Introduction
Lanie Millar

“Repression calls for resistance, and vice versa,” wrote Mário Pinto de Andrade in 1971. “This relationship conveys the dynamic of violence.”1 The context of colonial violence defined Andrade’s life’s work, which was dedicated to the interlinked projects of political and cultural decolonization. Andrade’s writings show us that part of the violence of the colonial enterprise was to break the cultural ties that held African societies together. Culture then rebuilds those ties by artistically coding shared experiences, creatively transforming the colonial languages into media through which the colonized can see themselves reflected. As Andrade reminds us throughout his essays, written over more than thirty years of public life between the 1950s and the 1980s, culture demands and comes about in a situation of freedom from oppression; revolution is therefore a cultural act.

Andrade’s work as a theorist, critic, and anthologizer of African literature expressed in Portuguese is another mode of reconstituting the ties among societies emerging from colonization. From the 1960s until his death in 1990, Andrade was among Lusophone Africa’s most important chroniclers of its intellectual and cultural development. He wrote extensively in Portuguese and French about the intellectual origins and urgent necessity of national independence for colonized peoples, with a particular focus on theorizing the relationship between culture and decolonization. Across the essays gathered in this volume, he excavates those societies’ cultural roots and traces their development through phases of Black cultural vindication, anti-colonial militancy, and national canon-building. Looking to models of leftist armed struggle and radical politics on both sides of the Atlantic, Andrade theorizes political and aesthetic ideals based on common experiences of oppression and colonization shared between Africa and the African diaspora, rather than on race-based identities, a single language, or mutual domination by a colonial power. In his ethical commitment to move away from discussing solely the relationship between the colonial occupier and the colonized subaltern, he instead promoted ideas and actions that would construct mutual understanding among decolonizing societies. By offering models to rethink race and nation as analytic categories, Andrade’s life’s work is particularly relevant not only to its historical context but to contemporary conversations about race, belonging, and political community.

Origins

Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928–1990) was born in Golungo Alto, Angola, and spent his childhood in the country’s capital city of Luanda. In 1948, as a twenty-year-old student, he moved to Lisbon. Andrade began by studying classical philology, a route that led him to the study of African languages and oral literatures, particularly in Kimbundu. In Lisbon, he moved in intellectual circles populated by other intellectuals who would also become key to the cultural and political decolonization of the countries under Portuguese colonial occupation, among them the poet, theorist, and independence leader of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau Amílcar Cabral, poet and Angola’s first president Agostinho Neto, Mozambican poet Noémia de Sousa, and São Tomean poets Alda Espírito Santo and Francisco José Tenreiro. At the time, the Estado Novo dictatorship (1933–74) ruled Portugal, which fiercely defended its self-image as a benevolent colonizing power while enforcing brutal policies of repression in its five African colonies: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Cape Verde. This repression took the form of mass displacement and forced labor regimes, massacres on the pretext of quelling dissent, and a program of de-culturation in favor of an ideology of “assimilation” – a legal term to describe the process by which a minuscule elite class of Africans who had “assimilated” Portuguese values, language, and practices could attain privileged status. In parallel with the cultural activities carried out in the influential Casa dos Estudantes do Império (House of Students from the Empire) in 1951, Andrade and Tenreiro founded the Centro de Estudos Africanos (Center for African Studies) as an act of resistance against the colonial institutions in place for African students in the metropole: the center “obligated us to study, to get to know Africa, to think about our own culture … [it was a] movement for the re-Africanization of souls.”2 The Center for African Studies also gave rise to Andrade’s first editorial project, the Caderno de Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa (Notebook of Black Poetry Expressed in Portuguese) (1953), which was to be followed by a number of other anthologies in which Andrade documented and theorized the Lusophone African cultural landscape. It initiated his role as a key architect, alongside others of his generation, in the cultural project of decolonization that would lead to direct political action.

Présence Africaine and International Circulation

To escape police repression in Lisbon, Andrade moved in 1954 to Paris, where contact with Alioune Diop, the founding editor of Présence Africaine, found him employment working at the premier cultural journal of the Black world. Andrade’s first publication in the journal, “Massacres in São Tomé,” recounted the brutality of the Batepá Massacre (1953) carried out by colonial agents against the workers of São Tomé, which, together with the Notebook, launched his lifelong career in political advocacy, editorial work, and extensive writing that evidence a deep engagement with Africa’s relationship to international racial and cultural politics of the mid-twentieth century. Several subsequent publications focused on unmasking Portuguese colonial ideologies, especially as theorized through the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s concept of “lusotropicalism,” which argued that the Portuguese “assimilated” African and Indigenous elements to harmoniously spread a common “lusotropical” culture around its colonies. Andrade’s lucidly pointed dismantling of this ideology in “What is Lusotropicalism?” and “Black African Culture and Assimilation” helps us understand not only the history of Portugal’s late colonial politics but also the enduring influence of Freyre’s ideas in the contemporary Luso-Afro-Brazilian world, where the false notion that Portuguese-speaking societies embody less racial prejudice and violence than other postcolonial areas continues to have purchase. Expanding his contacts with anti-colonial activists and Black cultural figures from around the world, Andrade organized and participated in international conferences, among them the I and II Congresses of Black Writers and Artists (Paris, 1956, and Rome, 1959), the first Afro-Asian Writers Conference (Tashkent, 1958), and the Cultural Congress of Havana (1968). Throughout, he traveled extensively, including to Moscow and to China. He became more deeply involved in political organizing, as he saw the increasing urgency for armed struggle against colonizing forces in the Portuguese colonies.

The Return to Africa, Independence, and Exile

As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, Andrade determined that he must return to Africa to accelerate the organization of movements that would eventually overturn Portuguese colonial occupation: “my concern with culture was still there, in another form: to inscribe the cultural in the political. I thought … political praxis itself was a cultural work par excellence.”3 Initially dedicated to the liberation fight in Angola, though from outside the country, he also helped found various organizations and meetings that coordinated anti-colonial war among the different colonies, including the Conferences of the Nationalist Organizations of the Portuguese Colonies (CONCP, founded 1961) and most famously was one of the founding members of the Popular Movement for Angolan Liberation (MPLA) in 1960 in Conakry, Guinea, alongside Lúcio Lara, Hugo de Menezes, and Viriato da Cruz. Andrade served as the MPLA’s first president in Conakry and then when it moved to Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the first few months of 1961, the anti-colonial war exploded in Angola through parallel attacks by nationalists on colonial prisons in Luanda, where political prisoners were being kept, and further inland, where agricultural workers’ protests turned into attacks on the area’s plantations; in the next years, nationalist movements in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique also went to war, forcing Portugal to fight on three separate fronts. In 1964, Andrade left the MPLA after a falling-out with its leadership under Agostinho Neto and lived in exile through the remaining years of the independence struggle, and beyond independence in 1975 until his death. However, he continued to keep abreast of development in the emerging African nations through essays that analyze the changing political conditions and the cultural production made possible by new phases of the anti-colonial wars and, eventually, independence. He served in the Ministry of Culture of Guinea-Bissau from 1976 to 1980 and, after its coup d’état, as prime minister counsellor in Cape Verde. Andrade...