I first read Pepetela’s Mayombe in a literature course taught by the Kenyan writer-in-exile Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Unlike the other texts we trooped over to Revolution Books on Fourteenth Street to buy, this one came in a shadowy photocopy, Ngugi’s own smudged handwriting littering the sides. The radicalism of the novel began before I opened it by conjuring all those other texts, out-of-print, market-dismissed, that lay in other languages, only to be recovered by activist-scholars. Published in Portuguese in 1979 and translated into English three years later, the novel Mayombe has since been difficult to obtain, with large gaps in its publication and circulation history.

Named for a forest in the province of Cabinda, Angola and written by a former guerrilla, Mayombe has all the hallmarks of literary forgettability. It was a novel of decolonization, tightly wound to the moment of 1961 and the launch of the MPLA, the Peoples Movement for the Liberation of Angola against colonial rule. Anchored in the forest with occasional trips to the base, the novel stages the battle between the Portuguese “tuga,” the settlers, and the fragile and hypermasculine ethos of a new revolutionary organization. It is organized by a series of astute guerrilla narrators, with names like Theory, and New World, and Struggle, each with his own ideological objective. Lush descriptions of the forest, the beauty and stature of trees soon to become timber, the shimmer of undiscovered streams, all compete with the harsh realities of sustaining troops during a time of brutal warfare.

Why do certain fictions become part of literary history, and others fall by the wayside? This is, in essence, the politics of cultural selection. You haven’t read Mayombe like you read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in school, or Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters when he was awarded the Nobel Prize. You didn’t study it in your World Cultures courses alongside Nadine Gordimer and Anita Desai. In fact, even those who know non-Anglophone African writers like Ousmane Sembene and Ferdinand Oyono have mostly never heard of it. Why?