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In order to expand its control over the region, Portugal desperately needed the support of this kind of noncoloniser urban elite, which was also used as an assimilating force, or better as a source of dissemination of a relevant model of social behaviour. Thus, until the 1850s, great creole merchants and inland chiefs dealt in captive slaves who were bound for export to Brazil via Cape Verde and São Tomé: the tribal aristocracy and the creole bourgeoisie thrived on the profits of overseas trade and lived in style, consuming imported alcoholic beverages and wearing European clothes.
After the abolition, however, their social and economic position was eroded by an influx of petty merchants and bureaucrats from Portugal who wished to grasp the commercial and employment opportunities created by a new and modern colonial order, anxious to keep up with other European colonial powers engaged in the partition of the African continent.
This book thus considers the first intellectuals, the early printed publications in the country, and the pioneers of Angolan literature who, feeling the need to raise their roots to higher dignity, wrote not only grammars and dictionaries but also poetry, fiction, and, of course, incendiary articles denouncing exploitation, racism, and the different treatment afforded by the colonial authorities to Portuguese expatriates and natives.
They were fully aware of the fact that their past function as a link between the few rulers sent from the metropolis and the African inland tribes was indispensable to the perpetration of the colonial system—that is to say the system guaranteeing them a privileged condition as well as exposure to European culture. On the other hand, they were thwarted by the impossibility of achieving the highest social standing in their own homeland.
Their first reaction was the invention of a new identity, introducing the terms filhos da terra, filhos do país, and the adjective Angolense in order to define themselves in clear opposition to both the Portuguese and the “uncivilised” black natives.