ABSTRACT
467This contribution aims at elaborating on the ties between creativity, intended as the ability to create new meanings through literature, and politics, in the Angolan literary sphere of the 1960s. The dispute between Mensagem of Casa dos Estudantes do Império and Notícias do Imbondeiro went way beyond literary debate. Though centred primarily on current literary production and dissemination, both publications engaged in a heated debate on activism and anti-colonial struggle. Contradictions became thereof apparent.
At the time, what was at stake was, in fact, a struggle on the part of a cultural elite on how to combine theoretical thought grounded in Africa, artistic creation (notably through the multiple representations of African imaginary), whilst setting an agenda for the boundaries of activism.
The arguments of Carlos Ervedosa and Leonel Cosme, representing the two editorial projects and their contrasting positions, as much as the ones of Alfredo Margarido – who anonymously wrote essays on the Boletim of C.E.I. -, constitute in this paper a point of departure for the understanding of the cultural background of the Angolan and Portuguese 60s, their contradictions and ambivalences.
