A Gloriosa Família

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A Gloriosa Família is a novel by the Angolan author Pepetela published in 1997 by Dom Quixote (Lisbon). The novel deals with the family of Baltasar Van Dum, a Flemish slave trader in Luanda, during the period of time that the Dutch ruled the colony. In order to write the novel, Pepetela undertook painstaking research of the seven years in which the Dutch occupied Angola, using archives located in Amsterdam, Antwerp, and the Vatican. [1]

Angola country in Africa

Angola, officially the Republic of Angola, is a west-coast country of south-central Africa. It is the seventh-largest country in Africa, bordered by Namibia to the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the north, Zambia to the east, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. Angola has an exclave province, the province of Cabinda that borders the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The capital and largest city of Angola is Luanda.

Pepetela Angolan writer

Artur Carlos Maurício Pestana dos Santos is a major Angolan writer of fiction. He writes under the name Pepetela.

Flemish variety of the Dutch language as spoken in Flanders (Belgium)

Flemish (Vlaams) also called Flemish Dutch (Vlaams-Nederlands), Belgian Dutch, or Southern Dutch (Zuid-Nederlands), is a Lower Franconian / Dutch dialect. It is spoken in the whole northern region of Belgium as well as French Flanders and the Dutch Zeelandic Flanders by approximately 6.5 million people. The term is used in at least five ways. These are:

  1. as an indication of Dutch written and spoken in Flanders including the Dutch standard language as well as the non-standardized dialects, including intermediate languages between dialect and standard. Some linguists avoid the term Flemish in this context and prefer the designation Belgian-Dutch or South-Dutch.
  2. as a synonym for the so-called intermediate language in Flanders region, the Tussentaal.
  3. as an indication for the non-standardized dialects and regiolects of Flanders region.
  4. as an indication of the non-standardized dialects of only the former County of Flanders, ie the current provinces of West Flanders and East Flanders, Zeelandic Flanders and Frans-Vlaanderen.
  5. as an indication of the non-standardized West Flemish dialects of the province of West Flanders, the Dutch Zeelandic Flanders and French Frans-Vlaanderen.

Contents

Plot synopsis

The long novel is composed of 12 chapters, and is set between the years 1642 and 1648. The novel is narrated by a mute mestiço slave, who is one of Van Dum's favorites. In addition to Van Dum and the slave narrator there are many other characters in the novel, most of whom are Van Dum's children. A division exists between the legitimate children that Van Dum has had with his legal wife, Dona Inocência, an African princess, and the "filhos do quintal," or the children of the yard, illegitimate children that Van Dum has had with other slaves.

Mestiço ethnic group

Mestiço, in Colonial Brazil, the Portuguese-speaking part of Latin America, was initially used to refer to mamelucos, persons born from a couple in which one was an Indigenous American and the other a European. It literally translates as "mameluke", probably referring to the common Iberian comparisons of swarthy people to North Africans.

Historical background

The novel takes place during the Dutch occupation of Angola. The Van Dum family of the novel can be seen as having strong parallels to the Van Dúnem family, considered the most eminent of Luanda Creole families. [2]

Luanda City in Angola

Luanda, formerly named São Paulo da Assunção de Loanda, is the capital and largest city in Angola, and the country's most populous and important city, primary port and major industrial, cultural and urban centre. Located on Angola's coast with the Atlantic Ocean, Luanda is both Angola's chief seaport and its administrative centre. It is also the capital city of Luanda Province and the most populous Portuguese-speaking capital city in the world.

