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).