Vou lá visitar pastores (I'm going there to visit the sheperds) has been described as an epistolary exploration of an Angolan journey through Kuvale territory (1992-1997) by Angolan writer, anthropologist, poet and filmmaker Ruy Duarte de Carvalho. The book was published by Cotovia in May 1999 and is a massive work on the Kuvale, a pastoralist people from Southwest Angola. In April 2003, Culturgest invited the director and actor Manuel Wiborg to write a play based on the text, which José Eduardo Agualusa once said was impossible to represent before he eventually saw it on stage. Forty years after Angola's independence and 12 years after the play's world premiere, it is the perfect time to return to a text (and other texts by the same author) about a region and people from the deepest part of Angola and Africa. In the words of the author, "The aim of this text is to convey, through writings that preserve the characteristics of oral communication (cassettes), a knowledge based in part on oral information/tradition, but literarily complex and "ruminated" on in exhaustive bibliographies, making reference to the theoretical concerns of social sciences and underpinned by a detailed knowledge of lands and peoples." For the director and actor, it marks a return to a theatrical work in which text, speech and visual documents combine to form an incredibly beautiful spectacle. The images that were projected during the play, with the exception of maps and diagrams, were selected from a series of drawings, photographs and video recordings made by Ruy Duarte de Carvalho in Kuvale territory, which he generously made available.

The book I'm going there to visit the sheperds, an Angolan journey through Kuvale territory, published in 1999 by Cotovia, was adapted for the stage by Rui Guilherme Lopes and directed and acted by Manuel Wiborg. Having been performed in a co-production with Actores Produtores Associados and Culturgest, the play will be presented in three shows in the Open Air Auditorium of the Gulbenkian Foundation.