In his 1983 address at the symposium “Continuar Cabral” [Continuing Cabral], Angolan intellectual Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928–1990) outlines a key contrast between two theoretical giants of African decolonization: Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral. Analyzing how each of the two theorists saw the relationship between armed struggle and cultural decolonization, Andrade lauds both of their understanding of the mutual constitution of political independence and the production of a new national culture. However, Andrade contrasts their visions of the cultural process: he critiques what he sees as Fanon’s “mechanistic” view that a new culture would “spontaneously” arise from the peasantry through armed struggle (Andrade Reference Andrade, Lanie, Lanie and Fabienne2024a, 140; Reference Andrade1984, 277), while looking more favorably on Cabral’s idea of a more managed cultural process, integrating different social sectors through a “socio-cultural osmosis” that would together produce cultural and political liberation (Reference Andrade, Lanie, Lanie and Fabienne2024a, 142; Reference Andrade1984, 280). The stakes of the debate that Andrade stages between Fanon and Cabral has to do with a core question behind his four decades of writing about literature, culture, and politics: how do intellectuals contribute to the process of decolonization? This article examines Andrade’s writing produced during and after independence in the model he theorizes through his reading of Cabral. Through this analysis, Andrade emerges as a key cultural agent in the production of African literary culture in Portuguese in the twentieth century.
Like many African writers and intellectuals of his generation, Andrade played an important political role in decolonization: he was a co-founder of the Angolan MPLA,Footnote 1 which became Angola’s principal political party after independence, and produced important intellectual work analyzing the roots of nationalist ideologies across Portuguese-speaking Africa in the last decade of his life. He has been most widely studied for theorizing and editing the primary works of the Negritude literary movement in Portuguese, the poetry of protest against Portuguese colonization and of intellectual decolonization produced by writers from across the five nations then under Portuguese colonial occupation (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe). Critics have understandably focused on his roles in these two realms: his multiple editions of Negritude anthologies in both Portuguese and French throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and his work documenting and interpreting the intellectual roots of nationalism in Lusophone Africa. His work offers some of the most important frameworks for understanding the development of anti-colonial movements over the course of the twentieth century, and for many critics, founded the field of sociology in Lusophone Africa (Fonseca Reference Mata and Padilha2000, 75; Kandjimbo Reference Kandjimbo, Mata and Padilha2000, 54; Kagibanga Reference Kagibanga1998, 299; Laranjeira Reference Laranjeira1995, 124–26; Oliveira Reference Oliveira, Mata and Padilha2000, 101–102; Tindó Secco Reference Secco, Lucia, Mata and Padilha2000, 116).
However, Andrade’s extensive writing and editorial work on African culture produced during the liberation struggle—that is, after Negritude—is one way in which he shaped the cultural transformation that revolutionary nationalism demanded as the five Lusophone nations won their independence from Portugal. This writing thus emerges as an important political intervention into Lusophone Africa’s transition to independence, one that Andrade understood to demand a turn away from the dyad of colonizer-colonized to focus on cultural conversations within and across decolonizing communities.Footnote 2 This article analyzes this lesser-known archive of Andrade’s writings on literature and cultural production that emerged during and after the anti-colonial armed struggle, published from the late 1960s to 1980s, some of which was recently made available to scholars through the digitalization project of the Portugal-based Mário Soares and Maria Barroso Foundation in collaboration with Andrade’s family. This article argues that during and after Lusophone Africa’s active fight for independence, Andrade emerged as a key architect of Lusophone African culture. He theorized how literature is transformed by the cultural “forge” of the battlefield, as well as the role that culture should have after independence of restoring a process of national community-building, a re-Africanization of cultural forms, and as a mode to hold those in power to account. I proceed by analyzing his interventions into a variety of different arenas, each of which is shaped by the political transformation underway in the transition to independence, in escalating scale: his attention to literary language, his use of the technology of the anthology, and his theorization of the role of cultural institutions. I conclude with a short discussion on his final works bringing each of these strands together in his longer-scale excavation of the roots of African nationalism. This reading of his work beyond Negritude thus diversifies our understanding of the intellectual fields of Lusophone African culture and theories of African decolonization.
The “Semantic Revolution”
Andrade’s understanding of culture was intimately attentive to the historical conditions that produced particular cultural forms. For Andrade and other thinkers of Negritude, this movement—focused on defining, valorizing, and rehabilitating a Black and African cultural identity—was a way of re-encountering their Africanity in a context of colonial alienation. As he discussed repeatedly in various different publications, Andrade understood colonial alienation as having two primary forms. First, colonialism deprived the colonized, especially the educated elite, of access to their own cultural identity, by devaluing any cultural expression of African origin and imposing European culture, language, and civilization on colonial subjects (Andrade Reference Andrade2012, 1–2). Second, colonialism forced whatever remained of African traditions into underground secrecy, where it survived in diminished form but largely failed to serve as a means of cultural cohesion or continuity especially among social classes (Andrade Reference Andrade and de Andrade1958a, viii; 1982a, 15; Reference Andrade1998, 185). Andrade’s anthologizing of Negritude poetry in Portuguese together with São-Tomean poet Francisco Tenreiro in Poesia negra de expressão portuguesa in Lisbon in 1953 coincided with his association with other key Lusophone African intellectuals of the era. Specifically, he understood a process that he referred to as a “re-Africanization of souls” to emerge from his organization with Tenreiro of a Centro de Estudos Africanos [Center for African Studies], a larger educational initiative to learn about African history, culture, social and political organization, and so on (Andrade Reference Andrade1982a, 16; Laban and Andrade Reference Laban and Andrade1997, 80). Recent critical work continues to yield important new insights into the rich networks in which Andrade moved that comprised this key moment in Lusophone African intellectual history: for example, the central role that women played as cultural producers and political actors (Alfieri Reference Alfieri2021; Passos Reference Passos2020; Rodrigues and Sheldon Reference Rodrigues and Sheldon2010), or the ways that Negritude operated as a highly mutable and multilingual cultural phenomenon that forged the ground for later transnational anti-colonial movements (Gruffydd Jones Reference Gruffydd Jones2023; Reza Reference Reza2024).Footnote 3 Reza in particular has traced the ways in which Andrade understood the coordinated anti-colonial movements that emerged in the 1960s as ideological inheritors of Negritude (2024, 147–48), a position that Andrade makes clear elsewhere, including in the last interview he granted before his death (Agualusa Reference Agualusa1990, 12).
