil war in Mozambique, Mia Couto (b. 1955) has established himself as a major author with several works of fiction that combine linguistic and other elements of magical realism, African folklore and mythology, and European literary traditions. In the haunting Sleepwalking Land (1992, English 2006), a boy and an old man take shelter in a burned-out bus and find the notebooks of one of the dead passengers, whose stories of his life then meld with those of the boy and the old man. Under the Frangipani (1996, English 2001) is an exotic variation on a murder investigation with too many willing suspects, with the form of police procedural becoming completely warped in Couto’s fantastical presentation. The Last Flight of the Flamingo (2000, English 2004) has an even more far-fetched premise, an investigation into the bewildering phenomenon of UN soldiers who are spontaneously exploding, making for a surprisingly effective picture of contemporary Mozambican conditions and the role of outside agents, including those from the UN and NGOs, who have replaced the colonial masters.
KEEP IN MIND
• Luís Bernardo Honwana’s (b. 1942) collection of straightforward stories We Killed Mangy Dog (1964, English 1969) gives a good sense of Mozambique under Portuguese rule.
Not much fiction from Cape Verde is available in translation, even by the country’s leading author, Germano Almeida (b. 1945). His novel The Last Will and Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo (1989, English 2004) nonetheless provides both local color and an appealing story, told almost completely in the modern European tradition. Only with his death do the details of Napumoceno da Silva Araújo’s life emerge, and it turns out there was more to him than was commonly known, surprises that Almeida relates in an engaging fashion.