In His Excellency, R.I.P. (“Sua Excelência, de Corpo Presente”) an African dictator lies in a coffin in an enormous hall. He is dead, but sees, hears and thinks. Stretched out, imprisoned in a body without life, but in possession of his intellectual faculties, all he can do to pass the time is recall his life experiences with many of those who come to pay their last respects, among them several relatives, the first lady (and his other wives and mistresses), his numerous children and state dignitaries. In remembering his life, the path that led him to being president and his many years as head of state, he reveals us the meanderings of political power, the nepotism that consumed him and the various abuses allowed to those who supported him. And since he is aware of everything that goes on around him, and it is very difficult for a dictator to stop dictating, His Excellency not only speculates on those present and their political interests, but also tries to guess their thoughts and machinations. For even when dead, he will not leave his succession in the hands of others, instead trying to meddle with the help of his one-eyed spy, who is as faithful to him in death as he was in life.

Luanda, 1995: On the run from the horrors of civil war, thirteen-year-old Himba attempts to survive as a street child. After being raped and hurt, a well-intentioned local resident accommodates her and her friend Kassule at a church-run project. But soon Himba decides: You have always to fight for your own well-being. Nearly 20 years later, the growing globalization presents a new challenge for the young Sofia: Can her little restaurant withstand the economic competition? As she uses the death of her business partner to secretly appropriate her share, her greed will cost her the close relationship with her brother: Deeply disappointed by the machinations of Sofia, Diego turns away from his beloved sister. In If the Past Had No Wings (“Se o passado não tivesse asas”) Pepetela presents two strong female characters in two interwoven storylines. But the violence of war and the brutality of the subsequent struggle for survival are not easily shaken off. On the way from street kid to businesswoman, during Luanda’s development from theatre of war to cosmopolitan business centre, the past has grown wings.

Heitor has always been shy, and when his latest girlfriend dumps him, he rents a run-down hut on the outskirts of Luanda to heal his broken heart. Listening to a particular radio programme, Heitor soon becomes addicted to the charming voice of its presenter Marisa. Through fate, they meet and fall in love. But Marisa is married… Featuring quirky and loveable characters, The Shy One and the Women (“O tímido e as mulheres “) is not only a love story but also an entertaining portrait of today’s Luanda.

Set in the heart of Africa at the beginning of the 17^th century, Pepetela’s novel In the South. The Sombreiro (“À Sul. O Sombreiro”) is full of adventure, political intrigues and magical elements. While the ruthless governor Cerveira founds the town of Benguela, the black native Carlos Rocha flees to the Savannah and stays with one of Africa’s fiercest warrior tribes to avoid a terrible fate.

The Highlands and the Steppes (“O Planalto e a Estepe “) tells a true story of great passion and suffering, scarred by a love nourished by hope and waiting. When Júlio is sent from Angola to Portugal to study medicine, he gets involved in clandestine communist cells. In Moscow, he falls in love with the Mongolian girl Sarangerel. But politics and tradition conspire against them, and Sarangerel is taken back to Mongolia. Will they ever meet again?

After this successful foray into crime fiction, Pepetela returns with the ambitious and powerful novel The Predators (“Os predadores”) 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 Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent (“Jaime Bunda, agente secreto”), 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 and the Death of the American (“Jaime Bunda e a morte do americano”). 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.

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 Kianda’s Desire (“O desejo de Kianda”) shows a post-colonial Angola worn down and devastated by four decades of colonial and civil war. The Generation of a Utopia (“Geração da utopia”) provides a unique vision of the author’s own generation, its dreams of independence, its fights and victories, despair and hope.