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e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº.1, TD4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026

242

AMÍLCAR CABRAL AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY IN POST-INDEPENDENCE

GUINEA-BISSAU AND CABO VERDE

INÊS NASCIMENTO RODRIGUES

nesrodrigues@ces.uc.pt

She is a tenured assistant researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES), University of Coimbra

(Portugal), and vice-coordinator of the research line Europe and the Global South: Heritage and

Dialogues. Her research sits at the intersection of memory studies, postcolonial theory, and the

cultural history of forced labour in African archipelagic contexts. She is currently principal

investigator of GHOST: The Afterlives of Contract and Enslavement. Narratives on Indentured

Labour between Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe, funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie

Postdoctoral Global Fellowship (2024–2027). Her doctoral research on the Batepá Massacre in São

Tomé and Príncipe was awarded the CES Prize for Young Portuguese-Speaking Social Scientists.

She serves on the editorial boards of Práticas da História and Cadernos de Estudos Africanos.

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8088-0201

MIGUEL CARDINA

miguelcardina@ces.uc.pt

He is a historian, professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra

(Portugal) and researcher at the Centre for Social Studies. He was an European Research Council

(ERC) Grantee, with the project «CROME - Crossed Memories, Politics of Silence. The Colonial-

Liberation Wars in Postcolonial Times» (2017-2023). He is the author or co-author of several

books, book chapters, and articles on the dynamics between history and memory; the processes of

historicization related to colonialism, anticolonialism, and the colonial wars; and political ideologies

in the 1960s and 1970s. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5428-457X

Abstract

This study examines how Amílcar Cabral’s legacy has been constructed, disputed, and

reconfigured in Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde since independence. Through an analysis of

monuments, official commemorations, political speeches, public debates, and youth and artistic

mobilisations, it situates Cabral’s figure within broader processes of nation-building, political

legitimation, and historical narration. It asks why the memorialisation of the same founding

figure took such different forms in the two states born of the struggle he led and links these

trajectories to the international conjunctures – Cold War alignments, structural adjustment,

democratisation – that shaped state formation in both countries. The article argues that Cabral

functions as a central mnemonic reference through which state actors legitimise authority and

shape narratives of unity, while younger generations and diaspora groups reactivate his legacy

as a language of critique in contexts marked by political instability, neoliberal reform, and social

inequality. Rather than eroding his symbolic status, these competing appropriations reaffirm

Cabral’s enduring relevance as a living political framework through which contemporary actors

articulate claims for social justice, democratic accountability, and alternative futures.

Keywords

Amílcar Cabral; politics of memory; state formation; Cabo Verde; Guinea-Bissau.

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 242-262

Amílcar Cabral and the Politics of Memory in Post-Independence

Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde

Inês Nascimento Rodrigues, Miguel Cardina

243

Resumo

Este artigo examina o modo como o legado de Amílcar Cabral tem sido construído, disputado e

reconfigurado na Guiné-Bissau e em Cabo Verde desde as independências. Através da análise

de monumentos, comemorações oficiais, discursos políticos, debates públicos e mobilizações

juvenis e artísticas, situa a figura de Cabral em processos mais amplos de construção nacional,

legitimação política e narração histórica. Questiona-se por que razão a memorialização de uma

mesma figura fundadora assumiu formas tão distintas nos dois países nascidos da luta que ele

liderou, relacionando estas trajetórias com as conjunturas internacionais – alinhamentos da

Guerra Fria, ajustamento estrutural, democratização – que moldaram a formação do Estado em

ambos os países. O artigo defende que Cabral funciona como referência mnemónica central

através da qual os atores estatais legitimam a sua autoridade e moldam narrativas de unidade,

ao passo que as gerações mais novas e certos segmentos da diáspora reativam o seu legado

como linguagem de crítica em contextos marcados pela instabilidade política, pela reforma

neoliberal e pela desigualdade social. Longe de erodirem o seu estatuto simbólico, estas

apropriações concorrentes reafirmam a relevância duradoura de Cabral enquanto quadro

político vivo a partir do qual atores contemporâneos formulam reivindicações de justiça social,

responsabilização democrática e futuros alternativos.

Palavras-chave

Amílcar Cabral; Políticas da Memória; Formação do Estado; Cabo Verde; Guiné-Bissau.

How to cite this article

Rodrigues, Inês Nascimento & Cardina, Miguel (2026). Amílcar Cabral and the Politics of Memory in

Post-Independence Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde. Janus.net, e-journal of international relations.

Thematic Dossier – Geopolitics of Anxiety: Ideology, Identity, and (Un)Bordering in Contemporary

Europe and Asia, VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD4, October 2026, pp. 242-262. DOI

https://doi.org/10.26619/1647-7251.DT0726.11

Article submitted on 23 June 2026 and accepted on14 August 2026.

