"We want to have a more active museum that can give the deserved visibility to this writer who did so much for Angola", the director of the Casa Museu, Sidónio Domingos, told Lusa, thanking the family for the gesture, after several years of negotiation.
Born on 17 August 1909, the son of a Portuguese father from Guarda and an Angolan mother from Luanda, Óscar Ribas began writing at a very young age and published his first work, "Nuvens que passam", at the age of 18.
The collection that will now be part of the Casa Museu, which came from Portugal, where he died on 19 June 2004, includes originals of his works and some unpublished works yet to be published, as well as correspondence exchanged with writers and other personalities of the time.
In 1948, the writer published "Flor de Espinhos", after having lost his sight due to health complications at the age of 36, and in 1951 he published what Sidónio Domingos describes as the "first Angolan folkloric novel", Uanga – Feitiço, which earned him an Honorable Mention at the time from the Agência-Geral do Ultramar (General Agency of the Colonies), a state entity dedicated to communication and propaganda for the Portuguese colonial empire, including literary competitions.
In total, Óscar Ribas published 17 works in which he illustrates his concerns with ethnographic issues, cultural experiences and the preservation of Angolan identity, said the head of the Casa Museu, also highlighting his work in collecting oral traditions.
The Casa Museu already had a vast collection, including furniture and numismatic and philatelic collections, donated in 1983, as well as the building itself, which was opened to the public in 1996, initially as a library, and in 2007 as a museum.
The exhibition "The Angolan soul revealed in the writing of Óscar Ribas", part of the celebrations of the 115th anniversary of his birth, opens on Wednesday and runs until November.
