The Nigerian debates in the 1970s between writers such as Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark and Christopher
Okigbo and critics such as Chinweizu Ibekwe has received substantial attention in English-language postcolonial
scholarship. As Neil Lazarus has argued, those debates became stymied because of the extent to which they relied
on a territorially hermetic approach to intellectual and artistic work: Chinwezu et al set up a reductive choice
between essentialised Afrocentric traditionalism and an essentialised Eurocentric modernism.
Aesthetic debate in French and Portuguese journals such as Présence Africaine and Mensagem in the 1950s and
1960s, however, was not calibrated along the same lines as those defined by Chinwezu and the “Euromodernists”
in the following decade. The question of whether African writers’ work counted as modernist, or related to writers
later claimed as modernists, was not at the fore. Rather, those aesthetic debates picked up the lexicon of formalism
and realism crystallised by Soviet debates about revolutionary aesthetics. They rejected socialist realism on the
one hand but also formalism on the other. In this sense, prominent debates about anticolonial aesthetics were not
predominantly pitched as a struggle between European modernism and African traditionalism but as one between
élite writing and writing that was orientated towards society more broadly.
This paper discusses competing conceptions of anticolonial literary practice through a discussion of the work of
Mário Pinto de Andrade, David Diop, José Craveirinha and Manuela Margarido, arguing that these writers made
important contributions to theorising about revolutionary aesthetics by re-emphasising, in different ways and to
different extents, individual, artistic liberty within a struggle of collective social and political freedoms. I ask
how these writers’ practice can inform discussions of the relationship between politics and writing today.