ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the figure of the “combatant” and how this figure has been invested with different public meanings and appropriations. The figure of the combatant has shaped ideas of citizenship, as well as the moral categorisations of heroism, resistance and suffering that established a symbolic grammar anchored in the struggle. We will therefore attempt to reflect on the trajectory of this concept by highlighting how it is developed according to archetypes that define different ways of legitimising the State, the nation and its protagonists. The combatant's legal status occupies, in this case, a very significant place: the changes in legislation and in the discursive representations of the figure of the “combatant” in Cape Verde accompany the country's political, social and economic transformations and reveal the ambivalence with which the past is socially and imaginatively disputed in the country on a scale that swings between celebration and erasure.
