Republicanism and Nationalism in Angola in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In the nineteenth century Luanda became the administrative, political and military centre of the Portuguese presence on the southern coast of West Africa. Between 1880 and 1910, 16 of the newspapers founded in Luanda, some of them owned by mixed-race or black Africans, called ‘sons of the country’, supported republican ideas. Although only a minority of the urban elite could write, they were obsessed with the private press, as it allowed them to present their points of view and to dispute the ‘control over writing’ with the colonial power. This chapter explores the republican press of Luanda, relating it to the ideal of independence that slowly and inconsistently took shape between the final years of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.