Pepetela has also written about Angola's earlier history in A Gloriosa Família and Lueji, and has expanded into satire with his series of Jaime Bunda novels.
[2] When he was 14, the young Pepetela moved to Lubango (then Sá da Bandeira), to continue his studies because there was no high school in Benguela at the time.
After the move to Brazzaville, Pepetela became more active in the MPLA's armed resistance against the Portuguese in the Cabinda region of Angola and on the Eastern Front.
Muana Puó [pt; fr] was never intended to be published, a detail Pepetela made clear in an interview with Michel Laban.
The next play that Pepetela wrote, A Revolta da Casa dos Ídolos, takes place in the past, drawing parallels between the Kongo kingdom in the 16th century and Angola's struggle for independence.
Leite writes, "The play remains didactic but it is innovative both in terms of its use of historical material, and especially in the complexities of the actual mise en scène".
The novel functions on two levels, one in which the characters' thoughts about the nature of the struggle for independence are explored, and another that narrates the "action and incidents" experienced by the nationalist fighters.
Ana Mafalda Leite considers the novel to be both critical and heroic, both attempting to highlight the ethnic diversity supposedly celebrated by the MPLA and also illustrating the tribal divisions present in Angolan society, which would lead to the eventual civil war that tore the nation apart in the years from independence until 2002.
[13] After leaving the government at the end of 1982, Pepetela began to focus exclusively on his writing, beginning work on his most ambitious novel to date, Yaka.
Ana Mafalda Leite writes, "Yaka symbolises at once the consciousness of traditional values and 'the anticipated spirit of nationality' of the new country".
Pepetela continued to write throughout the decade, publishing O cão e os Caluandas, a novel that looks at the inhabitants of Luanda and the changes that they have undergone since independence, one year after the publication of Yaka.
[15] In 1989, he published Lueji, a work similar to A Revolta na Casa dos Ídolos in that it draws parallels between Angolan history and the contemporary situation in the country.
In the words of Ana Mafalda Leite, "The author writes chronologically of the two women, whose lives eventually begin to merge in the novel.
In the 1990s, Pepetela's writing continued to exhibit interest in Angola's history, but also began to examine the political situation in the country with a greater sense of irony and criticism.
The Angolan Civil War and intense corruption in the government both led to a questioning of the revolutionary values espoused in the earlier novel.
The novel takes more of a magical realist approach than any of Pepetela's former works, positing a situation where several of Luanda's largest buildings collapse into Kinaxixi square with all the inhabitants left unharmed.
The heroine, a character named Carmina Cara de Cu, leaves her career as a government bureaucrat and becomes an arms dealer.
Stephen Henighan writes that the character of Jaime Bunda, a bumbling detective with roots in two of Angola's most prominent families, represents the changes that the Luanda Creole population has undergone in the view of Pepetela.
The character is obsessed with both James Bond films and American private-eye novels, something that Henighan claims is "ideologically charged" and illustrates elements of Angola's underdevelopment.
This novel also presents Pepetela's critique of U.S. foreign policy, as the heavy-handed behavior of the Angolan police mirrors the ways that Americans dealt with suspected terrorists during the same period.
[25] Though he began criticizing the nouveau riche class in Angola as far back as A geração da utopia, it can be seen through the Jaime Bunda novels and Predadores that by the 2000s this theme had become a dominant one in Pepetela's work.
[27] It is a work that begins to touch on the realm of science fiction, portraying the challenges facing people who find that they are the last living beings left on earth.
These characters, who have survived a global disaster, congregate on a small piece of land in Africa (that Pepetela stresses is very close to where humanity is thought to have originated) and are challenged with attempting to create some kind of new world.
This book continues the trend begun with O Terrorista de Berkeley... in that it is not set in Angola, nor does it deal explicitly with the Angolan reality.
The novel also returns to some of Pepetela's earliest themes of discovering Angolan nature through its descriptions of the protagonist Júlio's childhood in Huíla province.