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In the late nineteenth century, Africans still controlled trade in the plateaus of the interior, despite Portuguese expansion. The Ovimbundu proved to be highly successful intermediaries on the southern trade route that ran from the Bié Plateau to Benguela. The Ovimbundu were more competitive than white, mulatto, or “civilised” black traders, who often had to pay tribute and fines to African chiefs if they wanted to cross their territories. By the mid-1880s the Ovimbundu by and large had replaced them. The Tchokwe and Imbangala also took advantage of their positions in the interior to extend their control over the region’s trade.25 Nonetheless, Portuguese encroachments and the imposition of European rule progressively limited the political freedom of these groups and diminished their prosperity.
Immigration changes came into full effect, and competition for places that were traditionally the prerogative of Euro-Africans became ruthless, upsetting the previous politicoeconomical and sociocultural schemes. The recently arrived settlers forced both old towns and small demographic nuclei to undertake new economic and cultural activities and, crushed by the colonial wave, blacks and mulattos tended to quit the towns and recede to the shantytowns. Consequently, the role model provided by the journalistic activity that previously invigorated the social life of the colony and by the diffusion of small local publications gradually lost its fundamental function. Once it had become clear that the local political debate that had stimulated so many young Angolenses was outmoded, and that internal and export trade, demographic development, and the new pace assumed by society gave life to concerns that could have been hardly satisfied by a periodical press, the local colonial bourgeoisie had to let go of the control of its environment: it was no longer possible to liven up the political life of towns like Luanda and Benguela with such small resources.
In 1909 the journal O Angolense was suppressed due to misunderstanding among its founding members Francisco das Necessidades Castelbranco (director), Augusto Silvério Ferreira and Pedro da Paixão Franco (editors), and Eusébio Velasco Galiano (publisher), and by a legal process to which the journal was called into question. In 1913 Governor-General Norton de Matos ordered the suspension of O Independente and A Verdade, deeming that those publications posed a profound material danger to the colony’s stability.