Andrade insisted, however, that there was an important historical pivot conditioned by Lusophone Africa’s battles for political independence in the 1960s, that produced both new cultural forms and a new analytical code for understanding them. In his writing from the late 1960s to 1980s, Andrade outlined the ways in which he saw anti-colonial struggle and then independence transform Lusophone African culture. He also shaped how readers could access and understand these shifts through his work collecting and disseminating literature. In many ways, he saw the transformation of culture that took place via decolonization and nation-building—including its contents, its forms, and its infrastructure—as a dialectical fulfillment of the conditions of alienation and anguished denial of humanity to Black and African people that had spurred the Negritude movements in the first half of the twentieth century.
Though Andrade understood the important tasks of Negritude to restore humanity to colonized peoples by creating a positive image of Blackness and Africanity and to denounce the forces of colonialism that oppressed people of African descent (Andrade Reference Andrade2012, 1; Reference Andrade and de Andrade1958a, xiv), he acknowledged that Negritude spoke to a small group of Westernized colonial subjects, generally located in European capitals, as well as to a European public. Even at the time of his documentation of this poetry in the 1950s, he recognized that a new cultural form with a different cultural language would be necessary to reach the wider colonized public who would drive political and cultural decolonization: “since this poetry is condemned to reach only a small minority of Africans, who can ignore the reality that it must give way to another one, cadenced in the ‘new language of the future’?” (Andrade Reference Andrade, Lanie, Lanie and Fabienne2024e, 33–34) [“Condenada a atingir apenas as minorias africanas, quem ignora que esta poesia terá de ceder lugar a uma outra, ritmada na ‘linguagem nova do futuro’?”] (Andrade Reference Andrade and de Andrade1958a, xiv).
Andrade saw these changes to language and cultural forms as mutually constitutive with anti-colonial and pro-nationalist politics, and he documented and theorized them extensively in the 1960s and 1970s (Millar Reference Millar, Bystrom, Popescu and Zien2021, 53–54). The wars for independence in the African nations then-colonized by Portugal had begun in Angola in 1961 and spread to Guinea-Bissau (in 1963) and Mozambique (in 1964) soon after. Andrade not only helped found Angola’s MPLA, but was also involved in the organizations coordinating nationalist movements across Lusophone Africa, especially the CONCP.Footnote 4 He understood the mutual dependence of the various nationalist movements on political coordination to extend to cultural decolonization as well. In his address to the Cultural Congress of Havana in 1968 and his subsequent report on the Congress for the Moroccan cultural review Souffles, for example, he argued that writers in the decolonizing world must stop writing for Europe, and write for each other. Such a process would produce new forms of expression:
The cultural character that will give meaning to the emergence of the nation is coming into view. As they identify themselves with the revolutionary content of the changes underway, intellectuals acquire new forms of expression. A new literature arises from the fire of combat. … And the songs of the old Negritude are drowned out by the spluttering of these “miraculous weapons”: … “There is a message of justice in each bullet that I shoot” [Jorge Rebelo]. (Andrade Reference Andrade, Lanie, Lanie and Fabienne2024f, 47)
[“On voit apparaître la personnalité culturelle qui donnera un sens à l’émergence de la nation. En s’identifiant avec le contenu révolutionnaire des mutations en cours, les intellectuels apprennent de nouvelles formes d’expression. Une nouvelle littérature surgit dans le feu du combat. […] Et les chants de la vieille négritude sont étouffés par le crépitement de ces <<armes miraculeuses>>: … “Il y a un message de justice / Dans chaque balle que je tire.” {Jorge Rebelo}”.] (Andrade Reference Andrade1968, 47)
Where Negritude had represented the language of a small elite, the new literature would be a literature of the “people.” Where Negritude had appealed to Europe for legitimacy in part by Negritude writers’ use of colonial languages, the new literature would evidence a “semantic revolution,” by “inserting an African linguistic corpus” into the structures of colonial languages (Andrade Reference Andrade, Lanie, Lanie and Fabienne2024f, 48). This “African linguistic corpus” would transform European languages into vehicles of decolonization and mutual understanding across the decolonizing world. As Andrade says more forcefully in his report on the Congress in Havana, “the time has come to move beyond Negritude” (Reference Andrade, Lanie, Lanie and Fabienne2024g, 54). For Andrade, Negritude had forged Black people’s becoming aware of their Blackness under colonial conditions that denied them a social coherence independent of the colonial metropole. However, now writers and intellectuals must see revolution leading to national independence—rather than Blackness—as the forge for their collective identity, and the source of their cultural production (Reference Andrade, Lanie, Lanie and Fabienne2024g, 54).
