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It is also evident that the vast majority of the inhabitants of the country were completely excluded from the formulation of these claims, and that the same happened for the concept of the country itself; at that time, the notion of Angola was grounded on the limited—if compared with the actual size of the country, that is, the territory claimed by the Portuguese at the end of the nineteenth century—surface of the land effectively occupied and “civilised” by the colonial rulers: the towns of Luanda, Benguela, Moçâmedes (present-day Namibe) and related districts, the river Kwanza region, and a few more garrison houses, trading posts, fazendas, and frontierlike small inland settlements.
This first wave of dissidence was most assuredly born and raised inside the colonial milieu itself and was promoted by a local and heterogeneous urban social stratum that embraced and opposed at the same time both its European and African background; consequently, it seems that the fate of the so-called “civilised” Africans was to be eternally confined in a sort of limbo that precluded any possible access to either the metropolitan or the African world.
Nonetheless, we are facing the first sign of “modern” resistance to colonial rule in Angola: the historical and cultural worthiness of the texts produced—as well as the development of a cognitive inquiry around the discourse of nativism, protonationalism, and nationalism—cannot be ignored, especially in the light of the influence exerted by these forerunners on the following generations. Already in 1891, for instance, the only and anonymous issue of the satirical journal O Tomate featured an article titled “The Independence of Angola”. Its main purpose was to capture the family connections and interrelationships that took place during the whole colonial period between the sons of the country of the coast and the rebel African chiefs based in the hinterland. For the first time, the protagonists of the resistance against Portuguese penetration were cheered as heroes.3
Almost one century later, MPLA founder Mário de Andrade, interviewed in 1982 by the French sociologist Christine Messiant on the birth of Angolan nationalism, said,