Angola is Wherever I Plant My Field

“The only thing worse than hunger is the saudade.” Angola Is Wherever I Plant My Field is a collection of interlinked stories about Angolans living through and after war, colonialism, and rapid social change. It follows soldiers, refugees, street kids, migrant workers, minor officials, lovers, and loners as they try to survive, make money, fall in love, and understand who they are in a fractured country. Instead of a single campaign or hero, the book offers many viewpoints and a loose, episodic structure. It uses satire and allegory and keeps circling back to questions of voice, memory, and who gets to tell the story of Angola. The stories move from guerrilla camps and ruined villages to Luanda’s streets, Lisbon’s cafés, and imagined cities abroad. In each place, characters face hunger, corruption, desire, fear, and memory. Some try to become rich, some try to escape, some simply try to stay alive and keep their dignity. The tone mixes dark humor with grief, and the stories question fixed ideas about revolution, patriotism, race, and identity, showing how ordinary people improvise their lives under systems that rarely make sense. Spanning from roughly the 1960s liberation struggle through the height of the civil war and into the post-war, oil-rich era, Angola Is Wherever I Plant My Field gives a ground-level sense of how history feels to people who are usually only numbers or footnotes. It chronicles lives shaped by improvisation, sarcasm, and stubborn hope, and will appeal to readers of contemporary African fiction, post-colonial literature, and story collections that blend politics, irony, and intimate human drama.