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 242-262

Amílcar Cabral and the Politics of Memory in Post-Independence

Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde

Inês Nascimento Rodrigues, Miguel Cardina

244

AMÍLCAR CABRAL AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY IN POST-

INDEPENDENCE GUINEA-BISSAU AND CABO VERDE

INÊS NASCIMENTO RODRIGUES

MIGUEL CARDINA

Introduction

In one of the most emblematic scenes of Nha Fala, directed by Flora Gomes (2002), a bust

of Amílcar Cabral is carried through city streets as windows and shutters close against its

passage, refusing to shelter it. Through this scene, the Bissau-Guinean director signals the

contested memorial terrain that, in both Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau, shapes how

Cabral is remembered: the anticolonial leader who led the independence struggle for both

territories, and whose legacy remains, more than fifty years later, a site of dispute. The

film ends in Mindelo, on the island of São Vicente in Cabo Verde, at the square where a

statue of the Portuguese navigator Diogo Afonso, celebrated as the island’s ‘discoverer’,

still stands. There, a bust of Cabral not only comes to life and levitates into the air, but it

also displaces the navigator from his plinth and stands in a different orientation. As Kelly

Mendes Lima (2011) observes, while Diogo Afonso faces the ocean (and, by extension,

Portugal), Cabral directs his gaze toward the city and its people. Flora Gomes not only

critiques the discomfort that Cabral’s image has aroused in both countries but also

challenges it: memorial ambiguity, the film suggests, does not diminish his legacy. It keeps

it alive and open to reconfiguration.

This tension between official commemoration and popular reappropriation is the article’s

central concern. By “politics of memory” we mean the State and social processes through

which historical events, figures, and narratives are selectively institutionalised, used and

contested to serve present political ends. We examine the memorialisation of Amílcar

Conflict of Interests - The authors have identified no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgements - A preliminary version of this study was translated by Victor Ferreira, to whom we express

our gratitude for the exceptional care dedicated to the process. This work draws on data collected within two

research projects. The first is CROME. Crossed Memories, Politics of Silence: The Colonial-Liberation War in

Postcolonial Times, funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020

Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (StG-ERC-715593). The second is GHOST. The Afterlives of

Contract and Enslavement: Narratives on Indentured Labour between Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe,

supported by the European Research Executive Agency under the European Union’s Horizon Europe Programme,

Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions - Postdoctoral Fellowships (GA 101105812).

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 242-262

Amílcar Cabral and the Politics of Memory in Post-Independence

Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde

Inês Nascimento Rodrigues, Miguel Cardina

245

Cabral in both countries – through homage, open contestation, and relative omission – by

analysing how his figure has been inscribed in monuments, political discourse, popular

evocations, and public performances. We argue that Cabral’s symbolic status functions as

a central mnemonic reference through which state actors legitimise authority and shape

narratives of national unity, while critics and younger generations mobilise it as a language

of dissent. Two questions organise the analysis: why did the memorialisation of the same

founding figure take such different forms, broadly consensual and dispersed in Guinea-

Bissau, openly partisan in Cabo Verde, and what does this divergence reveal about the

conditions, domestic and international, under which postcolonial states secure its political-

symbolic legitimacy? In answering them, the article makes a twofold contribution.

Empirically, it offers a systematic binational comparison of Cabral’s post-independence

memorialisation. Analytically, it argues that mnemonic change and political change moved

together, and that neither can be explained in domestic terms alone: each reconfiguration

of Cabral’s memory tracked an international conjuncture, from Cold War alignments and

structural adjustment to post-1989 democratisation and the global antiracist mobilisations

of the present decade.

Amílcar Cabral is not the only postcolonial founding figure whose legacy has been

simultaneously institutionalized and contested. The selective memorialization of

independence-era leaders is a well-documented feature (e.g. Ahlman, 2017; Angelo,

2020; Fouéré, 2009; Harsch, 2013; Martins, 2021; Werbner, 1998). As Fouéré (2009)

demonstrates in her analysis of Tanzania, the production of an official public memory

involves the systematic collaboration of media, state actors, and commemorative ritual to

fix a single, morally simplified image of the founding leader in the national imaginary while

organising silence around everything that complicates it. This dynamic is never politically

neutral. As Werbner (1998, p. 15) argued, what appears as historical contestation is

always also a dispute over virtue, legitimacy, and the criteria by which leaders are judged.

Marschall’s analysis of commemorative monuments and statues in post-apartheid South

Africa extends this insight into the material sphere: by celebrating heroes through public

statues and heroes’ acres, postcolonial societies construct “a genealogy, a chosen ancestry

– not in biological but in ideological terms” (Marschall, 2006, p. 177). This literature has

had little to say, however, about founding leaders assassinated before independence

whose postcolonial states subsequently fractured. Monaville (2019, p. 22) states that the

dead Lumumba became “a more tractable uniting reference” because he was no longer

accountable for governance, yet his afterlife unfolded within a single national framework.

Assassination before decolonization, the binational scope of an independence project, and

the political rupture between successor states remain untheorized in combination.

