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It starts through the observation of the differences existing among the land, the people, and the coloniser country; it goes on through acquisition of awareness in respect to problems related to the colour of the skin, through the rejection of injustice; and it creates its own traditions and historical events; and, from then on, it claims independence and state organisation.
Since the present study aims to make its way through cultural ethnic, and social border zones, however, it is important not to underrate a huge barrier in relation to issues regarding a Lusophone context. Beyond the difficulties of finding sources and information, due to the thirty-year-long civil war following the declaration of independence in 1975, a correct interpretation of the Angolan reality has been overshadowed for a long time by the persistence of a series of exploited and abused myths, traditions, and rhetoric constructions aimed at praising Portuguese overseas expansion.
As deeply investigated in chapter 1, during the twentieth century, powerful myths related to Lusotropicalism or to the effective colonial penetration in Angola contributed to characterising and affecting the Portuguese vision of its own overseas empire—rendering the celebration of a presumed widespread creoleness according to propagandist demands.
The most pernicious tendency affecting Lusotropicalism—a special affinity for the tropics that the Portuguese, according to the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, entertained to a greater extent than did other Europeans—is probably the association of all the former Portuguese dominions under a common idea of joyful miscegenation. That would be the effect made possible by the innate capacity of adaptation peculiar to the Portuguese abroad and by the expansion of their faith and values, by means of a cultural dialogue that, rude and all loving at the same time, ensured a space of interaction between Europeans and natives. It is a tempting and easily exploitable theorisation that does not bear up to a more exhaustive examination. Comparing Brazilian and Angolan realities is in itself a risky operation, even if solely from the sociological point of view entertained by Gilberto Freyre. The original colonisation of Brazil, for instance, was executed through the establishment of a feudal system based on donations.