The end of Portugal's colonial empire has given rise to two compelling questions: (1) What is the future of the Portuguese language in Africa (and, indeed, in the world beyond)? and (2) Will the literatures of those new African countries continue to be written primarily in Portuguese? By now, some fifteen years after the colonies gained their independence, we have enough of a sense of the situation to identify certain middle-, if not long-term, patterns with respect to languages and literature as they relate to the PALOP. This rather amusing acronym stands for the serious designation Paises Africanos de Lingua Oficial Portuguesa (African Countries Whose Official Language is Portuguese), a term that owes some of its gravity to the insertion of oficial. This adjective serves, somewhat self-consciously, to qualify the language of the former colonizer as a convenient vehicle of communication in these ethnically and linguistically diverse African societies seeking to form themselves into autonomous and cohesive nation-states. In contrast to the offical language are the affective creole vernaculars of Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Sdo Tome e Principe, and the several, equally emotive indigenous tongues spoken in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique. In these new countries the indigenous African tongues are commonly called lfnguas nacionais (national languages), which is rather ironic given that these ethnic languages are spoken regionally.' Over the centuries, Portuguese, like other European languages, has had a paradoxical history in Africa. Starting as early as the fifteenth century, intensifying in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and reaching its peak in the 1950s with the birth of the nationalist/liberation movements in the five colonies, many of the relatively few Africans who had a command of Portuguese also evinced a love/hate relationship with the language of the colonizer. Assimilapio, which became official policy in 1926 and in practice allowed relatively small, albeit socially and politically significant, numbers of Africans to become, in effect, black Portuguese, hinged first and foremost on the ability of the native to speak, read, and write the language of the colonizer. If historically some Africans flaunted their knowledge of Portuguese, by the 1950s many members of the indigenous intelligentsia, particularly those with anticolonialist sentiments, were also uncomfortable with their linguistic assimilation; after all, Portuguese was not only an imposed language, it was also often an instrument of repression. As nationalist fever rose, many intellectuals evinced an increasingly na-