ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on Cape Verde's first 15 years as an independent nation. Focusing on the new state-building phase, it will be shown that activating the struggle as the cradle of the independent nation worked in two ways. Firstly, as a multidirectional response to the experiences of suffering and violence that preceded and drove it: the spectre of hunger that cyclically resurfaced in Cape Verde. Secondly, as a moral reserve of resistance that was evoked during the difficulties and constraints that the new independent nation faced. It is within this context that a national narrative came to be formed in those years which included an attempt towards “re-Africanization”, particularly in the area of culture. The end of the unity with Guinea-Bissau and the outbreak of some social contestation in opposition to and within the ruling party were accompanied, particularly in the latter half of the 1980s, by a series of mnemonic and political transformations, which aimed to combine the struggle with the cultural and intellectual legacies that preceded anti-colonial nationalism.
