Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to reflect on the editoral project of Colecção Imbondeiro, from 1961 in Sá da Bandeira (now Lubango), Angola. Leonel Cosme and Garibaldino de Andrade gave life to an ambitious project that wasn't free of internal contradictions.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to reflect on the editorial project of Colecção Imbondeiro, which started in 1961 in Sá da Bandeira (now Lubango), Angola. Leonel Cosme and Garibaldino, working as both editors and writers, gave life to an ambitious project that wasn't free of internal contradictions. Despite its apparent lack of coherence for what concerned the choice of the writers published in the Colecção, for a total of 68 books, the collection achieved a significant impact in the Angolan culture of the 1960's, being distributed also in Cape Verde, Portugal and Brasil.

An analysis of the project itself will help us to reflect on the way in which dissent was controlled by Salazar’s regime in the 1960's. Gerald Moser compared, in 1966, the impact of the closure of the Imbondeiro publishing house to the one of the scandal of the attribution of the prize of Sociedade Portuguesa de Escritores to the novel Luuanda, by Luandino Vieira. Even if the two cases could seem much different, there was a link between them: the politics of control of dissent by the late salazarist regime. The eventual consequences of the literary representation of some social realities, such as the ones of the musseques or daily discrimination suffered by black people, led PIDE (the political police)to act either through censorship or through the annihilation of the editorial projects and the legal prosecution of writers.