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Strongly influenced by Brazilian Romanticism, and particularly by Gonçalves Dias’ native pride, Maia Ferreira celebrated his homeland through a mixture of local topics, on one side, and typical European romantic forms, on the other, revealing aspects of the social life shared by the bourgeoisie based in Luanda and Benguela. A second phase, developed during the 1880s and 1890s by Alfredo Troni, Pedro Félix Machado, and Joaquim Dias Cordeiro da Matta, is rather marked by Portuguese Realism, and its distinction resides in the fact that in the texts produced at this stage, natives are frequently depicted as individuals to whom social ascension is not totally precluded in an intermediate space existing between the discursive space of African textual traditions and the personal relations with Portuguese masters.
With the advent of the new century, Angolan literature entered a phase that can be defined as fully nativist, marked as it is by the claim to equality, fraternity, and by a conscious and peremptory attitude inclined toward autonomist pretensions. The generation of 1900 (Pedro da Paixão Franco and the anonymous authors of Voz de Angola Clamando no Deserto) inherited the legacy of its predecessors and developed different forms of civic struggle. Paradoxically, as witnessed by António de Assis Júnior, repression grew concomitantly with the settling down of Portugal’s first republic, a regime that managed to definitively wipe out both the monarchy and the relative freedom of expression allowed to overseas territories during the previous administrations. The union between this kind of Angolan intellectuality and written press, therefore, came to an end.
The first part of chapter 4 reflects on the meaning of the word “creole” in order to discuss the pertinence of this adjective for the definition of the social fragment analysed, and to hone the investigation under cultural, biological, and linguistic points of view.
After comparing the differences between Angolan reality and accepted creole spaces originating in the Portuguese-speaking world (Cape Verde and São Tomé), the investigation will proceed to throw light on the features of the Angolan “creole islands”, to use the famous and controversial definition by Mário António, going beyond the ideological limits imposed throughout the twentieth century by contemporary Portuguese criticism, respectively inspired by apologists and detractors of the colonial effort.