What would this “semantic revolution” look like? In his analyses of particular literary figures as well as in his introductions to literary anthologies, Andrade prioritizes works that enact the “Africanization” of colonial languages. Crucially, he sees that “Africanization” as part of the decolonization process. While Andrade supported and wrote about culture in languages that originated in Africa, he was also conscious of the practical necessity, as well as the aesthetic and political possibilities, of African-inflected variants of colonial languages. He argued that African influences transform the European linguistic vehicle of colonial estrangement into an African one of anti-colonial resistance and creativity. He finds an outstanding example of such linguistic innovation in Angolan writer José Luandino Vieira’s (b. 1935) fiction. Vieira’s anti-colonial novel A Vida Verdadeira de Domingos Xavier [The Real Life of Domingos Xavier], written in 1961, was censored by the colonial apparatus. Andrade’s translation to French of A Vida Verdadeira and Vieira’s short story “O Fato Completo de Lucas Matesso” [Lucas Matesso’s Suit] in 1971 was a key mode of circulation for Vieira’s work until it was officially published in Portuguese in 1974. In the introduction, Andrade identifies how the social and political positions of the works’ speakers enact the linguistic revolution he had theorized in his address in Havana.
Andrade argues that African speakers of Portuguese, particularly in the musseques, or urban Angola’s informal neighborhoods designated for African inhabitants, transform the language phonetically and syntactically as they shape Portuguese according to the sounds and syntax of languages such as Kimbundu. They transform it semantically as they both incorporate popular speech and give phrases and words new meanings that produces new social and political codes among the African subjects who use them. As an example of the latter phenomenon, Andrade points to how the term “fato completo” has different meanings for Portuguese and Angolan speakers.
In Vieira’s short story “O Fato Completo de Lucas Matesso,” the protagonist Lucas Matesso is imprisoned and tortured by the colonial police for presumed anti-colonial organizing. When a guard overhears his partner, Maria, whisper to him that she will bring him a “fato completo,” the guard becomes convinced that the “suit” is a vehicle for a hidden note. Finding no suit and no note among the clothes that Maria supplies for him, the guards beat him furiously. The story hinges on the guards’ ignorance of the Angolan use of the term: “That food made of palm oil beans, with palm oil fish, banana and everything, that everyone in the musseques has the habit of calling ‘fato completo’” [“Essa comida de feijão de azeite-palma com peixe de azeite-palma, a banana e tudo, que toda a gente nos musseques tem só a mania de chamar de ‘fato completo’”] (Vieira Reference Vieira2007, 101).Footnote 5 The miscommunication has a multifaceted meaning: beyond simply poking fun at the Portuguese guards’ ignorance, the Angolan fato completo literally sustains Lucas Matesso as he struggles against the torture and starvation that the guards use to try to extract information from him about the clandestine activities of anti-colonial activists. In parallel, the resignification of the Portuguese phrase to describe something uniquely Angolan nourishes and invigorates the Africanizing of the Portuguese language. It thus acquires a new political charge in the process.
For Andrade, such resignification enacts a revolutionary linguistic praxis befitting the anti-colonial messaging that serves as the core of Vieira’s works (Andrade Reference Andrade, Lanie, Lanie and Fabienne2024h, 80). As he argues in the introduction to his anthology of African prose written in Portuguese, “We owe to Luandino Vieira not just a realist painting of the various human destines of the Angolan capital’s periphery but also a portrait of the nationalist militant of our times … Both broaden realist prose’s linguistic horizons to [include] the irruption of popular speech” [“A Luandino Vieira não se deve somente a pintura realista dos vários destinos humanos da periferia da capital de Angola mas igualmente o retrato do militante nacionalista do nosso tempo… Um e outro alargam os horizontes linguísticos da corrente realista da prosa à irrupção das falas populares” (Andrade Reference Andrade1970, xv).
In shaping how his audience should understand Lusophone African literature produced during the decolonization struggle, which I examine in more detail in the next section, Andrade thus prioritizes how the armed struggle transforms language. This is the primary subject of his analysis of work by fellow Angolan poet Fernando Costa Andrade (1936–2009) in the introduction that Andrade penned to Costa Andrade’s poetry collection Poesia com Armas [Poetry with Weapons] (1975). Poesia com Armas contains poems drawn from Costa Andrade’s notebooks produced in combat, and Mário de Andrade focuses particularly on the poetry that reflects Costa Andrade’s personal experiences as a militant in Angola’s war of independence. Mário de Andrade understands the armed struggle as the forge for a dialectical synthesis, where the struggle produces a poet and a poetry whose language unifies the intellectual class with the people:
Costa Andrade the militant makes his body and his poetry one, becoming ontologically the poet of actions and weapons. Insofar as he is a resistance fighter, a social actor on the armed front of the Angolan people’s liberation process, he understands how to locate the pulsing rhythm of combat in the heart of collective experience. And, in turn, the guerillas recognize themselves in the poetry of Costa Andrade. (Andrade Reference Andrade, Lanie, Lanie and Fabienne2024a, 116)
[“o militante Costa Andrade faz corpo com a poesia, torna-se ontologicamente o poeta dos feitos de armas. Enquanto partisan, actor social na frente armada do processo libertador do povo angolano, sabe encontrar no âmago da experiência colectiva o ritmo das pulsações combatentes. E os guerrilheiros reconhecem-se na poesia de Costa Andrade”] (Reference Costa Andrade1975, 9–10).
