ABSTRACT
The colonial judicial system was quite different from ‘the rule of law’ as applied in the European countries. In the history of colonial rule in Africa, collective punishment was among the more brutal and widespread forms of repression, but it has got little historical attention. This is probably due to the banality of those practices but also to the fact that their victims were not distinguished intellectuals, church or union leaders, workers on strike or radical students. They were, most of the time, peasants from places distant from political capitals, rarely mentioned in newspapers, unknown to those committed to defending more ‘important’ political prisoners. And after the independence of their countries those victims of collective punishment and imprisonment have rarely received much attention as part of the anticolonial resistance usually praised in commemorative ceremonies and patriotic discourses. This paper uses an (almost) forgotten episode of Portuguese colonial violence in Angola, involving hundreds of peasant women and their children, to question the way societies selectively remember victims of repression.
