Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos (born 1941) is an Angolan writer who writes stories. He is known by the name Pepetela.

Pepetela was born in Benguela, Portuguese Angola, and was a Portuguese Angolan. He fought with the MPLA during Angola's independence war. Many of his books focus on Angola's political history in the 20th century. For example, Mayombe tells the story of MPLA fighters in Cabinda. Yaka follows a white settler family in Benguela. A Geração da Utopia shows how young Angolans felt after independence.

Pepetela has also written about Angola's earlier history in A Gloriosa Família and Lueji. He has written satirical books in his Jaime Bunda series. His recent works include Predadores, which criticizes Angola's leaders; O Quase Fim do Mundo, a story about a post-apocalyptic world; and O Planalto e a Estepe, which explores Angola's history and ties to other communist countries. In 1997, Pepetela won the Camões Prize, the highest award for literature in Portuguese-speaking countries.

The name "Pepetela" comes from the Kimbundu word for "eyelash," which matches his Portuguese surname "Pestana." He received this pen name during his time as an MPLA soldier.

Early life

Pepetela was born in Benguela, Portuguese Angola, to parents who were also from Portuguese Angola. His mother’s family had been an important family involved in business and the military in the Moçâmedes (present-day Namibe) region of Angola. His great grandfather had been a major in the Portuguese Army. His mother’s family had lived in Angola for five generations, while his father was born in Angola to Portuguese parents and spent much of his childhood in mainland Portugal. Pepetela grew up in a middle-class family in Benguela, where he attended a school that brought together students from all races and social classes. He said that growing up in Benguela gave him more chances to befriend people of other races because Benguela was a more mixed city than many other places in Angola during the colonial era. He also said that he began to notice differences between his lifestyle and the lives of friends who lived in a nearby slum area during his school years. In an interview with Michel Laban, he said his upbringing influenced his political views. He had an uncle who was a journalist and writer and who introduced him to important leftist thinkers. His father had a large library that allowed young Pepetela to learn about the French Revolution, which had a strong effect on him.

When Pepetela was 14 years old, he moved to Lubango (then called Sá da Bandeira) to continue his education because there was no high school in Benguela at the time. In Lubango, he said he became more aware of racial issues in Angola because Lubango was a more segregated community than Benguela. In Lubango, he was influenced by a leftist priest named Padre Noronha, who taught him about the Cuban Revolution and shared news about current events. After finishing school in Lubango, Pepetela traveled to Portugal to study engineering. While studying at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, he became friends with other Angolan students who were part of the Casa dos Estudantes do Império, a group for Portuguese students from overseas territories. After two years of study, he decided engineering was not the right path for him and tried to join the History program at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon. However, when the Portuguese Colonial War began in Angola, he was called to serve in the Portuguese Armed Forces and chose to leave Portugal instead.

Frontline experience, early novels, and plays

Pepetela first went to Paris. In 1963, he earned a scholarship to study Sociology in Algiers, where Henrique Abranches from the MPLA approached him to help create a Center for Angolan Studies. This Center became the focus of Pepetela's work for the next decade. Until 1969, Pepetela, Abranches, and other MPLA members worked together to document Angolan culture and society and publicize the MPLA's struggle. In 1969, the Center moved from Algiers to Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo. After the move, Pepetela became more active in the MPLA's armed resistance against the Portuguese in the Cabinda region of Angola and on the Eastern Front. This time in the late 1960s and early 1970s inspired one of Pepetela's most recognized works, the war narrative Mayombe. During this time, Pepetela also wrote his first novel, Muana Puó. 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. His novel displays the knowledge of indigenous Angolan cultures that Pepetela gained during his time on the Eastern Front of the war for independence. Muana Puó was never intended to be published, a detail Pepetela made clear in an interview with Michel Laban. 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 1978, during Pepetela's tenure in the Angolan government.

In 1972, Pepetela published his first novel, As Aventuras de Ngunga, a work he intended for a small student audience. In this text, Pepetela explores the growth of Ngunga, a young MPLA guerrilla, using an epic and didactic tone. 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. As Aventuras… is a novel that exemplifies Pepetela's early career, exhibiting a deep love for Angola, a desire to explore Angola's history and culture, a revolutionary spirit, and a didactic tone. The novel was written and published while Pepetela was fighting the colonial government on the Eastern Front in Angola. By contrast, Muana Puó and Mayombe were also written while he was serving on the front, but were not published until after Angolan independence.

When Angola gained independence in 1975, Pepetela became the Vice Minister of Education in President Agostinho Neto's government. The author was a part of the government for seven years, submitting his resignation in 1982 to dedicate more time to his writing. During his tenure as Vice Minister, he published several novels, including Mayombe, a novel that had been written when he was an active MPLA combatant in the early 1970s. The publication of Mayombe only came about with the explicit support of President Agostinho Neto. During this period, Pepetela diversified his writing, also writing two plays that focused on Angolan history and on revolutionary politics. Pepetela was part of the governing board of the Angolan Writers' Union throughout this period as well.