As a result, the poetry itself is a poetry of wartime: its themes, language, and rhythms are those connected with the struggle, which for Andrade are thus political weapons that lead to independence (1975, 18).
Mário de Andrade outlines the aesthetic characteristics that for him achieve this unity between the poet and the guerrilla, and therefore between cultural and political struggle. They include Costa Andrade’s spare language, his exaltation of the battle for liberation, and an identification of the Angolan landscape with the soldiers, from which emanate the poet’s and the poetry’s ethical commitments to the values of liberty and community. For example, in Costa Andrade’s poem “A dor” [Pain], the poet contemplates the pain of a “fallen tree,” which becomes a metaphorical reflection of the social upheaval of soldiers leaving for war and dying in battle:
In its exaltation of the guerrilla fighter’s heroic death, which collective memory/poetry will memorialize, this poem exemplifies what Mário de Andrade sees as a necessary coherence between the artistic and political commitments of the militant-poet (1975, 16). This poetry’s ability to capture the experience that serves as the substratum of a new, independent collective—the emergent nations—therefore rescues it, according to Andrade, from being merely a circumstantial reflection of a particular time and place. For Mário de Andrade, this poetry/struggle brings into being a new historical subject vested with angolanidade, or Angolanness. His vision of the co-constitution of cultural and political transformation evinces, in his analysis, the enduring reverberation Costa Andrade’s transformations of poetic language, even if they are linked to the particular experiences of the battlefield (1975, 17–18).
Anthology as a political weapon
Andrade’s literary anthologies are another important mode of his theorizing and enacting cultural transformation during decolonization. In Lusophone Africa’s late colonial period, journals and anthologies were the most important forms of dissemination of written culture. However, far beyond solely a means of dissemination, they were also sites of cultural and political organizing, and a means of forging nationalist ideologies separate from the colonial imposition of a unified culture, history, and language centered in the European metropole. In the early independence period, anthologies played a similar role of documenting and systematizing a cultural tradition under the aegis of the new nationalist ideologies that would serve as the organizing and legitimating logic of pre-independence cultural production. Kathleen Gyssels, in her analysis of the role of anthologizing in the Francophone Négritude tradition that served as a vital point of reference for Andrade, points out the fundamental role of collecting marginalized writers’ and artists’ works, such that together they became legible as parts of a system:
[Anthologies] are essential to the creation of a specific corpus that needs to be presented as a subsystem, one that seeks legitimacy through editorial strategies. Many intellectuals … have served as intermediaries between artists and their potential audiences with respect to black literature and postcolonial literature…. Many of these thinkers—themselves poets and writers—have promoted literature from the African continent and the black Atlantic world; that is, the African diaspora in the Americas and Europe. In fact, it is hard to imagine how literary schools such as the Harlem Renaissance could have existed without its prominent members publishing collections of their colleagues’ writings. (Gyssels Reference Gyssels2018, 2–3)
In the context of the extreme vigilance and censorship of Portugal’s New State dictatorship, the stakes of publishing were high. Alfredo Margarido points out that anthologies like the ones produced by the state-sponsored Casa dos Estudantes do Império [House of the Students of the Empire] in the 1950s–1960s, a cultural institution with which many of the young African students and intellectuals (including Margarido) in Lisbon associated, had the potential to reorganize the ways that readers and writers understood themselves in relation to their communities. Anthologies allowed them to see themselves as part of regional and national African cultural traditions distinct from the colonial center (Margarido Reference Margarido1994, 15–17). This was a provocative position: the colonial dictatorship circulated propaganda with slogans such as “Portugal não é um país pequeno” [Portugal is not a small country], emphasizing the unity of the European metropole with its African colonies.Footnote 6 It followed that the “overseas provinces,” the euphemism the dictatorship employed to describe the colonies, should look toward the cultural traditions that originated and emanated from the center of the empire. To state that African subjects had their own coherent traditions defied the ideology of colonial unity.
Andrade was a key actor in systematizing Lusophone African literatures as distinct from metropolitan literatures, as well as the subsequent national literary systems of the five nations. His anthologies thus intervene into the political process underway in decolonization. In addition to the two poetry collections most closely associated with Lusophone Negritude in 1953 and 1958, and two additional anthologies of Lusophone Negritude poetry translated to French in 1961 and 1969, Andrade published a short anthology of prose in 1970, followed by a more expansive two-volume poetry anthology in Portuguese, titled Na Noite Grávida de Punhais (Andrade, Reference Andrade1980a) (In the Night Pregnant with Daggers, 1976) and O Canto Armado (Songs of Arms, 1979). Carmen Tindó Secco emphasizes the important role that these latter two volumes played in systematizing African literature in Portuguese, citing Margarido to show how Andrade considered the history of Portuguese colonial occupation and anti-colonial struggle that shaped the newly independent African nations as important substrates that linked the range of African literature written in Portuguese as part of a shared cultural and political system (Tindó Secco Reference Secco, Lucia, Mata and Padilha2000, 116–17).
