Description of periodical

Mensagem.  Printed 1948–1964 in Lisbon (and circulated across Portugal and in Angola and Mozambique). Published in Portuguese and appeared intermittently. Produced by students at the Casa Dos Estudantes do Império – literally, the ‘House of the Students of the Empire’ – a centre founded by the Portuguese government after World War Two with the intention of preparing overseas students studying in Lisbon for future imperial duties. It became a crucial anti-colonial nexus. Many protagonists of later independence movements met there, thrust together by their shared interest in decolonization as well as the particularly uncompromising response of the Portuguese fascist Estado Novo regime to the anti-colonialism growing throughout European empires in the 1950s. Mensagem ran on and off for sixteen years under extremely difficult conditions. Writing in Portugal was highly policed, and anti-colonial writers faced censorship and imprisonment. The regime surveilled Mensagem, which was run by successive generations of students. When the Estado Novo finally shut down the Casa and Mensagem in 1965, it was after years of mounting anxiety about the subversive politics the Casa and Mensagem were fostering. Some editions of Mensagem are available here.

Paper abstract: redefining political poetry

This paper asks what aesthetics of political writing Mensagem proposes. Critics have emphasised the influence on neo-realism on anti-colonial writing in Portuguese, and indeed the few statements of aesthetic intent printed in Mensagem emphasised the need to disavow decadence and to write with clarity. Yet in the period 1960-4 Mensagem also printed much oblique, intractable poetry. This paper considers how to parse those poems in the context of their surrounding literary critical discourses that disavow the detachment from political life the poems seem to figure. I argue that under the weight of censorship, African poets writing in Portuguese writing in Mensagem sought to reinscribe the question of what aesthetics could be politically powerful.

I also read Mensagem poets as taking up and taking forward debates about socialist realism in the USSR. Taking this genealogy seriously allows us to see Mensagem poets’ theoretical contribution to histories of militant aesthetics in re-emphasizing individual, artistic liberty within a defence of collective social and political freedoms.

The history of Mensagem helps us configure the place of creative expression as part of anti-colonial visions of freedom. It can help us understand the conditions of possibility the journal form produced for associative and comparative thought. Finally, it can help us understand the place of African writing in Portuguese in multilingual anti-colonial histories.

​The Combatant, was the official voice of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), the military wing of South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO). As a communication organ that served to disseminate information, educating PLAN fighters, motivating those that were in combat, and exposing the cruelty of the then apartheid regime. The Combatant was a monthly production whose circulation was during the early 80s. It was published and printed in Lubango, Angola by the PLAN commissariat and the language of publication was English. The University of Namibia’s Archives section has not more than 20 of the publications that are available in print form. As a revolutionary paper, The Combatant sought to explore through various means inclusive of the literary, stylistic, and rhetorical as cultural and aesthetic tools to shape, define and project a collective ‘identity’ as well as an indefatigable stance against oppression. This paper therefore argues that as an anti-colonial tool The Combatant utilised these various forms to enhance, sharpen and deepen the appeal of publication by using literary and stylistic means, as well as rhetorical strategies of ethos, pathos and logos, especially through visual rhetoric. The paper focuses specifically on one volume (Vol 4, no. 3 of 1982) to allow for closer and in-depth scrutiny. The specific volume was purposively selected because of how it features the iconic name Namibian anti-apartheid struggles (Hendrik Witbooi), as well as and international icon, Che Guevara.