While at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon he befriended other Angolan students who were associated with the Casa dos Estudantes do Império, the student association of Portuguese students from the overseas.
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Pepetela first went to Paris and then, in 1963, earned a scholarship to study Sociology in Algiers, where he was approached by Henrique Abranches from the MPLA to help create a Center for Angolan Studies.
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Mayombe, for example, is a novel that portrays the lives of a group of MPLA guerrillas who are involved in the anti-colonial struggle in Cabinda, Yaka follows the lives of members of a white settler family in the coastal town of Benguela, and A Geração da Utopia reveals the disillusionment of young Angolans during the post-independence period.
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The novel was written during his time in Algiers and deals with Angolan culture, using the metaphor of traditional masks of the Chokwe people to expose different dichotomies present in Angolan culture.