“Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them.”

Henry Steele Commager

Since the end of 2005, I have been participating in a reading challenge whereby the participants are attempting to read a book by an author (or if there isn’t one translated into English, about the country) for each of the 200+ countries participating in the 2008 Summer Olympics. We have until the end of the Beijing Games to finish our reading, and I will apparently need every minute of that time as I’ve only read books representing 23 countries so far. The twenty third being “The Return of the Water Spirit” by an Angolan author who goes by the nom de plume of “Pepetela.”

Pepetela was born and raised in Angola and was then educated engineering at university in Portugal, the Mother country of at that time of colonized Angola. “The Return of the Water Spirit” was published in 1995 and in 1997 it won the most prestigious award for a book written in Portuguese – the Camões Prize.

The story of “The Return of the Water Spirit” takes place in the mid-1990’s and tells of the experiences of the country from the personal viewpoints of João and Carmina Evangelista. The country is falling apart at the seams. To be sure there is civil war, disconnection from Portugal, an uprising of new religions from the west, and elections that change the politics from socialism to market economy democracy; but the very land is also revolting. An area in the city of Luanda was once a lagoon that Portugal filled in and paved over. The Spirit of the Lagoon has tired of the heaviness of pavement and high-rise buildings and begins sucking the very moisture out of the concrete and bricks, which collapses the buildings into piles of rubble as the residents and their belongings float unharmed to land atop the whole mess.

It is a very short book at just 102 pages, and it kept my interest as I tried to solve the puzzle of destruction along with João. I recommend this quick read to anybody looking for insight into the rapid changes taking place in newly evolving countries in Africa.