ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book describes the power relations under which ruins and imperial legacies and a number of contact zones operate, have much in common with those that existed in the colonial past. It explores three intertwined ways of mobilising memory in space: forgetting, celebrating and inventing. Forgetting relates to the ways in which memory is erased, as landscapes of pain are removed and places of amnesia are constructed instead of sites of memory. The book shows how both in past and present, navigators, architects, engineers, kings, settlers, and many other westerners have been and are celebrated in Kenya, Cape Verde and Sao Tome. A final way of mobilising memory is through pure invention of the past, and as Hobsbawm puts it 'Myth and invention are essential to the politics of identity'.