It is precisely here that Cabral’s case offers comparative leverage. His assassination before

independence spared, in part, his memory from direct association with the failures of

postcolonial governance. The binational scope of his project, and its subsequent fracture,

created two memorial contexts in which his figure was pulled in different directions

simultaneously. Yet comparatively little academic attention has been paid to the public

evocation and mobilization of Cabral’s figure in the specific contexts of Guinea-Bissau and

Cabo Verde, or to the memory disputes that have attended the re-signification of his image

in both countries over the past fifty years (for some exceptions see Barros and Lima, 2012;

Barros and Lima, 2021; Barros et al., 2024).

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 242-262

Amílcar Cabral and the Politics of Memory in Post-Independence

Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde

Inês Nascimento Rodrigues, Miguel Cardina

246

Amílcar Lopes Cabral was born in 1924 in Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau, to Cabo Verdean parents,

trained as an agronomist in Lisbon, and became the principal architect of the Partido

Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC), one of the most

internationally celebrated anticolonial liberation movements of the twentieth century. His

assassination in Conakry on 20 January 1973, months before Guinea-Bissau’s unilateral

declaration of independence, transformed him into a martyr-founder of singular moral

authority. In both Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde, Cabral was consecrated as “Founder of

the Nationality”: his effigy appeared on banknotes and coins, his birthday and the date of

his assassination were enshrined as national holidays, and his name was attached to youth

organizations, training institutes, and public institutions (Cardina and Rodrigues, 2022, pp.

25–26). The early post-independence years confirmed and actively deepened this status,

though not without a degree of political management that would have consequences later.

The states that inherited this legacy were formed under tight international constraints.

Like most polities born of decolonisation, they entered a world partitioned between rival

great powers, in which the solidarities and imaginaries of the so-called “Third World”

supplied both resources and limits for nation-building. Frederick Cooper’s characterisation

of the African state that emerged from this conjuncture is apposite: “the post-colonial

gatekeeper state, lacking the external coercive capacity of its predecessor, was a

vulnerable state, not a strong one” (Cooper, 2002, p. 5). State formation in Guinea-Bissau

and Cabo Verde unfolded within precisely these constraints, and the symbolic economy

built around Cabral’s memory became one of the few political resources the new states

fully controlled.

The PAIGC deployed Cabral’s image with deliberate intent: to legitimize the new

(binational) State, to construct a narrative of revolutionary continuity, and to conceal the

significant tensions that independence had not resolved, namely those between Cabo

Verdean and Guinean factions, between the party leadership and the population, and

between the ideals of the liberation struggle and the realities of governance (e.g. Chabal,

1983a, 1986; Lopes, 1987; Forrest, 1987; Roque, 2016). These tensions were rooted in a

structural asymmetry that preceded independence by decades. Under Portuguese colonial

rule, a chronic shortage of trained personnel had led the administration to rely heavily on

Cabo Verdeans to staff its bureaucracy in Guinea-Bissau: by 1936, half of all mid-level

functionaries and around seventy percent of civil servants were Cabo Verdean (Forrest,

2003, p. 169). For sectors of the Bissau-Guinean society, Cabo Verdean authority was

therefore not a novelty introduced by the liberation struggle but a continuation, in a

different political register, of a familiar colonial arrangement. The PAIGC’s leadership,

largely drawn from Cabo Verdean milieux whose educational formation and social networks

set them apart from the largely rural, ethnically diverse Guinean population, inherited this

association rather than transcended it (Chabal, 1983b, pp. 202–203; Coutinho, 2017, pp.

27, 54-61, 91-3; Forrest, 1987, pp. 100–101; Rudebeck, 1974, pp. 14, 40-1, 115). Little

of this was visible from outside. During the liberation war and the first years of

independence, Guinea-Bissau attracted considerable international attention and sympathy,

the product of a successful anticolonial campaign and of widely admired social and political

experiments in which international actors themselves took part. Teresa Almeida Cravo

(2023) describes a promising proto-state, and a new country received by the international

community with confidence and optimism, representations far removed from the “failed

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 242-262

Amílcar Cabral and the Politics of Memory in Post-Independence

Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde

Inês Nascimento Rodrigues, Miguel Cardina

247

state” imagery that would attach to it decades later. It was against this backdrop of

external goodwill that domestic tensions did their corrosive work. In Guinea-Bissau, a

nativist political discourse gave political form to the resentment this generated, positing

an authentic Guinean belonging against which the Cabo Verdean leadership of the PAIGC

could be cast as foreign, as an internal colonialism substituted for the external one (e.g.

Vieira, 1980–81; see also Lopes, 1987). That this discourse served the interests of specific

political actors, above all those who would go on to lead the 1980 coup, does not diminish

its social traction, or its lasting consequences for how Cabral’s legacy was subsequently

managed in each country. What matters here is that it set in motion the very backlash it

was designed to prevent: the moment when the consensus fractured, and Cabral’s legacy

became a terrain of contestation rather than a source of uncontested legitimacy.