Reception and Criticism

Many critics look at A gloriosa família as both a celebration and a criticism of Angola's creole population. Fernando Arenas wrote of the ways that novel puts a postmodern spin on the theories of Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, eventually critiquing the slave-holding system that is the root of Angolan society. [3] Stephen Henighan describes the novel as illustrating both the "admirable and reprehensible sides of Creole culture." While the family is resourceful and inclusive of other races, they are all also responsible for the slave trade in the interior of the country. [4]

Gilberto Freyre Brazilian politician and academic

Gilberto de Mello Freyre was a Brazilian sociologist, anthropologist, historian, writer, painter, journalist and congressman, born in Recife, Northeast Brazil. He is commonly associated with other major Brazilian cultural interpreters of the first half of the 20th century, such as Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and Caio Prado Júnior. His best-known work is a sociological treatise named Casa-Grande & Senzala. Two sequels followed, The Mansions & the Shanties: The Making of Modern Brazil and Order & Progress: Brazil from Monarchy to Republic. The trilogy is generally considered a classic of modern cultural anthropology and social history, although it is not without its critics.

Related Research Articles

History of Angola aspect of history

Angola is a country in southwestern Africa. The country's name derives from the Kimbundu word for king. It was first settled by San hunter-gatherer societies before the northern domains came under the rule of Bantu states such as Kongo and Ndongo. From the 15th century, Portuguese colonists began trading, and a settlement was established at Luanda during the 16th century. Portugal annexed territories in the region which were ruled as a colony from 1655, and Angola was incorporated as an overseas province of Portugal in 1951. After the Angolan War of Independence, which ended with an army mutiny and leftist coup in Lisbon, Angola's independence was achieved on November 11, 1975 through the Alvor Agreement. After independence, Angola later entered a period of civil war that lasted up until 2002.

Sranan Tongo is an English-based creole language that is spoken as a lingua franca by approximately 500,000 people in Suriname.

Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba 17th-century queen of the Ndongo and Matamba Kingdoms of the Mbundu people in Angola

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Portuguese language in Africa

Portuguese is spoken in a number of African countries and is the official language in six African states: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe and Equatorial Guinea. There are Portuguese-speaking communities in most countries of Southern Africa, a mixture of Portuguese settlers and Angolans and Mozambicans who left their countries during the civil wars. A rough estimate has it that there are about 14 million people who use Portuguese as their sole mother tongue across Africa, but depending on the criteria applied, the number might be considerably higher, since many Africans speak Portuguese as a second language, in countries like Angola and Mozambique, where Portuguese is an official language, but also in countries like South Africa and Senegal, thanks to migrants coming from Portuguese speaking countries. Some statistics claim that there are over 30 million Portuguese speakers in the continent. Like French and English, Portuguese has become a post-colonial language in Africa and one of the working languages of the African Union (AU) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Portuguese co-exists in Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Principe with Portuguese-based creoles, and in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau with autochthonous African languages.

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Stephen Patrick Glanvill Henighan is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, journalist and academic.

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Loango-Angola is the name for the possessions of the Dutch West India Company in contemporary Angola and the Republic of the Congo. Notably, the name refers to the colony that was captured from the Portuguese between 1641 and 1648. Due to the distance between Luanda and Elmina, the capital of the Dutch Gold Coast, a separate administration for "Africa South" was established at Luanda during the period of the Dutch occupation.

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Maria João Ganga film director

Maria João Ganga is an Angolan film director and screenwriter, best known for being the first woman to make a full-length feature film in Angola. Her film Hollow City, which she wrote and directed was released in 2004. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the 2004 Paris Film Festival.

References

  1. ↑ Silva, Rodrigues da."Acreditar é preciso." Jornal de Letras May 7, 1997. p. 8.
  2. ↑ Henighan, Stephen. "'Um James Bond Subdesenvolvido': The Ideological Work of the Angolan Detective in Pepetela's Jaime Bunda Novels." Portuguese Studies. 22:1 (2006), pp.135–152. p. 3
  3. ↑ Arenas, Fernando. (Post)colonialism, Globalization, and Lusofonia or The ‘Time-Space’ of the Portuguese-Speaking World. 2005. UC Berkeley: Institute of European Studies. Dec. 1, 2009 <http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0vh0f7t9>
  4. ↑ Henighan, p. 3
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