Whites Can Dance Too

It took being caught at a border without proper documents for me to realise I’d always been a prisoner of sorts. Kuduro had been my passport to the world, thanks to it I’d travelled to places I’d never dreamed of visiting. But the chickens had come home to roost . . .

Whites Can Dance Too tells the story of Kalaf, an Angolan musician stopped at the Norwegian border on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant. While in a holding cell awaiting interrogation, he considers the life he has led and the events that have brought him to his current-day situation. His story is the story of a musical genre, kuduro, a blistering, high-energy form infused with social and political messages; of Sofia, a white Portuguese girl at the heart of the Lisbon dance scene who agrees to marry Kalaf to help him obtain a European passport; and of Viking, the Norwegian policeman haunted by a previous immigration case who holds Kalaf’s fate in his hands and finds himself questioning his own livelihood following the rise of racism and prejudice in Norway.

Author Biography

Kalaf Epalanga is an Angolan musician and writer. Best known internationally for fronting the Lisbon-based dance collective Buraka Som Sistema, he is a celebrated columnist in Angola and Portugal. Whites Can Dance Too is his acclaimed debut novel. Epalanga is currently based in Berlin.