Abstract: The Colonial Act of 1930 confirmed Portugal’s intent to establish a policy in Africa based on assimilation and direct control over the colonies’ financial and political policies. Increased censorship stifled Angola’s nascent literature and led to the rise of colonial literature. It is argued that a coherent body of Angolan literature would not emerge until the late 1940s. Mary Louise Pratt’s construct of the contact zone proposes that the relationship between the colonial and the colonized is not a simple binary opposition occurring on a linear time scale. O Estudante of the Liceu Salvador Correia, one of over 200 journals published during the period of intense colonial intervention, illustrates the dynamic nature of the contact zone. This article examines O Estudante’s contribution to Angolan literature from its initial publication in September 1933 to the beginning of the Second World War.

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