The Cultural Production of Lusophone Africa

Abstract

The Cultural Production of Lusophone Africa Claire Williams The Portuguese colonial presence in Africa stretched over five centuries, until Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe achieved independence in the wake of the 1974 Carnation Revolution. For much of the twentieth century, imperial literary and cultural production tended to objectify and exoticise the populations of these countries, with a few exceptions, amongst which are the seminal novels published between the late 1930s and 1950s by Angolan author Fernando Monteiro de Castro Soromenho. Two short story collections that had an immediate and lasting impact were Luandino Vieira's Luuanda (1963) and Luís Bernardo Honwana's Nós matámos o cão-tinhoso (1964). Luuanda led to a confrontation between the Portuguese Writers' Association and that country's dictatorial regime, and Nós matámos o cão-tinhoso foregrounded the situation of the assimilado (a legal category recognising a level of 'civilised' behaviour in Black African citizens) under colonial rule. The independence struggles of the 1960s and 70s galvanised authors and artists to express their protests and mobilize their people. Revolutionary leaders, such as Amílcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau), Agostinho Neto (later the first President of an independent Angola), and Marcelino dos Santos (Mozambique), wrote rousing poetry, as did Alda Espírito Santo (São Tomé), Noémia de Sousa (Mozambique), and José Craveirinha (Mozambique). Many of them had met while studying abroad at the Casa dos Estudantes do Império in Lisbon. Their works were anthologised and translated, and, as more literature from Portuguese-speaking Africa became accessible, literary critics like Manuel Ferreira in Portugal, and Russell Hamilton and Gerald Moser in the United States, began to analyse and teach them on university courses.1 Writers' associations, such as the União dos Escritores Angolanos (founded in 1975) and the Associação dos Escritores Moçambicanos (founded in 1982), became important sources of support for aspiring writers. However, brutal civil war wreaked havoc as the newly independent countries fought their way to peace. The inequality of colonial rule was a recurrent theme in pro-independence protest literature, but it was soon replaced with criticism of different kinds of injustice: the upheavals and atrocities resulting from war, poverty, and displacement became the subject of later works, often attempting to come to terms with the traumas of the past. As well as dealing with these traumas, Portuguese-speaking African regimes have embraced global capitalism from the early 1990s onwards, to the detriment of forging a more equitable society, especially in oil- and diamond-rich Angola. Political corruption and social inequality have therefore been topics covered by more contemporary writers. In their introduction to the first special issue of the journal Research in African Literatures to be devoted to Lusophone African and Afro-Brazilian Literatures (2007), Lúcia Helena Costigan and Russell Hamilton acknowledge that African literature in Portuguese has often been neglected in favour of the English and French equivalents. This is still true, to a certain extent, but in the decade and a half since then, although there has not yet been a Nobel Prize for African literature [End Page 451] in Portuguese, many more writers are getting published (in their own countries and/or Portugal), as well as being translated into different languages, while their works have been turned into films or plays. Some of them—like Mozambicans Mia Couto, Paulina Chiziane, and João Paulo Borges Coelho; Angolans Pepetela, José Eduardo Agualusa, and Ondjaki; or Cape Verdean Germano Almeida—now reach international readerships, winning prizes and becoming the subjects of academic monographs. The postcolonial turn in the 1990s gave literary critics new tools with which to read and interpret the writing emerging from African nations. African literature in Portuguese were published in Portugal in special series by Porto Editora and Caminho since the 1970s, and were already being taught at some universities. This paved the way for critical readings and literary analyses published by academics such as Pires Laranjeira, Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, Ana Maria Martinho, Ana Mafalda Leite, and Inocência Mata. International scholars also began working more closely with Lusophone Africa: Laura Cavalcante Padilha, and Carmen Tindó Secco in Brazil...