Understanding why this happened requires attending to the logic of what we term

“mnemonic legitimation” in postcolonial states more broadly. Founding figures function as

symbolic anchors: when they precede the compromises and failures of actual governance,

their authority can be invoked without being tested against a record. In contexts of political

instability or contested legitimacy, state and non-state actors reach for these anchors not

arbitrarily but because they condense, in a single figure, the moral authority of the

independence struggle, the promise of national unity, and the claim to speak for a people

rather than a faction. What distinguishes Cabral from comparable founding figures, and

what makes the two cases examined here analytically productive, is that this symbolic

resource was simultaneously available to competing actors in structurally different political

contexts. In Guinea-Bissau, Cabral’s status as founding martyr has, at least on the surface,

largely retained a consensual character that cuts across political divisions: his figure has

rarely been the object of open contestation. In Cabo Verde, by contrast, his figure has

become entangled in multiparty competition, making his memorialization a sharper and

more openly contested terrain. This structural variation, as much as the intentions of

individual actors, explains the divergent trajectories traced in the sections that follow.

Decabralization And Post-Coup Forgetting

The fracture came from two directions almost simultaneously, and in each case the

mechanism was instructive. In Guinea-Bissau, the coup d’état of 14 November 1980, led

by then-President of the People’s National Assembly and Commander-in-chief of the Armed

Forces João Bernardo ‘Nino’ Vieira, ended both the PAIGC’s political hegemony and the

project of binational unity with Cabo Verde. The coup’s architects justified their action in

explicitly Cabralist terms, invoking his values and objectives as having been betrayed by

the existing leadership and framing the military takeover as a restoration of the

revolution’s original promise. The argument, in its sharpest form, held that the PAIGC had

been captured by a Cabo Verdean elite whose interests and cultural formation were alien

to the Guinean majority, and that independence had delivered not liberation but a change

of masters (Vieira, 1980–81; see also Nóbrega, 2003).

By invoking Cabral while dismantling the institutional structure of binational unity, the

coup’s architects performed a precise ideological operation: they separated Cabral from

the Cabo Verdean leadership that claimed to embody his legacy and repositioned him as

a martyr betrayed by that same leadership. This reflects a structural feature of postcolonial

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 242-262

Amílcar Cabral and the Politics of Memory in Post-Independence

Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde

Inês Nascimento Rodrigues, Miguel Cardina

248

legitimation in which the founding figure’s authority is so central that even those

dismantling his institutional legacy must claim to act in his name. But it also explains a

paradox that would define Guinea-Bissau’s memorial landscape for decades: Cabral’s

symbolic status could remain broadly consensual precisely because this nativist logic had

detached his memory from the Cabo Verdean political project and regrounded it in the

liberation struggle itself, which no actor could afford to repudiate. Yet the practical effect

was the opposite of what the rhetoric suggested. According to Koudawo (2001, pp. 202–

3), the coup marked the victory of the military wing over politics, directly contradicting the

principles Cabral had advocated, above all his insistence on the primacy of political over

military leadership and on the liberation struggle as a project of social transformation

rather than mere armed seizure of power. What followed was, as Koudawo (2001, p. 132)

terms it, “the disintegration of the heritage of the period of the liberation struggle”: Vieira’s

subsequent assertion of “presidential Bonapartism” (Fernandes, 1994) concentrated power

in ways that structurally contradicted Cabral’s own political thought, even as his name

continued to serve as legitimizing cover. Cabral’s image was thus preserved in rhetoric

precisely as his legacy was dismantled in practice, a dissociation between name and

content that would deepen over the following decades.

In Cabo Verde, the rupture took a different form and proved no less consequential for

Cabral’s public memory. After the coup, the Cabo Verdean wing of the party reconstituted

itself as the PAICV (Partido Africano para a Independência de Cabo Verde), inheriting a

fragile position: on certain islands, the PAIGC had never fully taken root, owing to the

complex relationship between key social sectors, the project of unity with Guinea-Bissau,

and the contested legacy of “Africanity” (Anjos, 2002; Costa and Sarmento, 2014;

Fernandes, 2002; Barros, 2008; Trajano Filho, 2009; Almada, 2012). International

conjunctures compounded this domestic fragility. Across the decade that followed, the

unravelling of the Cold War order dissolved the alignments within which the PAICV’s single-

party model had been legible, while the ascendancy of neoliberalism and the conditionality

attached to multilateral lending redefined what a small, aid-dependent archipelago could

plausibly pursue. Liberalisation, moreover, began inside the party itself: from the mid-

1980s the PAICV adopted a development model of economic extroversion, and, as

Koudawo observed, economic and political liberalisation appeared intertwined, propelled

by international pressure, the erosion of single-party authority, and a well-established

Catholic Church (Koudawo, 2001, cited in Cardina and Rodrigues, 2022, pp. 61–62). The

legislative, presidential, and municipal elections of 1991, all won by the opposition, turned

this conjuncture into political and, as the next section shows, mnemonic change (Cardina

and Rodrigues, 2023).