Andrade divides the poetry anthologies at the moment that, in his theorization, language and culture undergo the radical transformations linked to the independence struggle: the moment the anti-colonial revolutions get underway. Each volume, organized thematically, includes poets from the five African nations that emerged from Portuguese colonization. Though a full examination of the anthologies is beyond the scope of this discussion, I will focus here on two particular aspects that mark Andrade’s theoretical investment in the interlinked processes of ideological and linguistic transformation through armed struggle: his inclusion of Creole languages, and his integration of collectively authored songs and poems.
In the preface to the first volume, Na Noite Grávida de Punhais, Andrade reiterates the linguistic-ideological issue that had preoccupied him in earlier analyses of culture: the fact that it was produced in the “colonizer’s language,” and thus underscored the social and educational division between the African elite and the popular masses (Reference Andrade1980b). Here, again, Andrade stakes his ideological ground: for him, armed struggle against colonial forces initiated in the 1960s was the sociohistorical process that breached the linguistic and class divide between the rural peasantry and the urban intellectual class. Crucially, however, and here deviating from Fanon’s suspicion of national parties, Andrade specifically sees a role for the political party as a “forge” for this ideological-aesthetic process. Together, the party leadership and the rural masses would produce a new literature in a new linguistic code reflective of the new national entities being produced on the battlefield. Andrade argued: “The distinctiveness of our case resides in the fact that [our] ideological maturation concomitant with the radicalization of [our] forms of struggle, the very explosion of the linguistic instrument as it tends toward semantic independence, and especially the poet-subject’s commitment to the people’s battles, provide the basis for the author’s identification with their public” [“A particularidade de nosso caso reside no facto de que a maturação ideológica concomitante com a radicalização das formas de luta, a própria explosão do instrumento linguístico tendendo a uma independência semântica, e sobretudo a comprometimento do sujeito-poeta nas batalhas populares permitiram lançar as bases da identificação do autor com o seu público”] (Reference Andrade1980b, 10–11).
The mutual identification of the people with the “poet-subject” in armed struggle has thematic, authorial, and linguistic registers. In the preface to the second volume, Andrade argues that an expanded corpus of poetic compositions is necessary to apprehend these registers. First, he notes a collectively authored body of work, especially in African languages including Creoles, and often attributed to the parties themselves: “These are collective compositions with melodic support, songs generally produced by political mobilizers. Their social function consists of transmitting the core ideas to the masses, directing their spontaneity and stimulating poetic faculties” (Reference Andrade, Lanie, Lanie and Fabienne2024b, 129) [“São composições colectivas com apoio melódico, cantos produzidos, em geral, pelos mobilizadores políticos. O seu papel social consiste em veicular as ideias forças entre as massas, orientar a espontaneidade popular e estimular as faculdades poéticas”] (Reference Andrade1980d, 8). Reiterating his argument about Costa Andrade, he holds that the social commitment of contemporary writers and cultural producers, concretized in their direct participation in the struggle, allows their work to collectively define the ideological and aesthetic contours of the new societies being formed (Reference Andrade1980d, 14). Finally, he argues that the “elusive” language that had predominated during the phase of colonial oppression that required that African poets take refuge in clandestinity is replaced by “clear” and “direct” language that better reflects the historical synthesis underway (Reference Andrade1980d, 8).
The thematic groupings of the anthologies directly reflect Andrade’s conceptualization of the course of Lusophone African literature, culminating in independence. The first volume has four major themes, including “Insularidade” [Insularity], “Evocação” [Evocation], “Protesto” [Protest], and “Prelúdio à libertação” [Prelude to liberation]. In the second volume, the themes trace the historical phases of the independence struggle: “Salazar espantado” [Salazar frightened away], “Eu, o povo” [I, the people], “Canto armado” [Song of Arms], “Vem independência flor” [The flower of independence comes], and “Kabral ka morrê” [Cabral did not die]. While the first volume traces how Andrade saw African poets as coming to consciousness as colonial and racialized subjects and as Africans, the second volume evidences the features that Andrade understood as constituting intellectual decolonization and a solidified understanding of national community.
Andrade’s inclusion of poetry in languages other than Portuguese directly supports this coordinated nationalist project. Andrade wrote frequently about the vital importance of preserving and developing culture in non-colonial languages, himself wrote several compositions in the Kimbundu language that was spoken in his home when he was a child, and dedicated significant study to the documentation of Kimbundu throughout his life (Laban and Andrade, Reference Laban and Andrade1997, 15; Moreno Reference Moreno2023, 170; Andrade Reference Andrade and de Andrade1958b). However, rather than languages spoken regionally and associated with particular ethnic groups, Andrade chooses to include non-Portuguese poetry in Creoles considered languages of national unity: Bissau-Guinean Kiriol and Cape Verdean Kriolu. This choice is a register of his insistence—following Cabral—on understanding the cultural mechanisms of national unity.
