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According to the latter stream, the point is that what researchers, or at least most of them, tend to designate as “creole” in reality would be nothing more than a petty local Luso-Angolan bourgeoisie together with its customer base, a class that has never considered itself to be “creole”. However, the use of this term allows a stance outside a racial framework to narrate the history of a heterogeneous group: the term “creole” is meant to define, in this study, a sociocultural category encompassing, conveniently, a vast range of heterogeneous elements from the descendants of Europeans born locally—as many white as mestiço—to the detribalised Africans, more or less adapted to European culture, all of whom formed an intermediate group between the Europeans of the metropolis and the uneducated native rural population.
Finally, the second section of the chapter applies the concepts of nation and nationalism to late nineteenth-century Angolan claims, trying to understand whether it is possible to define them as nationalistic claims, or more correct to stick to Pélissier’s definition that refers to protonationalistic claims. Are they perhaps the outcome of a mere nativist uproar, based on an isolated case of colonial bourgeois discontent?