Across the archipelago, the PAIGC never related to Cabo Verdean society uniformly, and

the mnemonic transition that followed traced pre-existing social and geographical fault

lines rather than overwriting them. On Santiago, where the agrarian legacies of slavery

and land concentration ran deepest and the party’s rural roots ran strongest, popular

attachment to Cabral proved most durable and post-independence mobilization in his name

most vigorous: the rabelados and the Marxa Kabral, discussed below, are Santiago

phenomena. São Vicente, tied to Portugal by long histories of emigration, kept a more

ambivalent distance from the Guinean dimension of the PAIGC’s project; it is no accident

that Christian Rationalism, with its spiritualist reading of Cabral, flourished precisely there.

JANUS.NET, e-journal of International Relations

e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 242-262

Amílcar Cabral and the Politics of Memory in Post-Independence

Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde

Inês Nascimento Rodrigues, Miguel Cardina

249

The Movimento para a Democracia (MpD), after 1991 the principal vehicle of anti-Cabralist

politics, drew on a longer current of Cabo Verdean self-understanding that emphasised

Creole singularity and kept the PAIGC’s Pan-Africanism at arm’s length (Anjos, 2002; for

a detailed discussion of these disputes, see Cardina and Rodrigues, 2022, pp. 39–42, 132–

4). The contested character of Cabral’s legacy in Cabo Verde is therefore legible not only

in the chronology of political transition but in this uneven social geography: islands,

classes, and communities for whom his figure meant different things from the outset.

When the PAICV lost decisively in the multiparty elections of the early 1990s, more

changed than the party in office: the terms on which national identity and historical

legitimacy could be publicly claimed were themselves recast, in what we have elsewhere

called a “mnemonic transition” (Cardina and Rodrigues, 2021). The MpD government did

not attack Cabral head-on; his symbolic standing ran too deep for that. Instead, it

gradually dismantled the symbolic apparatus surrounding his legacy, removing his effigy

from banknotes and coins, abolishing his birthday as a national holiday, and replacing the

anthem that carried his lyrics. Taken one by one, each gesture could pass for

administrative normalisation or democratic renewal; together, they de-centred the

anticolonial past as the primary reference for national identity. What Márcia Rego (2015,

p. 77) calls “de-Africanization” worked by substitution rather than erasure, exchanging

one set of national symbols and commemorative anchors for another that stressed Cabo

Verde’s creole particularity and its Atlantic and European connections over its ties to

continental Africa. Cabral was not abolished but displaced: from the centre of national

memory to one contested figure among several.

Even so, new homages followed: in 1995, a bust of Cabral was inaugurated in Santa

Catarina, in the interior of Santiago, near the house where he grew up, and in 1996 a

statue was erected at the international airport on Sal, which also bears his name (Cardina

and Rodrigues, 2022, pp. 104–105). In Praia, on 5 July 2000, the twenty-fifth anniversary

of independence, a memorial offered by the People’s Republic of China was inaugurated:

a small museum at its base, a bronze statue roughly three metres tall at its summit. The

figure wears the iconic sumbia, yet it holds a book and is wrapped in a heavy trench coat,

stiff in posture and distant from the bearing associated with the liberation struggle; sectors

of the population, comparing it to statues of Asian political leaders, found it unsettling

(Cardina and Rodrigues, 2022, p. 124). The memorial’s location prompted similar

reservations. In June 2020, Gilson Varela Lopes, a young Cabo Verdean based in

Luxembourg, petitioned online for the removal of the statue of the Portuguese navigator

Diogo Gomes, which stood beside the presidential palace in Praia, where the mnemonic

transition described above had returned it. Gomes, the petition argued, was “a navigator

who also trafficked slaves part-time”; the demand drew explicitly on the international wave

of criticism of colonial statues and on the antiracist protests that surged worldwide after

the murder of George Floyd in the United States. In place of Diogo Gomes, the petition

proposed, should stand a statue of Amílcar Cabral.

Turning to Guinea-Bissau, the coup gave rise to Nino Vieira’s growing consolidation of

power, against a backdrop of recurring political turbulence, the structural adjustment

programme initiated by the World Bank and IMF in 1987, and regional disputes with

Text of the petition retrieved from https://peticaopublica.com/pview.aspx?pi=PT100526.

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e-ISSN: 1647-7251

VOL. 17 Nº. 1, TD 4

Thematic Dossier – From Colonial Rule to Nationhood:

Amílcar Cabral and the Birth of Lusophone Africa

October 2026, pp. 242-262

Amílcar Cabral and the Politics of Memory in Post-Independence

Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde

Inês Nascimento Rodrigues, Miguel Cardina

250

Senegal and Guinea-Conakry (Temudo, 2008, p. 249). Although Nino Vieira professed a

return to Cabral’s ideals, substantive change remained limited. The process of

commemorating Cabral through monuments in Guinea-Bissau was equally fraught with

delays. As José Neves and Leonor Pires Martins (2024) describe in the catalogue

accompanying the exhibition Amílcar Cabral: uma exposição, Cuba gifted Guinea-Bissau a

statue of Cabral in 1985, sculpted by Lázaro Calvo from memory, drawing on Cabral’s stay

at a Havana hotel during the Tricontinental Conference. Upon arrival, however, the statue

was placed in storage at the Amura Fort, where it remained for two decades, until May

2009, when it was finally installed at a roundabout near the airport in the Bissau-Guinean

capital.

