Anti-Colonial Resistance, Literary Works and State Imprisonment Policies of the Portuguese Regime in Angola, Portugal and Mozambique During the 1950s and 1960s

This paper discusses the colonial Portuguese regime’s policies of state imprisonment and the resistance to those polices manifest in literary works and editorials produced in Angola and Mozambique between the 1950s and ’60s—texts that position these conflicts in relation to global dynamics. This article fills in gaps in existing scholarship by returning to primary archival sources: correspondence, censored letters, and official reports from the Portuguese political police (PIDE) held at the Archives of Torre do Tombo (ANTT). The Salazar regime was characterized by colonial propaganda, the censorship system, and political persecution of intellectuals and writers. In this context, anti-colonial claims for autonomy or independence appeared in individual publications and collective editorial projects. Suffering from cruel repression by PIDE, authors like Luandino Vieira, José Craveirinha, Noémia de Sousa, Alda Espírito Santo, and Deolinda Rodrigues were either imprisoned and displaced in concentration camps in Angola, Mozambique, and Cape Verde or forced into exile. Through the combination of distant readings and archival research, I highlight how multiple oppressions and subalternities of gender, race, and class converged in a state policy aiming to sanction and annihilate forms of resistance. I also examine claims based on Pan-Africanism and the Négritude movement, which counteracted the Portuguese colonial theory of Luso-tropicalism and its notion of civilizing mission. In this analysis, literary works and diaries complement archival resources and serve as historical evidence of how Pan-African solidarity and internationalism helped the resistance against a project of mass confinement of political opponents.

1950s-1960s · Angola · anti-colonial resistance · Cape verde · Censorship · civilizing mission · Concentration camps · Estado Novo · Exile · José Craveirinha · Luandino Vieira · Lusotropicalism · Mozambique · negritude · Noémia de Sousa · Pan-Africanism · partial integro-differential equations · political persecution of writers · Portuguese colonialism · subalternity · African history and culture studies · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Literature, Culture, and Criticism