ABSTRACT
“The Struggle in the Mnemonic Transition” discusses the profound changes that occurred with the adoption of a multi-party system and the defeat at the polls of PAICV. The political transition that took shape in 1991 was followed by a specific “mnemonic transition”. It involved replacing the hitherto dominant memoryscape of the struggle with a new public memoryscape. We explore the ways in which this new memorial landscape produced in Cape Verde in the 1990s erased the centrality of the anti-colonial heritage and the connection to Africa and began to recover pre-independence events and figures in a process that Márcia Rego has called the “de-Africanization” of national symbols. The struggle as the cradle of the independent nation was directly challenged here by anti-anticolonial representations that were part of a redefinition of Cape Verde and its history.