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." The play is in one act and features two sides playing a game of tug-of-war over Angola. One side includes the Americans and their Angolan clients, while the other side consists of five guerrilla fighters of various ethnicities representing the MPLA. The next play that Pepetela wrote, A Revolta da Casa dos Ídolos, takes place in the past, drawing parallels between the Kongo kingdom in the 16th century and Angola's struggle for independence. Leite writes, "The play remains didactic but it is innovative both in terms of its use of historical material, and especially in the complexities of the actual mise en scène."

Exit from the government, work published in the 1980s

As mentioned earlier, Pepetela wrote several novels while working as a government minister. One of these, Mayombe, is the most well-known. The book describes Pepetela’s experiences as a fighter for the MPLA during Angola’s fight for independence. The story has two parts: one that shows characters thinking about the meaning of the independence struggle, and another that tells about the events and actions faced by the fighters. Ana Mafalda Leite says the novel shows both the strengths and the challenges of the MPLA’s goals. She explains that the book highlights the many different groups in Angola, which the MPLA claimed to support, but also shows the conflicts between groups that later caused a long civil war from independence until 2002. Leite writes that the war in the story is described as both brave and important because it helped shape the nation.

After leaving the government in 1982, Pepetela focused only on writing. His most important novel, Yaka, was published in 1984. The book is a large story about a family of Portuguese settlers who moved to Benguela in the 19th century. Pepetela chose to write Yaka because he wanted to learn more about his own background. He is a descendant of Portuguese settlers in Benguela. Like Muana Puó, Yaka includes traditional Angolan spiritual objects in its storytelling. While Muana Puó uses masks, Yaka uses a wooden statue used by the yakas, groups that organize for war, to structure the story. Leite says Yaka shows both respect for old traditions and the new idea of a united Angola. Yaka won the 1986 Angolan national prize for literature.

Pepetela kept writing during the 1980s, publishing O cão e os Caluandas a year after Yaka. The novel looks at life in Luanda and how it changed after independence. It uses the journey of a German shepherd through the city to tell the story and includes many different characters’ voices. In 1989, he published Lueji, a book similar to A Revolta na Casa dos Ídolos because it compares Angola’s past to its present. The story follows Princess Lueji, a key figure in 17th-century Angola, and a young ballerina who dances the role of Lueji in a modern performance. Leite explains that the author tells the two women’s stories in order of time, and their lives eventually come together in the book. Pepetela recreated the history of 17th-century Angola in Lueji, a project he repeated in his 1994 novel A gloriosa família, which focuses on the 16th century.

New literary directions and the Prémio Camões

In the 1990s, Pepetela continued to write about Angola's history. He also started to write more about the country's political problems, using humor and criticism. His first novel of the decade, A Geração da Utopia (1992), talks about many of the same issues as his earlier book Mayombe, but from the viewpoint of Angola after gaining independence. The Angolan Civil War and government corruption made people question the ideas of revolution that were in Mayombe. Ana Mafalda Leite said this book is "critical and skeptical," very different from the heroic tone of Mayombe. In this novel, Pepetela studied his characters more deeply and took a strong critical position. The story covers three decades of Angola's 20th century, including Portuguese colonial rule, the fight for independence, the civil war, and a short time of peace in the early 1990s. Pepetela still cared about history, but his criticism of Angola's leaders was new and would appear again in his future works.

His next novel, O Desejo de Kianda (1995), shows the same loss of hope as A Geração da Utopia. This book uses a style that mixes real events with fantasy, like when large buildings in Luanda fall into a square but no one is hurt. The main character, Carmina Cara de Cu, quits her job as a government worker and becomes an arms dealer. An essay by Phillip Rothwell compares the building collapse in the story to the September 11, 2001, attacks, saying the novel "continues Pepetela's strong and harsh view of a broken dream." In 1996, he wrote A Gloriosa Família, a different kind of book. It tells the story of the Van Dúnem family, a wealthy Angolan family of Dutch origin. Pepetela researched the Dutch in Angola for years to write this book. Unlike his other works of the decade, this novel is not cynical or hopeless. It is a wide historical story with some magical elements. Though different from his other books, this work shows his deep interest in Angola's history.

As Angola became more dangerous in the 1990s, Pepetela spent more time in Lisbon and Brazil. By this time, his writing had made him famous in Portuguese-speaking countries. In 1997, he received the Camões Prize, the highest award for literature in Portuguese-speaking nations. Pepetela was the first Angolan and the second African author to win this honor.

