A Single Nation : National History in Angolan Fiction, Independence to 2025

A Single Nation presents a narrative history of Angola’s first fifty years of nationhood and of the careers of its major modern prose writers. This book charts the challenges Angolan authors faced in imagining and sustaining a national literature after independence, engaging with questions of decolonization, the legacies of the slave trade, and the role of a culturally – and often racially – syncretized bourgeoisie in shaping visions of a modern African nation-state through literature..

Opening with the declaration of independence amid Cold War conflict in 1975, this work offers fresh perspectives on events such as the attempted coup of May 1977 and the pivotal confrontation with apartheid South Africa at Cuito Cuanavale in 1987–88. It brings into focus the transnational dimensions of Cuban-Angolan cooperation, the devastation of the civil war of the 1990s between the governing MPLA and Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA movement, debates over race and identity, and the corruption unleashed by the oil boom in the early twenty-first century. The literary institutions created by socialist Angola were remarkable for their nation-building ambition. Stephen Henighan charts the conditions under which Angolan writers worked after the Cold War and analyzes texts by writers from Pepetela to José Eduardo Agualusa, Ondjaki, and Chó do Guri.

The successor to Henighan’s companion study of the pre-independence period, Fissured Ground, this work combines narrative history with meticulous literary analysis and a broad view of the reception of Angolan writing in Europe and the Americas. A Single Nation offers an engrossing and enlightening account of a distinctive African nation and its literature.