The mnemonic transition: The rise of an anti-anticolonial memoryscape in Cape Verde

Abstract

This article analyses the production of an anti-anticolonial memoryscape in Cape Verde in the 1990s. We will show how this process is bound up with a mnemonic transition that accompanied the economic and political transition taking place in the country and also marked by changes occurring internationally in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the global expansion of multipartidarism. Proposing a broadening of the concept of memoryscape, we will examine the alterations produced in the public space, in the national symbols and in the valorization of events and personages that have marked the history of the archipelago. We find that they produce a mnemopolitical imaginary different from the anticolonial legitimacy that had emerged from a victorious liberation struggle against Portuguese colonialism and became hegemonic immediately after independence (1975–1991).

Toxic Monuments and Mnemonic Regime Change

“…15 Understanding what Cardina and Rodrigues have recently called 'mnemonic transitions' has become all the more urgent at a time of increasing global entanglements which put pressure on established national narratives and their purported representativity. 16 In explaining how collective narratives change, it is useful to recall that remembering and forgetting always go hand in glove. Not only because memory needs to be selective to be meaningful, but also because the sense of a shared past and shared present can only be created if people are prepared to paper over historical cracks.…”

The monumentalization of the Portuguese Colonial War: Commemorating the soldier’s efforts amid the persistence of imperial imaginaries

“…In Portugal, as in other former colonizing countries, the dissolution of the Empire and the democratization of the country did not lead to the removal of colonial statues or toponymic alterations to rename streets, monuments and buildings (Buettner, 2016;Stanard, 2019). On the contrary, these processes of symbolic renaming and decolonization of the public arena were often initiated in countries that gained their independence with the end of colonialism, as also happened in the former Portuguese colonies (Cardina and Rodrigues, 2021). These material memories of a colonial past, associated with an idea of the country's greatness, were not only preserved and valued, but new urban spaces 21 and buildings/museums 22 directly related to these ideas emerged in the meantime.…”

“…I argue that these monuments are one of the foundations that support the construction of a 'memoryscape' (Cardina and Rodrigues, 2021;Kappler, 2017) of the conflict and its former combatants that reflects the narratives, images and memorial discourses that those who erect these monuments want to project. I shall argue that the recent boom in monument building is a response by its promoters to what they consider to be an insufficient public commemoration of the Colonial War and of former Portuguese combatants.…”

States of conception: Renegotiating the mnemonic order amid crisis

“…Going beyond Cardina and Rodrigues’s (2021) concept of a mnemonic transition, which specifically accompanies a political transition, states of conception can occur outside of these transitional periods. States of conception are not necessarily moments in which the political order is changed, but when the mnemonic order is reevaluated.…”

“…During processes of what has come to be known as transitional justice, governments and civil society undergo processes of truth, justice, reparations, and reform, all of which rewrite historical narratives and construct new public memory (Hayner, 2010; Kritz, 1995; Murphy, 2017; Simić, 2016; Teitel, 2000). As such, according to Miguel Cardina and Inês Nascimento Rodrigues, these political transitions are “bound up with a mnemonic transition” (Cardina and Rodrigues, 2021: 380). More and more, however, we are seeing the confrontations with the past outside of these periods of transition (Arthur, 2009; Camilo Sánchez and Uprimny Yepes, 2011; Grodsky, 2008; Sarmiento, 2016).…”