Mayombe

Angola: União dos Escritores Angolanos + Empresa Nacional de Prospecção, Exploração, Lapidação e Comercialização de Diamantes de Angola, c. 1982. Hardcover. Green cloth in boards. Very good book in a very good dust jacket. Minor shelfwear and dust soiling to edges. Binding tight and square. Interior unmarked other than a price penciled on the front free endpaper. 184 pages. 8vo. An extremely rare copy of the first English translation of Pepetela's now classic novel. "Published jointly in the Popular Republic of Angola by agreement between the Author, the Union of Angolan Authors and the ENDIAMA-UEE (National Diamond Prospecting, Mining, Polishing and Trading Company), to by used as an offer by the three entities, with no commercial purposes." No stated date of publication or copyright.

A white Angolan born in 1941, Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos AKA Pepetela joined the MPLA guerrilla fighters in the Cabinda enclave in the late 1960s. He served on the central front during the second liberation war and, in 1976 after Independence, was made Deputy Minister of Education. He wrote Mayombe while he was serving in the MPLA in 1971. The book's original Portuguese version was published in 1980 because Angola's first President, Agostinho Neto, felt an open debate on the topics which the book deals with-–the dangers of tribalism and racism--needed to be "pursued in the wider context of independent Africa." This English translation by Michael Wolfers was published in Angola in 1982. The book first received widespread attention when Wolfers' translation was published in Heinemann's African Writers Series in 1983. In 1997, Pepetela was the second lusophone African writer to be awarded the Camões Prize, the most prestigious literary accolade in the Portuguese-speaking world.