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The capitães, who were both landlords and managers of property, could dispose of resources, allowing them to buy or hunt for slaves and feed them, build quarters and plantations, equip private armies, raise forts, and hire garrisons. Quite different was the fate of the poor settler coming—and often forced to come—from Minho, Algarve, or Madeira, who disembarked alone and seminaked on the African coast, with no protection or resources to help him face the unkind climatic conditions and find his way through the wilderness.
In order to provide a valid interdisciplinary approach to the main theme of the investigation, the structure of the study is imagined as follows. The purpose of chapter 1 is to overcome some of the myths that could hinder a correct analysis of the Portuguese overseas expansion. In the Angolan case, the research has to be focused on the persistence of die-hard stereotypes such as the overstatement of a five-century-old Portuguese presence in Angola and on the influence of the work of Gilberto Freyre on twentieth-century Portuguese colonial ideology.
Chapter 2, dedicated to nineteenth-century Angola and its intellectual setting, investigates the literary and cultural influences spread throughout the third pole of the axis of Portugal, Brazil, and Angola. Centuries of communication through the transatlantic trade route left in that part of Africa many literary and linguistic vestiges of relations with America and Europe. From the second half of the nineteenth century on, many factors contributed to the establishment of a first, even if modest, authentic literary nucleus of Angola: the opening of the harbours to foreign ships, the convergence of European and Brazilian influences––the former, channelled and directed through Portugal, generally resulted as the predominant one, but in the Angolan case, the latter is no less piercing––the introduction of the “free press”, and the settling down of a constitutional metropolitan government after the liberal victory in the Civil War.
Chapter 3 is focused on the Luanda intellectual scene, aiming to set against its background a Euro-African minority suspended between romantic European culture and Kimbundu oral tradition. The starting point of Angolan literature traditionally overlaps with the 1849 publication of Espontaneidades da Minha Alma by José da Silva Maia Ferreira.