Unlike other African magical realist texts we have seen, Pepetela’s The Return of the Water Spirit, marries magical realism to elements of the mystery thriller. The story is set in a period just after Angola’s violent civil wars in 2002, when the earlier communist government is transforming itself into a post-war capitalist bureaucratic regime. The main realist emphasis in the story is placed on the progressive bourgeois tendencies of the character of Carmina Evangelista, who was a former cadre in the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA)’s Youth Wing and in the novel represents the disturbing transformation of the Angolan revolutionary class into a modern-day capitalist elite. Her husband João provides a lazy and skeptical counterpoint to the narrative of this elite. Interrupting the progress of this frame story is the baffling collapse of various apartment buildings around Kinaxixi Square.

Suggested Reading
Ato Quayson, “Fecundities of the Unexpected: Magical Realism, Narrative, and History,” in The Novel vol 1: History, Geography, and Culture, Franco Moretti, ed., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
Ato Quayson, “Magical Realism and African Literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, Abiola Irele, ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Christopher Warnes and Kim Anderson Sasser, eds., Magical Realism and Literature, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
Christopher Warnes, “Magic and Otherness,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African Novel, pp. 13-29.
Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
Brenda Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Fiction, (London: Routledge, 1998)
Pietro Deandrea, Fertile Crossings: Metamorphoses of Genre in Anglophone West African Literature, (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002).
Stephen Slemon, “Magic as Postcolonial Discourse,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, pp. 407-426.
Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, (Cambridge University
Press, 1976).
Harry Garuba, “Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing
African Literature, Culture, and Society,” Public Culture, 15.2 (2003), 261–285.

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