Colonial Legacies in Times of 'Black Lives Matter'

CES Studies

A memory of concrete: politics of representation and silence in the Agostinho Neto Memorial

Miguel Cardina

Vasco Martins

Kronos

About

How to think of the Black Lives Matter movement and its articulation with the colonial past from a country with such a complex history as Angola? I propose the reading of a text by myself and Miguel Cardina entitled A memory of concrete: politics of representation and silence in the Agostinho Neto Memorial. Starting from the António Agostinho Neto Memorial as a place of memory of the liberation struggle of Angola par excellence, this article shows that the memorialization of the first president of Angola adopted westernized narrative formats that atrophied memories of the historical past. In this process, the memorial celebrates only one man, the great hero, overshadowing the contribution of all those who participated in the liberation gest as well as the struggle itself, silencing important nuances in the contextualization of colonial violence in the mnemonic landscape of Angola.