Satire and foreign horizons in the new millennium

Pepetela has continued to write many books since the 2000s. His work has become more humorous and critical, especially in the "Jaime Bunda" series, which are detective stories that show life in Luanda in a new way. Stephen Henighan says the character Jaime Bunda, a clumsy detective from two important families in Angola, represents changes in the Luanda Creole population as seen by Pepetela. Instead of showing Creoles as leaders who will create a new Angolan identity, the books portray them as a group that takes things for themselves. Jaime Bunda is a funny version of James Bond, whose name comes from his large backside ("bunda" in Portuguese). He loves James Bond movies and American detective stories, which Henighan says shows how Angola has not fully developed. In the first book, Jaime Bunda, agente secreto (2001), the main character investigates a murder and rape that leads him to a South African counterfeiter named Karl Botha, a reference to former South African leader P.W. Botha, who ordered South African involvement in Angola during the 1970s and 1980s. The second book, Jaime Bunda e a Morte do Americano (2003), is set in Benguela instead of Luanda and focuses on American influence in Angola. It also shows Pepetela's criticism of U.S. foreign policy, as the actions of Angolan police mirror how Americans treated suspected terrorists during the same time. These books were published by the Portuguese publisher Dom Quixote and were very popular in Portugal, with some success in other European countries like Germany, where Pepetela was less well-known before.

Pepetela also wrote other books during this time. His first book of the 2000s was A Montanha da Água Lilás (2000), a children's book that explores the causes of social inequality. In 2005, after the success of the Jaime Bunda series, he wrote Predadores, his strongest criticism of Angola's ruling class. The story takes place in post-independence Angola and follows Vladimiro Caposso, a low-level government worker who becomes a businessman. Igor Cusack describes the main character as a "violent, cheating businessman who lives among other greedy people." Though he had criticized Angola's wealthy class earlier in A geração da utopia, the themes of criticizing this group became more common in his work by the 2000s, as seen in the Jaime Bunda books and Predadores.

In the final years of the 2000s, Pepetela kept writing, with books published in 2007, 2008, and 2009. The 2007 book, O Terrorista de Berkeley, Califórnia, is set entirely in the United States and has little connection to Angola. It discusses modern views on terrorism and technology. Pepetela said in an interview that this book was not meant for publication and was written for his own enjoyment. His next book, O Quase Fim do Mundo (2008), was also a personal project. It starts to include science fiction elements, showing people who are the last survivors on Earth after a global disaster. These characters gather on a small piece of land in Africa, near where humans are thought to have first appeared, and try to build a new world. This book continues the trend of not focusing on Angola, as seen in O Terrorista de Berkeley. The last book of the 2000s, O Planalto e a Estepe, deals with Angola but shows how Pepetela's themes have become more global. The story follows a love story between a white Angolan and a Mongolian man he met in Moscow. It also returns to some of Pepetela's earliest themes, describing the natural environment of Angola through the childhood experiences of the main character, Júlio, in Huíla province.

In addition to writing, Pepetela also taught. From 1982 until he retired in 2008, he was a sociology professor at the University of Angola, now called the University of Agostinho Neto. He was a visiting professor at Rutgers University in 2002 and at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2003 and 2004.

Novels

• As Aventuras de Ngunga, 1972 [English translation: Ngunga's Adventures. A Story of Angola. Translated by Chris Searle. London: Young World Books, 1980]
• Muana Puó, 1978
• Mayombe, 1980 [English translation: Mayombe: A Novel of the Angolan Struggle. Translated by Michael Wolfers. London: Heinemann, 1983]
• O Cão e os Caluandas, 1985
• Yaka, 1985 [English translation: Yaka. Translated by Marga Holness. Oxford: Heinemann, 1996]
• Lueji, o Nascimento de um Império, 1989
• Luandando, 1990
• A Geração da Utopia, 1992 [English translation: The Utopian Generation. Translated by David Brookshaw. Windsor, ON: Biblioasis, 2024]
• O Desejo de Kianda, 1995 [English translation: The Return of the Water Spirit. Translated by Luis R. Mitras. Oxford: Heinemann, 2002]
• Parábola do Cágado Velho, 1996
• A Gloriosa Família, 1997
• A Montanha da Água Lilás, 2000
• Jaime Bunda, Agente Secreto, 2001 [English translation: Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent: Story of Various Mysteries. Translated by Richard Bartlett. Laverstock, U.K.: Aflame Editions, 2006]
• Jaime Bunda e a Morte do Americano, 2003
• Predadores, 2005
• O Terrorista de Berkeley, Califórnia, 2007
• O Quase Fim do Mundo, 2008
• Contos de morte, 2008
• O Planalto e a Estepe, 2009
• A Sul. o Sombreiro, 2011
• Crónicas com Fundo de Guerra, 2011
• O Timido E As Mulheres, 2013
• Crónicas Maldispostas, 2015
• Se o Passado Não Tivesse Asas, 2016
• Sua Excelência de Corpo Presente, 2018

Awards

• Received the Camões Prize in 1997
• Received the Prince Claus Award in 1999
• Received the Prémio Literário do Correntes d'Escritas in 2020 /think