The Escola-Piloto was founded following resolutions at the Cassacá Congress to establish schools, storehouses and local administrative bodies within the liberated areas. Blufo was part of the same politics that established the Secretariat, and the Departments of Information, Culture and Cadre Training.

The paper was made available for free at PAIGC schools and distributed in small batches from January 1966 to December 1970. It aimed to reach the party’s “pioneers”, the student body made up of the children of combatants, PAIGC militants, war orphans and other young people. Its articles were unattributed, written in Portuguese using a typewriter and printed on A4 pages. The length of each publication varied; earlier issues were shorter and reached four pages, with issues ten, eleven and twelve reaching twelve pages.

Blufo acted as an innovative pedagogical tool. It educated the pioneers in culture and politics, towards the construction of internationalist, pan-African perspectives within the struggle for self-determination. This research analyzed the 1959 Pidjiguiti Massacre in the newspaper… read more

The publications produced from exile during the period of the military dictatorships in Latin America show an advanced awareness of the ideological and political barriers produced by the distortion or invisibilization of certain facts by the media, co-opted by the dictatorial and neo-imperial powers. The FBI (Front brésilien d’Information) was a newspaper founded in 1969 in Alger (Algeria) by Brazilian refugees, which circulated through several countries in Europe and Latin America until 1973. The publication had different collaborators and delegations in Chile, Uruguay, France, Holland, Italy, Germany, where it was published at irregular intervals. It was conceived as a counter-hegemonic political tool of (un)information, aiming to unmask the crimes of the military dictatorship and the state of oppression in Brazil.​

The fact that the FBI was based in Alger, which was at the time one of the most important centers for revolutionary movements in Africa, marks the particularity of its perspective, aware of the extensive effects of imperialism and attentive to the problems and challenges common to the countries of the Global South. I am going to place a special focus on certain images, themes and recurrent terms of the FBI, which functioned as shared codes to understand and name different experiences of repression and resistance in the Southern Cone.

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.