In both volumes of the anthology, Andrade includes poems in Kiriol and Kriolu, with translations to Portuguese. Poems by the Cape Verdean poet Kaoberdiano Dambará (Felisberto Vieira Lopes, 1937–2020) published as part of his seminal Kriolu poetry collection Noti [Night] (1964) appear in both anthologies. There is a Cape Verdean tradition of literature in Kriolu dating at least from the nineteenth century: Fernando Arenas argued, for example, that “Kriolu is the primary galvanizing force within Cape Verdean culture” (Reference Andrade2012, 49). And yet, Andrade’s selection of Dambará’s poems from Noti is politically strategic: Noti was the first poetry collection published entirely in Kriolu without translation (Brito-Samedo Reference Brito-Semedo2020, n.p.; Hamilton Reference Hamilton1975, 248).Footnote 7 Andrade saw Dambará’s poems as uniquely “bound to African realities” [“reliés aux réalités africains”] and considered them the first example of Cape Verdean literature capable of raising “the status of the Creole dialect to a literary language” [“le dialecte créole au rang de langue littéraire”] (Reference Andrade, Lanie, Lanie and Fabienne2024c, 72–73; Reference Andrade and de Andrade1969, 28). Though he does not identify the translator of the poems for the anthology, Andrade’s inclusion of verses of Kriolu poetry in the French-language introduction to the anthology La poesie africaine d’expression portugaise [African Poetry Expressed in Portuguese] (1969) with presumably his translations to French suggests that he would have also translated the poems from these languages into Portuguese.Footnote 8
Dambará’s poem “Ora dja tchiga” [The time has come] is the only poem in a language besides Portuguese in the first volume, included in the section “Prelude to Liberation,” while several others of his poems drawn from Noti and posterior to its publication appear throughout the second volume. They accompany poems by Cape Verdeans Abílio Duarte, Emanuel Braga Tavares, and Corsino Fortes and Bissau-Guinean José Carlos Schwarz, as well as collectively authored or anonymously authored chants and poems from Guinea Bissau. This selection reveals Andrade’s position that the struggle against colonialism was the forge of a common experience for an emerging national citizenry and therefore of a common culture to be constructed across ethnic, linguistic, and class lines. Through this selection, he argues that the literature produced as part of this process necessarily encoded the lingua franca responsive to that national group. Poems in Kriolu and Kiriol thus appear throughout the text’s thematic sections: as part of the narrative of the path to national liberation; lament for colonial violence and displacement; the call to anti-colonial battle; collective consciousness-raising; mourning and memorializing heroes fallen in battle, especially Amílcar Cabral; and celebrating the arrival of independence.
In several cases, the political function of this poetry to connect the poet with the larger masses is evident in the rhetorical devices deployed. One example is the direct invocation of the people, as the poet’s addressee. This is the case in Dambará’s “Ora dja tchiga” [The time has come]: “Get up and walk, Son of Africa / Get up, listen to the cries of the People: / Africa, Justice, Liberty /… / feet on the earth, take up your weapons” [“Labanta bo anda fidjo d’Afrika / labanta negro, obi gritu’l Pobo: / Afrika, Djustissa, Liberdadi / … / finka pé na tchom bo pega n’arma”] (Dambará, Reference Dambará1980, 256).Footnote 9 The unattributed Bissau-Guinean chant “Cantiga di Partisan” [Partisan’s Song] is a similar call to arms, in this case explicitly on behalf of the party:
In other cases, the use of Creoles establishes an intimate relationship among the poet, the people, and the fallen hero, as in the poems in the section dedicated to Amílcar Cabral, who died in battle in 1973. This is the case for both Emanuel Braga Tavares’s “Kabral ka morrê” [Cabral did not die] and “Amílcar Cabral” by Dambará. In Tavares’s example, the cry “Cabral did not die” emits from the collective, to whom Cabral’s revolutionary spirit passes upon his physical death:
Here, the community’s declaration that “Cabral ka morrê” [Cabral did not die] thus serves a performative function. By pronouncing the continuation of Cabral’s political commitments in Kriolu, the poem reinforces the linked aesthetic and political projects of community-building. The Kriolu language is a vehicle for the revolutionary spirit that spreads among the poem’s speaker, Cabral, and the community. By enacting this dissemination of revolutionary spirit in Kriolu, the poem thus denies the colonial forces responsible for his physical death the ideological power symbolized in the Portuguese language to put an end to his independence project.
A second noteworthy feature of Andrade’s anthologies, which intersects with the co-presence of Kriolu, Kiriol, and Portuguese, is his integration of a number of anonymous poetic compositions, which appear in the first section of the second volume, under the subheadings of “Salazar espantado” [Salazar frightened away] and “Eu, o Povo” [I, the People]. These are generally chants or songs that call people to arms, encourage fighters in battle, and promote social cohesion among the politically committed—for example, the verses previously cited from “Cantiga do Partisan.” Many of these chants are explicitly partisan and/or have authorship attributed to the three allied Socialist movements of Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau’s PAIGC, Angola’s MPLA, and Mozambique’s FRELIMO. Their inclusion is thus a statement of Andrade’s view of the role of the party in directing and managing the cultural/ political transformation.Footnote 11 The collective first-person voice is a distinguishing feature of many of these chants, reinforcing the message that the people are the authors of their own culture:
They thus demonstrate Andrade’s vision, stated repeatedly across his work, that the Party is the “engine” of cultural production, and that political action taken as part of the socialist Party’s work for independence “unblocks” cultural production for the masses (Andrade Reference Andrade, Lanie, Lanie and Fabienne2024f, 45, 48).
