The first book of José Eduardo Agualusa, A Conjura (The Conspiracy), published in 1989, is a historical novel set in Angola in the period between 1880 and 1911. As in his later novel, A nação crioula (Creole Nation), Agualusa paints a fascinating portrait of a society marked by opposites, in which only those who adapt have a chance of succeeding. The necessary process of adaptation corresponds to that of creolization. By this Agualusa not only means mixing black and white, but above all, mixing different cultures, a theme on which this author, himself a Creole, focuses again and again in his subsequent works.