Taken together, these two trajectories illuminate something that a focus on either country

alone would obscure. In both cases, Cabral’s symbolic figure proved simultaneously

indispensable and unstable: indispensable because the moral authority of the liberation

struggle remained the primary source of political legitimation in the post-independence

decades, and unstable because that authority could be claimed by competing actors with

opposing agendas. The forms this instability took, however, differed fundamentally

according to political context. In Cabo Verde, where the democratic transition produced a

functioning multiparty system and institutional continuity, the contestation of Cabral’s

legacy was largely managed through official channels: electoral politics, state symbolism,

and legislative decisions. The “decabralisation” of national memory was, in this sense, a

controlled and incremental process. In Guinea-Bissau, where the authority over Cabral’s

memory was more dispersed across political and social actors, his legacy circulated more

freely in non-state spaces: youth movements, music, urban art, and the kind of grassroots

political mobilization that the following sections explore. The paradox is that this relative

dispersion may have preserved the critical and transformative dimensions of Cabral’s

legacy more effectively than the managed commemorations of the Cabo Verdean state,

precisely because no single actor was able to domesticate it. What the comparison reveals,

in other words, is that the relationship between political context and memorial politics is

not linear: stronger institutions do not straightforwardly produce more robust or more

faithful engagements with the founding figure’s legacy. They produce more controlled

ones.

Other Representations of Cabral: Between Cult and Fraud

The representations of Cabral examined so far operate largely within the registers of official

commemoration and institutional politics: monuments, holidays, party discourse, and the

strategic mobilization of his name by state and para-state actors. Yet alongside these, and

often in tension with them, a parallel set of memory practices has taken shape that

operates below and beyond the state. These vernaculars, syncretic and, at times,

millenarian appropriations of Cabral’s figure exceed the frameworks of formal political

culture. They transform Cabral from a historical actor into a mythological presence – a

redeemer, a spirit, even a god – whose power derives precisely from his removal from the

compromised terrain of actual governance. What follows traces three distinct but related

manifestations of this memorialization in Cabo Verde: the mythological testimonies from

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the colonial period, the rabelados communities of Santiago, and the Christian Rationalist

movement on São Vicente.

One structural condition underlies all three of these vernacular appropriations and helps

explain why they took such intense form specifically in Cabo Verde: Cabral never returned

to the archipelago after leaving as a student (Tomás, 2021). His adult life was spent in

Guinea-Bissau, Lisbon, Conakry, and international diplomatic circuits. In Guinea-Bissau,

Cabral was a known physical presence; fighters had met him, heard him speak in the

liberated zones, and followed him in combat. His memorialization there remains in some

respects tethered to living memory. Mythologising registers were not absent in Guinea-

Bissau, where Cabral also entered legend; but in Cabo Verde they assumed a more

elaborate form, one his structural absence likely did much to enable: the demigod who

appears in disguise, the Messiah glimpsed in rural communities, the astral president who

communicates from beyond death are all figures generated by longing for someone who

was no longer physically there. His very distance made him available for a kind of

imaginative investment that proximity would have complicated.

The quasi-mythological dimensions of Cabral’s presence in the social imaginary predate

his assassination and exceed the memorialisation produced by the state, media, and the

political sphere. Cláudio Furtado noted the existence of a “mythical memory” associated

with the revolutionary, according to which it was common, “in the Cabo Verdean rural

world and even during the colonial situation”, to “hear that Amílcar Cabral had appeared

in such and such localities” (Furtado, 1997, p. 18). Pedro Martins, arrested at the age of

nineteen for his underground political activities in Cabo Verde and held at the Tarrafal

prison

until the release of political prisoners on 1 May 1974, remembers him this way:

[Cabral] had achieved a magical and paternalistic stature as a demigod, a

defender of the people who, disguised as a priest, a sister of charity, an old

man, etc., would appear everywhere in Cabo Verde to see with his own eyes

the suffering of the people, in order to encourage them in the fight against

Portuguese domination. Any stranger who was not identified was often

regarded as ‘Amílcar’ who again passed in disguise. This protection was not

limited to Cabo Verde but also extended to São Tomé and Angola where he

would see the suffering of the ‘contratados’ [workers, often forcibly recruited,

who were bound by exploitative labour contracts to work on colonial

plantations in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries]. […] The will of the

people to free themselves from the yoke of exploitation, and their anxiety to

be close to the leader who had already achieved enormous prestige and

popularity, but who was hundreds of kilometres away from the islands, led

them, in their simplicity, to make him a mystical figure (Martins, 1995, p. 174).

