The contribution of the historiography of Angolan literature to the development of a national consciousness: 1930--1960

The Colonial Act of 1930 confirmed Portugal's intent to establish a policy in Africa based on assimilation and direct control over the colonies. Increased censorship stifled Angola's nascent literature and led to the rise of colonial literature. It is argued that a coherent body of Angolan literature would not emerge until the late 1940s. Portugal's policies, however, did not extinguish Angolan culture or the desires for autonomy that evolved in the nineteenth century. Colonial literature reflected only a fraction, and in historical perspective an ephemeral part, of Angolan culture. There are more enduring and recurrent historical and cultural themes which serve to unify Angola. O Estudante of the Liceu de Salvador Correia, one of almost 300 journals published during the period of intense colonial intervention, illustrates the preservation and continuity of the Angolan cultural and nationalistic themes.; In organizing the corpus of this research, I reproduced the following information from each issue of O Estudante: the cover page, works of literature and relevant commentaries that provided insights into the social and cultural environment of the student population. This research examined O Estudante's contribution to the evolution of Angolan literature and consequently its role in the formation of a national consciousness from its initial publication in September 1933 to December 1960. The principal advantage of using the methodology of historiography was to allow for a longitudinal study that analyzes Angola's literary history in terms of unity.; Scholars of Lusophone Africa have neglected the important contribution of literary journalism to the development of a national literature. The vast quantity of non-analyzed literature produced during the Angolan colonial period, explicitly suggests that an important, yet ignored, historical and cultural record exists of an evolving Angolan literature. O Estudante reveals the complexities of a developing Angolan culture, and further serves to underscore the continuity of nationalistic themes from nineteenth- to twentieth-century Angola. A central core of the new generation of post-independent Angolan writers and elites received their secondary education at the Liceu de Salvador Correia and published in O Estudante.