Paper short abstract:

The impact of Salazar's dictatorship and Colonial Act provoked a wave of contestation. The exchanges between the Notícias de Mozambique and the Pracasha from Goa confirm the beginning of transversal nets that cross the Indian Ocean's part of the Empire already pointed out to the fall of such empire.

Paper long abstract:

The impact of Salazar's dictatorship and Colonial Act, the first constitutional law of the regime, provoked a wave of contestation and resistance through the Portuguese Empire's colonies. Luís de Menezes Bragança, a democrat and a republican from Goa the center of the Portuguese State of India, published along the 1930's at the newspaper Pracasha, that he edited, a collection of articles analysing and criticizing the new model of Portuguese colonialism and its imperial pretention that the dictatorship’s legislation was turning into a brutal, repressive and segregational reality. Alongside, several chronicles from the Notícias of Mozambique were also published by Menezes Bragança at Pracasha as means to feed opposition to the Lisbon's regime. Signed by Goan and Mozambican writers, these chronicles testify the beginning of a flow of intercontinental alliances that latter would gain form in African-Asiatic solidarity movements, finding their expression namely at the Bandung conference (1955) and the 1961 CONCP Conference against the Portuguese Empire in Casablanca. In the context of first reactions to the dictatorship, Menezes Bragança was honored in Lourenço Marques and his collaboration with the Notícias continued until the ban of the Pracasha (1937). It is thus the existence of these transversal nets that cross the Indian Ocean's part of the Empire that this paper will address, emphasizing how these nets already pointed out to the fall of such empire, by communicating through the press, within the limitations of censorship, an anticolonial cultural and political discourse, that conscientiously demanded the right to self-determination of the peoples.