One Country, One Book — Angola

Mayombe by Pepetela (1980)

I’ve been thinking about one of my original goals in choosing books — to find books that aren’t written for a Western audience by an “explainer”. Yet I keep finding books that explore various aspects of the history and psychology of the author’s country. Perhaps any book set in a specific country at a specific time will be an explanation of sorts for how things were and why they were.

Pepetela is the pen name of Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos, from his time in the MPLA, when he lived the events of this novel. He is a white Angolan who was raised in Angola, began college in Portugal, but left the country after being required to serve in the Portuguese military at the start of the Portuguese Colonial War. After continued study abroad, he became involved with the MPLA, was part of the post-independence government, and currently continues to write and to teach sociology.

It’s cliche to talk about how literature can be more than a story and contain truth and insight and greatness. It’s even more cliche to admit it’s a cliche and then to say, but this book really actually does that. I struggled with how to praise Mayombe. What it contains is a lot. The prose isn’t great and the first person sections can make the narrative clunky; I struggled to engage with the story at first. But I think that Pepetela isn’t merely writing as a novelist, but a recorder of years of first-hand observation, adding embellishments and a framework, changing events and combining speeches, to turn experience into fiction.

A group of guerrillas in Mayombe are fighting for liberation against the Portuguese. Ostensibly, they are each committed to putting the needs of the movement ahead of their own rivalries, both as soldiers and as socialists, but each of them has his own motives for joining the MPLA, and each has his own tribal loyalties. They are ready to do dangerous things, and sometimes they get the opportunity, but they spend a lot of time waiting — waiting for reconnaissance information, waiting for the right conditions, waiting while people go to and from the base. And while they wait, they have a lot of time to argue and worry and try to convince each other and themselves of their loyalty and courage.

In a way, the reader does the same thing. There’s nothing to do but think and overthink with and about the guerrillas as they wait. They barely talk about the liberation to come, but we know that the subtext is that one small group made up of many tribes and many ideologies is holding things together with a precarious balance, and soon even more tribes and individuals would have to form a new government.

Something that’s been surprising so far is how many countries have colonization as a concern in their literature, how many wars for independence have been referenced.