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A destabilizing war during the 1980s and '90s helped entrench a one-party authoritarian regime, and marred elections in 1992 during a brief lull in the fighting, at virtually the same time that Brazilians demonstrated a newfound democratic power when President Collor de Melo was impeached for corruption, only three years after winning the first mass election since the 1950s.2 in Angola, many would claim, as José Eduardo Agualusa does, that the party in power has long become corrupted and somehow forgotten its roots in a democratic tradition of creole struggle for freedom of expression that has its roots in the nineteenth century, and that Agualusa himself exploited as the subject matter for his first work of fiction, A Conjura (1989; The Conspiracy). When Agualusa's novel was first published, it received adverse comments from some critics, most notably Pires Laranjeira who lambasted it for its postmodern irresponsibility towards the truth and its internal historical incoherence, its intertextual references (some of which Pires Laranjeira claimed were invented) and for its wanton stereotyping, in particular in the name of the main Black Brazilian character, Jararaca, because of its reptilian connotations, an insult, in the critic's view, to Afro-Brazilians and to the black movement in Brazil (Pires Laranjeira 23).