In the preface to the second anthology, Andrade argues for the importance of codifying this outpouring of creativity, even as he acknowledges that these poems are unlikely to have the kind of long-term aesthetic resonance of other examples of what he calls a more “erudite” poetry:
we should underline the positive phenomenon of young guerrilla fighters seizing poetic power, those whose intellectual formation or level of classical instruction, in the context of colonial life, had paralyzed their literary expression. One notes in these poems an imprecise knowledge of language, insufficient mastery of a second language. But a vigorous current runs through certain verses—an intimate appeal, the necessity to communicate the just, the practical, the beautiful. We are not among those who fawn over this genre of poetry without a critical eye. (Reference Andrade, Lanie, Lanie and Fabienne2024c, 131)
[devemos sublinhar o fenómeno positivo da tomada de poder poético por jovens guerrilheiros cuja formação intelectual ou nível de instrução clássica, no contexto da vida colonial, paralisavam a sua expressão literária. Nota-se nesses poemas um conhecimento impreciso da linguagem, insuficiente domínio de um idioma segundo. Mas uma vigorosa corrente atravessa certos versos—o apelo íntimo, a necessidade de comunicar o justo, o prático, o belo. Não somos daqueles que se extasiam, sem sentido crítico, face a este género de poesia.] (Reference Andrade1980d, 11)
For Andrade, these verses are therefore a first and important step in the process of cultivating the masses as producers of culture. They put into practice Andrade’s vision of using the institutional apparatus available (both the party apparatus and the apparatus of the anthology) to affirm the collective, popular sources of that cultural production and to argue for its place alongside the better-recognized examples of individually authored, erudite poetry that dominates the two volumes. That very juxtaposition of the two categories is therefore, for Andrade, an important means to sanction the mechanisms of democratizing culture in the struggle for independence.
Conclusions: The institutionalization of culture
Andrade understood the various modes of cultural/political decolonization traced in this article as necessary for the project of a deeper historical excavation of African intellectual development that he undertook toward the end of his life. He wrote about both the past, with the intent of correcting the notion that African and African diasporic intellectuals were scarce and exceptional, and the future-oriented present, particularly after independence was achieved in the five African nations that emerged from Portuguese colonization. For him, these two impulses were part of the same project of institutionalizing African culture and disseminating knowledge of African culture as part of democratization in recently decolonized nations.
Andrade lays out elements of this project across a variety of texts in which he discusses both the theory—as in his address delivered at the “Continuar Cabral” [Continuing Cabral] symposium commemorating the tenth anniversary of Amílcar Cabral’s death—and the practice of institutionalizing culture. By the early 1980s, Andrade had closely followed the struggles of the transition to independence, as evidenced, for example, by the fracture in the MPLA represented by the Revolta Activa (1974)—his support of which resulted in his definitive alienation from the party—as well as the subsequent violent purging the MPLA undertook as its civil conflict with opposing parties escalated (1977).Footnote 12 Embraced by Guinea Bissau’s leadership after his exile from Angola, he also accompanied that nation’s difficult transitions in his role as Guinea Bissau’s first Minister of Culture from 1975 until 1980, when a coup ousted President Luís Cabral. Andrade’s 1983 address at the “Continuar Cabral” symposium, titled “The Cultural Dimension in National Liberation Strategy: Identity, Cultural Power, and Democracy” [“A Dimensão Cultural na Estratégia de Libertação: Identidade, Poder Cultura e Democracia”], is concerned precisely with the possibility of cultural development after independence, and therefore of political development. On the one hand, Andrade theorizes culture as “the existential matrix of democracy” (Andrade Reference Andrade, Lanie, Lanie and Fabienne2024a, 147) [“a matriz existencial da democracia” (Reference Andrade1984, 288)]. On the other, he interrogates the social structures in place in newly independent nations in their capacity to produce the kind of cultural agency and distribution of cultural access that he associates with the full realization of intellectual and political independence.
Andrade roots his vision of culture as the core of political independence and the foundation for a democratic society in Cabral’s thought. Andrade’s critique of Fanon’s presumption that the rural masses will “automatically” and “spontaneously” produce a national culture (Andrade Reference Andrade1984, 277)Footnote 13 serves as his counterpoint to Cabral, whom he sees as imagining a more nuanced role for social institutions and their intellectual leaders. He finds Cabral’s concept of an “osmosis” among social sectors particularly productive for how it lays out a path for national culture that draws from both traditional cultural sources and the “modernity” often embraced by urban lettered classes. Andrade cites Cabral’s call for the peasantry to abandon cultural practices that were harmful to the community (superstition, for example), while retaining those that preserved community coherence. Simultaneously, he sees the incorporation of “modern” developments rooted in the urban classes as a mechanism that would “accelerate” the “cultural time” of decolonizing communities (Andrade Reference Andrade1984, 280).
