The Creole Elite and the Rise of the Angolan Proto-Nationalism: 1880-1910

The main purpose of this essay is to define the peculiarities of Angolan urban society and trace its evolution during the second half of the nineteenth century, a lapse of time marked by relative freedom—due to the economic crisis affecting Portugal from the definitive abolition of slavery and to the social and artistic progressive reformer impulse promoted by the Generation of 1870. This made possible the establishment in Luanda of lively journalistic activity and the production of a literary corpus—principally written by traders, soldiers, public officers, and landowners, born in Africa and tied both to their European and African origins, which witnessed the growth of a feeling of dissatisfaction destined to culminate in a heterogeneous set of open claims for autonomy or even independence.