Written almost twenty years apart, Pepetela’s O desejo de Kianda and Ondjaki’s Os transparentes both describe « petro-magic »’s hold on the Angolan capital Luanda, and foreshadow the revenge of the more-than-human forces hidden in the Angolan underground. In Pepetela’s narrative, the « deep » rise up against the neocolonial order through the figure of Kianda, the water-spirit. In Ondjaki’s novel, on the other hand, devastating excavations are conducted to unearth the oil reserves hidden in Luanda’s underground, evoking a morbid process of neoliberal self-devouring taking place under the eyes of a defeated population. Despite their opposite out comes, under the sign of water (apocalypse) for the former and fire (pyro cene) for the latter, both novels uncover traces of popular solidarities, exa mined through the lens of animist cosmologies and new possibilities of interspecies coalitions.