Andrade outlines some of what this approach would look like in practice in his 1982 article published in the UNESCO journal Cultures. Drawing on the case of Guinea Bissau, he discusses the importance of national policy that made culture widely available, state-level institution-building as the mechanism through which culture would be made available, and the material demands of cultural content for distribution: educational materials in national languages, social scientific documentation of oral traditions and everyday practices, and the material infrastructure for collection and communication. Andrade demonstrates these priorities through the example of radio as a means to harness the creativity of the masses. He traces the history of “Radio Libertação,” [Liberation Radio], a mobile radio broadcasting project founded during the war of independence. He notes that the participatory and dialogic nature of the broadcasts prior to independence had changed as radio was institutionalized into a one-way mode of communication shaped by the new national ruling class (1982a, 22). Looking to radio models tried out in Mozambique, he outlines a UNESCO-funded rural radio service project in Guinea Bissau as a way of reestablishing a forum for active participation of rural population in the creation and dissemination of culture (1982a, 24). The state/party and its institutions would thus be constantly in a process of being molded by the people who comprised them, in a dialogic relay. This process of the “democratic distribution of power” would serve as a bulwark against an abusive consolidation of state authority among a new national elite, which Andrade was already observing underway on the continent.
Finally, institutionalization of culture in the ways outlined above would offer the tools for a more profound apprehension of the intellectual traditions that made decolonization possible. From his earliest work, Andrade had maintained the critique that colonization had severed the historical continuity of African cultures, and that only decolonization would produce the conditions to reconstruct them. In several texts, but most completely in his posthumously published monograph Origins of African Nationalism [Origins do Nacionalismo Africano] (1998), Andrade constructs a cultural historiography that locates the deep intellectual origins of anti-colonial nationalism in Lusophone Africa in the late nineteenth-century boom in newspaper publication as Portugal attempted to consolidate administrative domination of African colonies under its control following the Berlin Conference.Footnote 14 His article on a similar topic, “The Orders of Discourse of Clamor Africano: Continuity and Rupture in the Ideology of Unitary Nationalism,” [“As ordens do discurso de Clamor Africano: continuidade e rupture na ideologia do nacionalismo unitário” (1990)], was conceived, as Víctor Kagibanga indicates, as a second companion piece on the history of African nationalism that would have been a second volume of the larger work on the sociology of African nationalism, had Andrade not died unexpectedly in 1990 (1998, 286 and 300). As Mario Pereira outlines in the introduction to his English-language translation of “The Orders of Discourse” (Reference Andrade2017), Andrade thought expansively about culture: Pereira notes that Andrade drew on
a wide range of written, performative and oral texts, while reminding readers that the nationalist discourse must be understood amid pre-existing institutional power relations within an international context. Mário Pinto de Andrade … shows us the ways in which these relations were negotiated, challenged and refused in political enunciations and nationalist discourses through newspaper articles and editorials, political associations as well as class and cultural organizations, canticles and church songs, poetry and literary movements, academic lectures and research, and a theoretical body of writings composed of proceedings from meetings, letters, communications and resolutions. (Reference Andrade2017, 200–201)
Through these diverse materials, Andrade traces the discursive strains that served as the ideological foundations of the “unitary nationalism”—political movements that integrated allied groups from across colonized Africa—that developed in the mid to late twentieth century across the five Portuguese-speaking African nations. Among these strains, Andrade discusses the basis of collective identity based on racial and geographical groupings (e.g. Black and African), and socioeconomic and class designations (e.g., the educated, professional elite vs. the indigenous masses) (Andrade Reference Andrade1990, 11–17). He also outlines the praxis of collective organizing made possible by professional, social, and religious organizations. He sees the necessary rupture between the protonationalists and nationalists of the mid-twentieth century as located in the former’s inability to critically examine the logic of Portuguese colonialism that would keep them in a permanent state of social apartheid (Andrade Reference Andrade1990, 17; 1998, 186). For Andrade, the cultural production of the mid-twentieth century which firmly established for the first time an ideology of rupture with colonial identity was indebted to this proliferation of cultural products in the decades prior.
Andrade’s intellectual work systematizing and analyzing Lusophone Africa’s cultural producers both in the past and in his present thus constitutes a political intervention into the process of decolonization, and through them, he helped create the material conditions for the transmission of this cultural knowledge. With this article’s approach of tracing his individual interventions as a political agent shaping the fields of Lusophone African culture, I have intended to broaden our insight into this area of African intellectual history, as well as to call attention to Andrade as a lesser-known voice among the pantheon of theorists of African decolonization. Yet, I recognize that this biographical approach might run the risk of reproducing a historiographical tradition that overemphasizes the roles of a few outstanding individuals at the expense of wider collectives. This was not how Andrade represented himself, nor how he conceived of cultural fields, as this article’s analysis of his anthologies and cultural histories indicate. Pereira signals how Andrade habitually deemphasized his own key role in the production of the theory and practice of African nationalism (Reference Pereira2017, 201–202), despite the clear evidence of how his work shaped subsequent generations of intellectuals for whom his writing and editing served as a foundational reference (Cosme Reference Cosme, Mata and Padilha2000, 149; Kagibanga Reference Kagibanga1998, 301–302; Moreno Reference Moreno2023, 172–73). A clearer understanding of his role in the decolonization process, therefore, might serve as an invitation to scholars and students not only to better understand Andrade and his work, but to continually push for a wider view of the intellectual networks in which he operated and the intellectual genealogies to which he contributed, and thus an expansion of our understanding of lesser-studied areas of African cultural and intellectual history.Footnote 15
Author Biography
Lanie Millar is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Oregon, USA. She is the editor and co-translator with Fabienne Moore of The Revolution Will Be a Poetic Act: African Culture and Decolonization by Mário Pinto de Andrade (Polity, 2024).
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