31 - African literature in Portuguese

Summary

Portuguese was the first European language to reach sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, by the middle of the fifteenth century many Africans spoke Portuguese-based pidgins and creoles. As a consequence of this early presence, African writing in Portuguese appeared before anything comparable in English, French, and other European languages.

Literary precursors in the colonial period

With a few exceptions, documented as far back as the nineteenth century, precursors of a representative lusophone African literature did not come into being until the 1930s and 1940s. Joaquim Dias Cordeiro da Matta (1857–94) perhaps stands as Angolan literature’s most important nineteenth-century precursor. A native of Icolo-e-Bengo, Cordeiro da Matta was a poet, the author of an unpublished novel, and the organizer of a Kimbundu–Portuguese dictionary.

António de Assis Júnior (1887–1960), a later precursor, was an “assimilated” African, according to the colonial Indigenous Law enacted by the Portuguese New State in the early twentieth century. In spite of his official social status of assimilado, Assis Júnior was transcultural, and he paid tribute to his Kimbundu ethnic origins. Like his predecessor Cordeiro da Matta, he compiled a Kimbundu–Portuguese dictionary. He established himself as a direct precursor of modern Angolan literature with O segredo da morta (1934) (The Dead Woman’s Secret), subtitled Romance de costumes angolenses (A Romance of Angolan Customs). Although written in the style of Victor Hugo, Assis Júnior’s early romance is a forerunner of the ethnographic Angolan prose fiction of the 1950s and 1960s.