Who is the combatant?: A diachronic reading based on Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe

Abstract

Starting from a cross-cutting analysis of two African archipelagos with anticolonial histories – Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe – this chapter examines how the mnemonic category of “combatant” has been diachronically defined, produced, and negotiated over time through a specific politics of memory and silence. Mapping the political, social, and economic changes experienced in the two postcolonial countries, we argue that the transformation of the notion of the “combatant” reveals a mnemonic expansion that mobilises the discursive and moral traits associated with this figure and extends them to other sociopolitical and temporal sites. Hence, even though the figure of the “combatant” refers predominantly to the context and chronology of the liberation struggles, it has acquired its own plasticity, accommodating other moments and meanings more widely associated with the anticolonial resistance.