A Real Magazine

We wouldn’t want ‘people to think we were “afraid” of its existence’, Carlos Eduardo Machado, of the Portuguese secret police, wrote in a report on the literary journal Mensagem in the 1960s. But the journal had become ‘an instrument of propaganda for anticolonial groups’ and shutting it down would stop people ‘getting the idea, politically speaking, that there exists … an anticolonial spirit in the Portuguese community’. Machado mustered the contents page of a recent edition of Mensagem to bolster his argument. There were poems by African writers: he listed some, in red capitals, underlined. (One of them was Agostinho Neto, the future first president of Angola.) What is the defining characteristic of the poems? ‘Négritude.’ He rests his case. In a way, it’s heartening to see someone so convinced by the power of poetry, even if it is an imperial policeman sounding the alarm.

Mensagem (‘Message’),whose last edition appeared sixty years ago, in July 1964, was published by students at the Casa dos Estudantes do Império, a centre set up in 1944 by the Portuguese government for students from the colonies coming to university in Lisbon. It occupied a building in the Saldanha area of central Lisbon, with a library, a canteen, a common room and an infirmary. Students met there, ate there and held events. At first the Portuguese state provided funding for activities and the journal was distributed for free, printed in black and white on thin paper. For now, ‘this is nothing more than a fortnightly bulletin,’ the first editorial opened in 1948, but ‘we want to publish a magazine, a real magazine, perfect in form and content, that brings the intellectual message of its students to the empire.’ It was an age of reviews, and to have one was to be part of the times. Around the decolonising world, magazines were being launched, fluttering into life, sometimes disappearing after a couple of issues.

Periodical culture of course wasn’t new. A Aurora launched in Angola in 1856, A Revista Africana in Mozambique in 1881, and there was an efflorescence in the interwar period. Itinerário appeared in Mozambique in 1941; Tropiques in Martinique in 1942; Focus in Jamaica in 1943; Certeza in Cape Verde in 1944; Cultura I in Angola in 1945. Presence Africaine, launched by the Senegalese intellectual Alioune Diop in Paris in 1947, was particularly influential, publishing hundreds of editions in French and English and bringing together writing from and about Africa from all over the world. Some writers from Mensagem managed to get hold of copies, passed under the counter at a leftist bookshop in Lisbon. They were in touch with Diop and later wrote for the magazine. ‘We would have loved, in Lisbon … to have had a Présence Africaine,’ Mário Pinto de Andrade, an Angolan philology student and contributor to Mensagem, said later. ‘We had the capacity to do it, we had people who could have written … But we never had that kind of institution, for the obvious reason of the Portuguese political regime.’ Andrade later went to work for Présence Africaine in Paris.

The students in Lisbon worked with what they had, publishing poetry, essays, short stories, news of daily life and events at the Casa. The magazine ran on and off between 1948 and 1964 in difficult conditions. It was impossible to write anything explicitly anticolonial without reprisal. The magazine was closely (if crudely) surveilled, and many of its writers were imprisoned. But keen readers could read between the lines.

In 1949 the magazine published a poem and an article condemning poverty and hunger in Cape Verde by Amílcar Cabral, an agronomy student from Guinea-Bissau. Over the page, there was an essay by the Sao Tomé poet Alda do Espírito Santo on the history of African women. In 1951, Andrade and Agostinho Neto wrote essays on the commitments and aesthetics of African literatures. Between 1952 and 1957 the regime installed an oversight commission at the Casa and Mensagem did not run. When it began again, the journal published fiction and poetry by anticolonialists such as Marcelino dos Santos, José Craveirinha and Luandino Vieira, but they appeared between stories about sporting fixtures and student excursions.

There was a gear change in the 1960s. Portugal found itself out of sync with the crumbling of European empires. After the wave of African independence at the beginning of the decade, the Estado Novo dug its heels in. While other imperial nations were arranging to leave their colonies on neo-colonial terms, the party line in Portugal was that their empire was not like other European empires, lacking both racism and anticolonial sentiment. In the colonies meanwhile, repression and incarceration continued, along with, Andrade’s words, ‘violence, pillage, racism and miserable police provocations’: the classics of the colonial playbook. The work of Mensagem’s poets in these years is marked by a poetics of constraint, which gestures elliptically to the stagnations and frustrations of the political situation. ‘I have turned every corner/In the world,’ the Angolan poet Arnaldo Santos wrote in 1961, ‘And all the world/Has for me/are invisible walls.’

In 1962, Mensagem grew bolder. North American writing appeared. A poem by Gwendolyn B. Bennett in Spanish; Claude MacKay and Langston Hughes translated into Portuguese. Given the dictatorship’s position that movements for Black rights and freedoms in other parts of the world had no relevance to the Portuguese case, even these light-touch gestures of connection were highly charged. The magazine published writing by Vieira from prison, including poems that described the view from his cell window. Essays appeared on fraternity, racism, the international student movement and collective organising. They published the Guinean dancer and writer Keïta Fodéba on African dance; the São Tomé poet Manuela Margarido’s ‘Memory of Principe Island’, about land, sovereignty and freedom; and the Mozambican poet Noémia de Sousa’s ‘If You Want to Know Me’, in which the lyric voice describes the dehumanisations and diminishments of enslavement and colonial society, summoning the ‘swollen cry of hope’ of the African revolt.

In 1963, Mensagem’s penultimate issue announced that the journal was under attack. The regime was withdrawing funding. The editorial appealed to readers to commit to the movimento associativo, the student movement. The argument was developed in the lead essay, ‘What We Are Fighting For’.

The last edition, of July 1964, went even further in its internationalist sensibilities, its sense of the imbrications of culture and politics. There were essays on African national student unions, sociology, dance and oral storytelling, juxtaposed with the testimony of James Musa Sadika, a Black man who had been beaten and imprisoned by the authorities in apartheid South Africa. There were more poems, some in a declamatory tone, others in dreamy key; at the end, a translation into Portuguese of Richard Rive’s ‘Where the Rainbow Ends’, which had been published in Drum magazine in Johannesburg. It’s a utopian poem about the power of music and words to draw connections across racial lines. At the bottom of the last page of the last edition, a declaration: ‘The Casa will never die!’

The students and writers of the Casa and Mensagem went on to forge not only the independence struggle but the new states after independence: Cabral cofounded the PAIGC in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau; Neto and Andrade the MPLA in Angola; Dos Santos, Frelimo in Mozambique. Espírito Santo wrote the lyrics to the São Tomé national anthem. Vieira (still alive) is a celebrated writer. Because of his organising around Angolan independence, the Estado Novo imprisoned him for over a decade, for much of it in a concentration camp. Craveirinha was also a political prisoner, and later won the Premio Camões, the most prestigious literary prize in the Lusophone world (Vieira was offered it too but turned it down).

Machado had been right about Mensagem’s oppositional sensibilities. He was right to detect the threat to the dictatorship that the independence of the colonies represented. But he was wrong that shutting down the magazine could suppress the call to freedom that was immanent – repressed, often oblique – in African writing in Portuguese throughout the late decades of empire.

By the time Mensagem was shut down in Lisbon, its former contributors had set up base in Conakry, in newly independent Guinea. They had launched a new paper, Libertação, but wanted to reach more people so started a radio station too. Instead of printed poetry, they broadcast local music. It was an evolution of the form, offering a new articulation of politics and culture, but in it the magazine’s spirit changed shape and lived on.