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In 1867 António Urbano Monteiro de Castro, Alfredo Júlio Cortês Mântua, and Francisco Pereira Dutra, popular journalists and editors, were condemned for the crime of “abuse of the free press”, and the latter did not survive the imprisonment conditions. In 1873 the governor-general of Angola approved a warrant released by the Luanda council administrator; the premises of the newspaper O Mercantil were shut down and any valuable materials confiscated. In 1881 republican journalist João da Ressurreição Arantes Braga was condemned to forty days imprisonment for sedition. In the same year, O Echo de Angola appeared as the first periodical entirely edited and funded by Africans.17
With the launch of the “free-press period”, the colony enjoyed a sort of intellectual euphoria: both sons of the country and creolised Portuguese found in this kind of journalism, devoted to the taste for controversy and to the defence of local values and interests, the way to express their heterogeneous positions about not only politics and trade, but also art, culture, and social criticism, and to uphold their economic and administrative interests against the arrogance shown by some governors, at variance with the most reductive metropolitan policies.
Periodical publications such as O Arauto Africano, O Pharol do Povo, and O Echo de Angola were the expression of a generation whose primary distinction was a fierce autodidactism, since higher education was beyond reach for most of its collaborators and because, generally speaking, after the first two years of secondary school, it was impossible to pursue further education without leaving Angola.
To this end, the presence of Protestant missionaries was crucial, since they made a reality out of the ideology of “self-sufficiency” by opening schoolrooms where they would valorise local knowledge and oral literature, which they even tried to fix into written languages, drawing up grammars and dictionaries. Most of the missions were established in the northern part of the country, where Portuguese penetration was superficial and the colonial authorities had no choice but to tolerate the thriving of foreign commercial enterprises and missions, which helped the locals involved to develop a critical sense and to take into consideration their African roots, serving as a testing ground for the creation of a national literature.18