Pepetela's proposal: desire and anarchy in The Return of the Water Spirit

Abstract

Written by perhaps Angola's most celebrated writer of the post-independence period, The Return of the Water Spirit is Pepetela's attempt to articulate ‘the truths’ of the Angolan nation. In response to President Agostinho Neto's earlier call for Angolan writers to ‘analyse reality profoundly’, Pepetela writes of the political reality of the newly independent nation, charting the corrosive force of capitalism on the ideological principles of the socialist Marxist administration of the MPLA. However, it is the description of the people's steady withdrawal from the ambit of the state that marks the novel's importance. While Ana Martinho, David Brookshaw, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and others have explored the ways in which Pepetela's novels highlight and anticipate the difficulties associated with the nation-building project in Angola, none has written specifically on the people's collective decision to excise themselves from what Paul Zeleza calls the inherited ‘colonial leviathan’ of the...