The Development of Lusophone Africais Literary Magazines

It is often wrongly suggested that the lusophone zone of Black Africa is the parent pauvre as far as continental literary production is concerned, a sort of last and worst. Those who make such claims (and they seem to be many) are not only ignorant of the existence of the literary magazines in this politicolinguistic zone ¹ but also of the important role that periodicals play in the literary institution in general. This ignorance of the collective affirmation expressed in and through little magazines is not just limited to the attitude of critics towards African literature. Often, unaware of the place of literary magazines in the development of a national or continental literature, most criticism has limited its reference to such periodicals by only citing their titles without daring to penetrate into the literature they contain or even trying to understand how the literary system they operate functions. Given such an attitude, it is not surprising that literary periodicals remain generally unknown, even by those who should know them and make them known.

The problem is further compounded in Black Africa by the absence of studies comparing cultural phenomena in the subcontinent's three politicolinguistic zones, also known as its francophone, anglophone, and lusophone regions. While the literary magazines of francophone and anglophone Africa are more well known (at least by their titles), chronologically speaking, the literary periodical culture is much older in lusophone Africa than in the French-speaking zone, for instance. And we suspect that serious comparative research would show that, in terms of quantity, magazines from Portuguese Africa would equal or may even surpass those of the two other politicolinguistic zones. Yet lusophone African literature and especially her literary periodical tradition remain largely unknown and therefore unexplored.

The study of literary magazines makes it possible for criticism to go beyond the often sterile and classical criteria of literary theory, history, and criticism, which often limit themselves to the choice of a few "star" novels, poetry collections, and anthologies. Periodicals testify to the literary activity of a given geographical location; they are the literary memory of a particular period, the laboratory of new ideas, mouthpieces of literary movements, and, often, the place of a more varied form of collaboration. They represent, therefore, a fairer and more balanced means of judging the richness of a national literature. This is certainly true of lusophone Africa's literary periodicals and it allows the critic to have an idea of how far the zone's literature has come. The development of lusophone Africa's literature has been made possible largely by the contribution of its literary periodicals.

The second half of the nineteenth century marked the installation of printing presses in Portuguese-speaking Africa (Cape Verde: 1842; Angola: 1845; Mozambique: 1854; São Tomé and Principe: 1857; Guinea-Bissau: 1879) and the birth of the literary press in this zone. Up to the end of the century, periodicals presented certain interesting characteristics worth highlighting. In the first place, the Boletins Oficiais (official government gazettes) that were published the same year as the installation of the printing press in each of the countries cited were also the first documents to host some form of cultural expression. Indeed, such "literary" contributions in the Boletins Oficiais that others have talked about (Ferreira, Bibliografia 52) took the form of cultural write-ups. But contrary to the affirmation of such critics, our research has shown that real literary expression (in the strict sense of the word) was rather rare at this time. The term literary that others have referred to must therefore be understood to mean culture in general. In the case of Angola, for instance, one of the first such cultural manifestations only appeared a year after the inauguration of the local Boletim Oficial dated 17 October 1846. Entitled "Theatro," the article appeared in the form of a cultural appreciation/criticism of the previous week's theatrical display by the group Sociedade Providencia. There...