Studentspoettranslator and journalistanti-colonialistexile in Paris
Born
20 September 1926, KaTembe (Maputo, formerly Lourenço Marques), Mozambique
Died
4 December 2002, Cascais
A Mozambican poet, she lived in Lisbon from 1951 to 1964, published in the House of the Students of the Empire’s “Mensagem” and attended the Centre for African Studies, until her opposition to the Estado Novo (“New State”) forced her into exile in Paris.
She was born in Catembe, Mozambique, on 20 September 1926. The poetry she wrote between 1949 and 1951 was only collected in a book in 2001, in Sangue Negro (Black Blood); until then, her work was scattered across newspapers and magazines, such as O Brado Africano and the Mensagem of the House of the Students of the Empire.1
From 1951 to 1964 she lived in Lisbon, where she worked as a translator.1 She attended the Centre for African Studies, which met at the home of Alda do Espírito Santo.3 In the memoirs of António Tomás Medeiros, she is one of the Centre’s “elders”, who moved away from Portugal for fear that the PIDE would associate the Centre with the events in Africa.2
Her opposition to the Estado Novo forced her into exile in Paris, where she began signing her work as Vera Micaia. She returned to Lisbon in 1975 and died in Cascais on 4 December 2002.1
A medical student in Lisbon from 1948, he was active in the House of the Students of the Empire, the MUD Juvenil and the Centre for African Studies. Arrested several times by the PIDE in Lisbon, he was the first president of independent Angola.
A poet from São Tomé whose Lisbon home, on Rua Actor Vale, housed the Centre for African Studies from 1951. Arrested in 1965 and imprisoned in Caxias, she later wrote the words of the anthem of São Tomé and Príncipe.
An agronomy student in Lisbon from 1945, he met Agostinho Neto, Mário Pinto de Andrade and Marcelino dos Santos at the House of the Students of the Empire, and was one of the leaders of the Centre for African Studies. He founded the PAIGC and was assassinated in Conakry in 1973.
A Portuguese-Angolan writer, the author of “Luuanda”. The prize that the Portuguese Society of Writers gave him in 1965, while he was imprisoned at Tarrafal, led the PIDE to question the jury and detain three of the jurors, and the regime to wreck the SPE’s headquarters and dissolve it.
Notes on the sources2
The full name: Carolina Noémia Abranches de Sousa Soares, according to Wikipedia.
The biography rests mainly on Wikipedia: an institutional source is still needed to confirm the Lisbon years (1951–1964) and the exile in Paris.
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