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O Boletim Oficial da Província de Angola, a governmental publication founded in 1845 under the administration of Governor-General Pedro Alexandrino da Cunha, was the starting point of the development of journalism that, supported in the beginning by the small local European elite, was destined to take root in the capital and to rapidly increase during the following decades; by the end of the century, as recorded by Carlos Ervedosa, a total of forty-six periodicals had been printed.14 A decree enacted in 1856 legalised the “free press” in the overseas dominions, and in 1866 the first issue of A Civilização da África Portuguesa was published, a small self-funded weekly publication dedicated to administrative, economic, industrial, and commercial concerns, which inaugurated the second phase of the history of Angolan journalism.
The definition “free press” is, of course, quite rough if applied to Angola, and it is more correct to say that “settlers and locals tended to define as ‘free press’ the publications issued by private printers, in order to distinguish them from the official governmental gazette”.15 If it is true that a certain number of publications saw the light during the second half of the nineteenth century, it is also true that their life was never easy, the colonial censorship being constantly on the watch.
Just to mention a few episodes that had a strong impact on the local public opinion of the time, in 1842 rumours spread that a printing press had been loaded in Lisbon and was bound for Luanda, where it was supposed to be installed. The Portuguese authorities, fearing such a powerful asset in the hands of the natives, decided to turn aside the ship and let it sink off the Moçâmedes coast. The owner of the printing press was Joaquim António de Carvalho e Meneses, mulatto writer and intellectual, coming back to his native land to assume the post of secretary-treasurer in Luanda. José de Fontes Pereira’s comment shows how the presence of the Portuguese was substantially felt as a burden, hindering every kind of enhancement in the country: “aware of the power that such a skilled politician could deploy using a weapon [the printing press] that is so dangerous to the interests of the metropolis, in Portugal they preferred to lose a ship rather than allow this engine of civilization to disembark in Luanda!”16