Pepetela and the MPLA

Angola’s most acclaimed author, Pepetela (b. 1941), has been publishing fiction for over half a century. His work bears witness to the birth and monumental transformations of one of Africa’s most resource-rich nations. A former guerrilla and member of the ruling MPLA (the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), Pepetela writes in response to the anti-colonial struggle, national independence, a decades-long civil war, a Marxist-Leninist experiment and Angola’s acquiescence to the trends of globalization. In this wide-ranging study, Phillip Rothwell interrogates Pepetela’s symbiotic and fraught relationship with the MPLA, the author’s prescient critiques of the changes (and continuities) in Angola’s political direction, and his ambiguous compromises made as a writer and militant, faced with the unpalatable choices of the Revolution and the male chauvinism of the Marxist New Man.

Phillip Rothwell is King John II Professor of Portuguese at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Peter’s College.