Sua excêlencia de corpo presente: dictator novel of the most dystopian Pepetela

Abstract

For some time now, Angolan writer Pepetela's fiction has turned his attention to the present; a present that does not satisfy him and which he has been reporting on in an increasingly satirical way, using genres prone to social criticism, such as the detective novel or the dictator novel. In Sua excelência de corpo presente (2018), he takes the pulse of the totalitarian drifts that mark the beginning of the 21st century and offers his readers a scathing critique of totalitarian systems disguised as democracies. The action takes place in Africa, in an unidentified country whose president has died and is receiving a last tribute. Surprisingly, however, the dead man can see, hear and understand. Prostrate in the coffin, he has time to recall his life and his rise to power, fuelled by the memories and stories provoked in him by the people passing in front of his coffin... We propose with this paper to analyse Pepetela's novel from the perspective of studies of the "narrative of violence" (Tomás Cámara, 2017), in the field of the "African Dictator Novel" (Veit-Wild, 2005, Walonen, 2011) or "Politique-Fiction" (Coussy, 2000), since the novel represents the archetypal manifestation of the genre in African narrative - a characterisation made by Subercaseux (1980) - and at the same time becomes the first novel on the figure of the dictator in African literature in the Portuguese langua