Cabral thus emerged as a longed-for presence, a spectre who revealed himself to the rural

poor most exposed to the violence of colonial exploitation in unexpected and varied

disguises, precisely because his physical presence was so distant. His power lay in the

On Tarrafal prison, one of the most potent symbols of political repression under Portuguese rule, see Barros

(2009) and Lopes (2010).

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ability to transcend his corporeal condition, appearing at unforeseen times and places to

alleviate the suffering of the population.

A further manifestation of these dynamics is the distinctive appropriation of Cabral by the

rabelados, rural communities in the interior of Santiago Island who maintain their own

religious practices and a long history of resistance to the state, among whom Cabral is

venerated and, at times, deified.

Contacts with the PAIGC during the liberation struggle

are poorly documented, but appear to have run through the movement’s underground

militants (Martins, 1995, p. 174; Querido, 2013, pp. 191–2). What makes this

appropriation analytically distinctive is not its religious intensity but the social logic it

encodes. A community constituted by refusal – of the Catholic Church, of the colonial state,

of successive governments’ integrationist pressures – the rabelados incorporated Cabral

into a sacred cosmology not as conventional political loyalty but as an act of sovereign

interpretation, taking from his legacy what served their own framework of resistance and

discarding the rest. That legacy, this suggests, has never belonged exclusively to the state

or the party but circulates in registers that formal political culture neither controls nor fully

comprehend.

The testimonies are consistent. Visiting the community of Espinho Branco in 1974, Euclides

Fontes found a millenarian group whose leader, Nhô Fernando, saw Cabral as “the Messiah

who would join them, the chosen people, to save Cabo Verde after centuries of suffering

and oppression of all kinds” (Fontes, 2018, pp. 348–9). At Nhô Fernando’s death in 1979,

the newspaper Voz di Povo wrote that, in “their mystique”, the rabelados considered Cabral

“the black God they always dreamed of opposing to the European religion brought by the

colonizers” (Voz di Povo, 1979, p. 8). Decades later, Rego (2015, pp. 146, 151) found the

same veneration in attenuated form: some consider Cabral divine, others a man of

exceptional qualities; asked whether Cabral had been seen in his community, the leader

“shrugged, gave a half-smile, and uttered a suspenseful ‘who knows’”. As a member of

the community put it in 1995, “Amílcar Cabral did not die [...] Jesus did a faith-based work

and Cabral performs a practical one” (cited in Carvalho, 2020, p. 102).

A very different context produces a structurally similar move. Christian Rationalism, a

spiritist current originating in Brazil in the early twentieth century that gained significant

presence in Cabo Verde, particularly on the island of São Vicente, regards Cabral as a

superior or “light spirit” (Vasconcelos, 2004). In one of its branches in Mindelo, he is

considered an “astral president”, acting as a kind of spiritual guardian of the centre, where

he is said to appear frequently to transmit messages (Cardina and Rodrigues, 2022, p.

141). These representations of Amílcar Cabral reflect the construction of a myth around

his figure, elevating him to the status of a deity. This mythologisation contrasts, however,

with the critical and often anti-Cabralist perception that some Cabo Verdean intellectual

and political sectors hold of his legacy. Amado (2012), addressing the complexity of

Cabral’s image in Cabo Verde’s sociopolitical context, identifies three distinct

representations: as a fraud, as an icon, and as a theorist-ideologue.

The first representation constructs Cabral as a ‘fraud’, articulated primarily by intellectuals

linked to the right and shaped by post-1991 party political disputes. The biographical

On the rabelados, see e.g., Rego (2015).

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dimension of this critique, centring on Cabral’s long physical absence from the islands and

the resulting claim that his project was fundamentally Guinean rather than Cabo Verdean

in orientation, gave it a surface plausibility that purely ideological attacks could not sustain

alone. In this view, Cabral bears moral responsibility for the abuses of power committed

during the post-independence period: “for some social sectors (including some sections of

the archipelago intelligentsia), Cabral represents everything wrong that happened in the

post-colonial period”, with commentators drawing “a direct causal relationship between

Cabral and the evils and political errors committed by the single-party regime” (Amado,

2012). This position draws on a broad range of arguments: his supposed lack of theoretical

originality; claims that his biographical trajectory was largely alien to Cabo Verde;

allegations of a dictatorial disposition; and the assertion that the prominent place he

occupies in the popular imagination is unwarranted. Read in context, the “fraud”

representation is not only a reaction to Cabral himself but to the specific uses to which his

image was put by the single-party state. The anger directed at Cabral is in significant

measure displaced anger at the PAIGC’s post-independence record. Acknowledging this

does not rehabilitate the anti-Cabralist critique, but it does make it historically intelligible.

The second representation, the “icon”, circulates widely in Cabo Verde and the diaspora

through stylized reproductions of Cabral’s image and his most emblematic phrases on

clothing, in public space, and on social media, a mediated figure that, for Amado (2012),

forecloses critical engagement with his ideas and transforms him into an idolized symbol

divorced from his actual thought. The third, the “theorist-ideologue”, is the least known

but in Amado’s view the most important: a substantial, internationally recognised body of

theoretical work whose ideas remain underexplored in the Cabo Verdean academic

context.

