Mário António

Poet and essayist. Born in Angolan Congo, he attended high school in Luanda, later graduating in Overseas Administration from the Instituto de Ciências Sociais e Política Ultramarina, in Lisbon, with a thesis on «Alguns Aspectos da Administração de Angola em Época de Reformas: 1834-1851». At that Institute, he also taught Quimbundu, one of Angola's most important Bantu languages. He worked in Luanda as a meteorological observer. In the 1950s, in that city, he was part of a group of young Angolan intellectuals who championed an Angolan culture, but through a Creole path. With this group, he founded the magazine Mensagem (1951-1952), of which only four issues were published, with the last three in a single volume. At that time, he began collaborating, mainly poetically, in publications in Angola, Mozambique, and Portugal, notably in the poetry sheets Távola Redonda, in Lisbon (1952). He was published by Casa dos Estudantes do Império, in Lisbon (1960-1963), in the «Imbondeiro» Collections, in Sá da Bandeira (1960-1966), in Edições «Capricórnio», in Lobito (1974), and also by Agência Geral das Colónias (1962-1968). He debuted in book form with Poesias (Lisbon, 1956). He is represented in several anthologies as an Angolan poet, notably in Antologia da Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa, by Mário de Andrade (Paris, 1958), and in Poetas Angolanos, by Casa dos Estudantes do Império (Lisbon, 1962). He organized and prefaced an anthology of poetry by his Mensagem companion, Tomaz Vieira da Cruz, which Casa dos Estudantes do Império published in 1963. That year, he had moved to Lisbon, breaking with his previous political positions, and dedicated himself, above all, to the study of Angolan society in the second half of the last century, its fiction writers, its poets, its journalists, but always and increasingly from the perspective of a Creole culture integrated into the Luso-tropicalism line. He was a lecturer in African literatures of Portuguese expression at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and a senior official in the Department of Cooperation with Portuguese-Speaking Countries at the Gulbenkian Foundation. His poetic work is deeply analyzed in Francisco Soares' doctoral thesis, A Autobiografia Lírica de «M. António»: Uma Estética e Uma Ética da Crioulidade Angolana, 1996.