The House for the Students of the Empire (CEI), African women poets from the 1950s, and Sarah Maldoror’s films

Abstract

In the 1950s, in Lisbon, several students coming from different Portuguese colonies in Africa met at “CEI - Casa dos Estudantes do Império” - a cultural and leisure centre for college students and other scholars from Africa or Asia. I would highlight names such as Amílcar Cabral (1924-1973), Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928-1990) and Agostinho Neto (1922-1979), famous activists that, at the time, invested in cultural forms of resistance against colonialism, being literature a means to raise political awareness among students. The high-profile women writers in this millieu were Noémia de Sousa (1926-2002), Alda Lara (1930-1962) and Alda do Espírito Santo (1926-2010). My research will assess the role of these three women in the cultural front of a collective political awakening, which later led to the independence struggles of the Portuguese colonies. These three women were also the first canonised women writers in their own national literary systems, thus being founding figures in a women’s genealogy of literary achievement. However, their works also the represent a particular generation, framed by the atmosphere lived at CEI. As a consequence of the political activism developed by the CEI millieu, some of the involved young scholars had to leave Portugal going into exile in Paris, where they gathered around the magazine Présence Africaine. This paper also explores CEI’s “Paris connection”, via Mário Pinto de Andrade and his wife, the film director Sarah Maldoror (1938-), who eventually adapted Luandino Vieira’s texts to cinema (Monangambé, 1968 and Sambizanga, 1972). At the time, Maldoror’s work was conceived as a means to promote international awareness of the regime Angolan people were fighting against. The final aim of the research is to explore the articulation among the works by these four women in relation to CEI’s activism.