Pepetela is the literary pseudonym of Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos, born on 29th of October 1941 in Benguela (Angola) in a family of Portuguese ancestry. He attended primary school in Benguela, where he had contact with colleagues of different social and racial status. He continued his education at Liceu Diogo Cão in Lubango and later moved to Portugal for higher education. There he attended the Casa dos Estudantes do Império, the cradle of African nationalist movements in Lisbon. When the colonial war broke out, Pepetela was compulsorily conscripted to the Portuguese army to fight in Angola. Instead, he fled Portugal and moved abroad, first to Paris, and later to Algiers. While studying Sociology in Algiers in 1963, Pepetela was approached by the MPLA member Henrique Abranches, who enlisted the writer in the liberation movement and whom he helped to found the Center for Angolan Studies. The center, with its seat first in Algiers and since 1969 in Brazzaville (Congo), played an important role in documenting Angolan culture and in spreading information about MPLA's struggle against the colonial rule. Around the turn of the 60s and 70s, Pepetela participated actively in the armed resistance of Angola. This war experience inspired him to write one of his most acclaimed novels, Mayombe (published only some years after the independence, in 1980). It was also during this time that he wrote Muana Puó (published in 1978) and received the pseudonym Pepetela, which means Pestana (eyelash) in Kimbundo. His only book published during the colonial period is As Aventuras de Ngunga (The Ngunga's Adventures) (1972) which tells the story of a little boy who joins the MPLA's guerrilla. After the independence, Pepetela joined the government of Agostinho Neto and became Vice Minister of Education, resigning in 1982. Since 1984 he is a professor of Sociology at the Agostinho Neto University in Luanda and has presided over several cultural associations, among which the União dos Escritores Angolanos and the Associação Cultural e Recreativa Chá de Caxinde. In several of his books, such as Lueji (1990) or A Gloriosa Família (The Glorious Family, 1997), Pepetela addresses topics from Angola's turbulent colonial history. In other books, such as A Geração da Utopia (The Utopian Generation, 1992), O Desejo de Kianda (The Return of the Water Spirit, 1995) or Predadores (Predators, 2005), he questions the political and social situation of the country in the post-independence period. In 1997 Pepetela was awarded Prémio Camões, the highest literary prize for a Portuguese-language writer. Except mentioned works Pepetela also published O Cão e Caluandas (Dog and Caluandas, 1985), Yaka (1985), Parábola do Cágado Velho (Parabola Of the Old Turtle, 1997), A Montanha da Água Lilás (The Mountain of Violet Water, 2000), Jaime Bunda, Agente Secreto (Jaime Bunda, Secret Agent, 2001), Jaime Bunda e a Morte do Americano (Jaime Bunda and the Death of the American, 2003), O Terrorista de Berkeley, Califórnia (The Terrorist From Berkeley, California, 2007), O Quase Fim do Mundo (The Almost End Of the World, 2008), Contos de Morte (Stories of Death, 2008), O Planalto e a Estepe (The Plateau and the Steppe, 2009), A Sul. O Sombreiro (Towards South. The Sunshade, 2011), O Tímido e as Mulheres (The Shy and the Women, 2013) and two theater plays A Corda (The String, 1978), A Revolta da Casa dos Ídolos (The Uprising Of the House Of Idols,1980).

The Nation by Pepetela:

"I think that in all nations that are in the process of being formed or are trying to consolidate themselves as nations, the recourse to history is a strategy employed by its elites – to return to the past to seek out the reason for that amour-propre that works to reinforce identity and for arguments that will allow them to take a pride in their existence. There are still countries which don’t yet have a history that has been told by the people of their own country and from a nationalist perspective. So, the so-called historical novel, or fiction based on history, has its place in the reinforcement of a national identity when it tells us about the past and when it gives us examples of the past as something which we can be proud, of our own heroes, etc."