Origins of African Nationalism

Exploring the development and structuring of African nationalist sentiment, the intellectual and sociological foundations of African nationalism, and the origins and social and cultural identities of the participants who helped form the anticolonial movements in the Portuguese colonial empire, Origins of African Nationalism captures the revolutionary energy of a generation. Named one of Africa’s hundred best books of the twentieth century, this innovative study traces the emergence of African nationalism starting at the end of the nineteenth century and illuminates how nationalists from across the Portuguese empire were brought together in subsequent decades in a unified struggle that would lead to the overthrow of colonial rule after the Second World War. Mário Pinto de Andrade’s insights are now available to English readers for the first time.

MÁRIO PINTO DE ANDRADE, born in Angola in 1928, was a pioneering and central figure of modern Angolan nationalism and the anticolonial struggle during the 1950s and 1960s. He went on to found the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola), which has been in power in Angola since 1975, and died in exile in London in 1990. JEAN-MICHEL MABEKO-TALI is professor of history at Howard University and author of Guerrilhas e lutas sociais: O MPLA perante si próprio, 1960–1977. MARIO PEREIRA is executive editor of Tagus Press in the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.