Mayombe

Pepetela is the pen-name of Artur Pestana, or Artur Carlos Mauricio dos Santos. He was a half-caste Angolan who participated in the liberation struggle of the MPLA (People’s Movement for the liberation of Angola) in the early 1970s. This tale was based on his experience of the struggle. The original version in Portuguese was translated in 1983 into English by Michael Wolfers.

The story highlights the exploitation at the bottom of liberation struggles, and brings about the personalities of the types of people that take part in the liberation struggle, told mostly in third person, with first-person snapshots of the thinking of the key characters: Theory who is half-white and in the struggle to prove his commitment to the black people; Struggle the only person from the Cabinda area whose people were generally seen as traitors. Fearless the commander from the Kikongo tribe, who has grown into an old man of war at thirty-five seeing no role for himself once the struggle was won. The Political Commissar who was Kimbundu and under the shadow of the commander until the commander decides not to wade into his sexual problems with Ondine and then starts resenting him. And so on.

The plot is short, two missions from a base in the Mayombe forests interspersed with the scandal of a leader comrade (Andre) being found out after he’d had sex with a female comrade (Ondine) in the bush at Dolisie. But it generally draws out the play of tribalism within the members of the group, the distrust and arguments about tribal domination and past conquests. During the second and last mission, the commander and Struggle are killed but more in an effort to defend the position of the Commissar: A Cabinda and a Kikongo died to save a Kimbundu. So the message was clear that tribalism was a problem to be discouraged among the African peoples.

August 26, 2015. Review initially written in 2005. Novel first published in 1980. Picture source: Google Images.