José Luandino Vieira (born José Vieira Mateus da Graça on May 4th, 1935) is an Angolan writer of short fiction and novels. He was devoted to Angolan independence, resulting in his arrest in 1961 after an interview with the BBC in which he disclosed secret lists of deserters from the Portuguese army fighting in Africa. He would remain in jail for eleven years. After the Angolan independence, Luandino Vieira was nominated for various positions: organized and directed the Popular Television of Angola from 1975 to 1978, directed the Department of Revolutionary Orientation MPLA until 1979; organized and directed the Angolan Institute of Cinema, 1979-1984. In the field of literature, he was one of the founders of the Union of Angolan Writers in 1975, and was its General Secretary since the end of 1980.He was also deputy secretary general of the Association of Afro-Asian Writers, from 1979 to 1984, and later became its secretary general (until December 1989). Vieira's works often followed the structure of the African oral narrative and dealt with the harsh realities of the Portuguese rule in Angola. His best-known work was his early short story collection, Luuanda (1963), which received the Portuguese writers' literary award in 1965, though it was banned by the Portuguese government until 1974 due to its examination of the oppressiveness of the colonial administration in Angola. His novella A vida verdadeira de Domingos Xavier (The Real Life of Domingos Xavier, 1974) portrayed both the cruelty of the Portuguese administration and the courage of ordinary Angolans during the colonial period. Other works include Velhas estórias (1974) [Old Stories], Nós os do Makulusu (1974) [Our Gang from Makulusu], Vidas novas (1975) [New Lives], João Vêncio: os seus amores (1979) [João Vêncio: His Loves], and No Antigamente na Vida (1987) [Formely in the Life]. Currently, Luandino Vieira is preparing a triology O Livro dos Rios [The Book of the Rivers], from which two titles have already been published, De Rios Velhos e Guerrilheiros (2006) [Old Rivers and Guerrillas] and O Livro dos Guerrilheiros (2009) [The Book of the Guerrillas].

Works published in English:

Luuanda, 1963 (English trans. by Tamara L. Bender Heinemann, African Writers Series no. 222, 1980);

A vida verdadeira de Domingos Xavier, 1971 (trans. by Michael Wolfers as The Real Life of Domingos Xavier, Heinemann, African Writers Series no. 202, 1978).

The Nation by Luandino Vieira:

"There are two things which make Luanda a privileged place. The first is that we managed to live in that wrecked and broken bell jar, which dated from the nineteenth century and lasted until the 1950s. The destruction of that nineteenth-century reality… we still collect broken pieces and bits of information from that time. If I had not lived where I lived, and if I had not had the freedom I had, I would been just like the child of any other settler. This made a difference – in my generation it made a difference – when we compare the experience of other Angolans in Lubango, Nova Lisboa [Huambo], Cabinda who did not acquire, at the age when these things should be acquired, the essential features of one's own culture, such as the cuisine, the habits and customs, and all those things which we don’t know are culture but which later define us culturally. For us, Luanda was a laboratory and then we had the historical good luck – that is to say, my generation was lucky – to have been young at the right time. We inherited all the popular revolts from the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries, and all revolts and acts of rebellions, and such like, from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. […] And it is this context that explains – I would not say ‘the superiority’ because it happened by historical accident – the rise of the MPLA. It happened when the historical context made possible that those sectors that had been educated for the future would join forces with those that had inherited a tradition from the past: it worked. The MPLA could not have been anything else - I am talking about the famous manifesto. It could either come into being in the 1940s through to about 1960 or it would never come into being at all, because it could never have come to exist before that period, so it was our generation that found itself participating in the struggle for national liberation."