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With the rise of both Black Nationalism and armed struggle still in the future, as well as the international recognition attributed to acclaimed contemporary writers, such as Pepetela and Luandino Vieira, and more in general, to Angolan militant literature from the 1950s onwards, the period of Angolan history that is at the centre of this investigation still presents wide-open spaces. In addition to that, the literary production that flourished during those years is generally dismissed as minor colonial literature or, at best, celebrated by the apologists of the colonial empire as the outcome and the evidence attesting to the existence of a multicultural intellectual creole elite originated by the proverbial and overrated Portuguese “plasticity”. According to this reasoning, the idealised pervasive practice of interracial marriages would be an irrefutable proof indicating a total absence of racism among the Portuguese.
On the other side, it is not a surprise if the end of the colonial period coincided with a call for the reafricanisation of the new political elites governing Angola and with the banishment of any kind of syndrome evoking the colonial past, let alone the recognition of the intellectual vibrancy and legitimacy of a distinct creole perspective.
When speaking about contemporary literature, for instance, Angolan book reviewer Luís Kandjimbo does not consider authentically “Angolan” the well-known Pepetela’s novel Yaka, wondering if it could be indeed defined as a colonial novel, since it emphasises “a kind of alterity built upon a fictional discourse in which, as absolute protagonist, the (creole) Semedo family symbolises the other in a society where black characters are reduced to mere walk-on figures or objects of observation…The preponderance of a vision subduing history and its real actors deprives the novel of any worthiness, bringing into question whether it could belong to the genre classified as historical novel”.1
Pepetela was born and raised in the colonial society as a white Angolan, but this did not prevent him from joining the national struggle for freedom against the Portuguese (1961–1974), while Yaka is a novel portraying the Benguela creole society from the end of the nineteenth century to the eve of independence.