Most recently, on Cabral’s centenary on 12 September 2024, anti-Cabralist criticism

sharpened notably: the leadership of the MpD parliamentary group resigned collectively to

protest their own party government’s decision to support the issuance of a commemorative

stamp marking the centenary (Santos, 2024). Such controversies confirm that Cabral

remains an uncomfortable figure in some quarters, somewhat countercyclical to his

consensual international celebration. Yet the anti-Cabralist tendency present in parts of

the MpD and Cabo Verdean society is not dominant, as the following section demonstrates.

Cabral Today: Revolutionary Icon

Contestation and partial erasure notwithstanding, Cabral’s figure has shown remarkable

resilience. In Cabo Verde, the independent nation took symbolic shape around what might

be described as a spectral body: absent, because his remains lie buried in Guinea-Bissau;

present, because the archipelago owes its independence to the historical process he set in

motion. The result is a paradoxical national hero – Cabo Verdean by parentage and

adolescent schooling, Bissau-Guinean by birth and by the armed struggle he led, and

holder, in formal terms, of no nationality other than that of colonial Portugal.

In Guinea-Bissau, in recent decades, the memory of the successful war of liberation and

its leader has served as a redemptive reference, sustaining hope for a more just future.

Following the implementation of a structural adjustment programme in 1987, the first

multiparty elections in 1994 (won by Nino Vieira, in power since 1980), and the devastating

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civil war of 1998–99, a lack of opportunity and widespread social dissatisfaction intensified

across the country. Cabral’s figure became a significant reference point, mobilized

especially by the civic youth movements that emerged in the 1990s and consolidated in

the 2000s in Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde alike (Barros and Lima, 2012, 2021). Barros

and Lima (2021, p. 90) describe the recovery of the liberation struggle’s legacy as “a new

expression of African awakening”. Kohl and Schroven (2014, p. 16) similarly note that, for

a significant part of the Bissau-Guinean population, Cabral is now regarded as a martyr,

embodying qualities associated with those of a prophet.

This movement finds expression in music, particularly rap and hip-hop, where Cabral is

invoked as a “messenger of truth”, summoned as an embodiment of pride and a figure of

critique directed at political powers accused of ignoring his teachings (Barros and Lima,

2012, pp. 99–101). Barros et al. (2024, p. 51) describe these practices as collective

dynamics of artivism, functioning “as an alternative mechanism of opposition to political

power, but also as a way of revendicating and disputing the structuring memories of

Guinean and Cabo Verdean identities”. Since 2020, murals on the main streets of Bissau

have paid tribute to Cabral and several of the PAIGC’s most prominent fighters who died

during or shortly after the liberation struggle (Rodrigues, 2023). Figures such as Titina

Silá, Pansau Na Isna, Domingos Ramos, Francisco Mendes (Tchico Té), and José Carlos

Schwarz are recognized as national heroes in a contemporary appropriation of the

liberation struggle’s legacy.

Periodic debates arise over to whom Amílcar Cabral “belongs” and who represents the

greatest figure of the Bissau-Guinean nation. These surface with intensity at specific

political or symbolic moments, such as in November 2020, when Nino Vieira’s remains

were transferred with state honours from the municipal cemetery in Bissau to the Amura

Fortress. The ceremony, presided over by Head of State Umaro Sissoco Embaló, was

marked by public controversy (Martins, 2020). Embaló described Vieira as “a courageous,

patriotic, and committed fighter, a statesman, a charismatic leader, who gave his life for

our country and shaped our history, both during the armed struggle and as President of

the Republic” (Cassamá, 2020). Days earlier, Sissoco Embaló had enacted a government

decree posthumously awarding Vieira the title of “Hero of the Armed Struggle for National

Liberation”. The creation of the “Nino ka muri” movement, recalling the well-known

expression “Cabral ka muri” (Cabral did not die) and active since at least 2017, similarly

draws a deliberate equivalence between the two figures. The gesture is revealing precisely

because it cannot fully succeed. The attempt to elevate Nino Vieira to a status comparable

to Cabral’s requires borrowing the memorial language that Cabral’s own legacy generated,

which already signals the asymmetry it tries to overcome. Nino Vieira governed, and

governance leaves a record. Cabral did not, and his martyrdom protects him from precisely

the kind of accountability that shadows Vieira’s legacy. The political disputes that arise in

Guinea-Bissau do not, however, challenge Cabral’s legacy or the prominent place he

occupies among community associations and youth sectors that aspire to social justice,

transformation, and local development. His broad consensus is not despite Guinea-Bissau’s

contested political history but, in a specific sense, because of it.

Barros and Lima (2021, p. 94). For the case of Cabo Verde, see Cardina and Rodrigues (2022).

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In Cabo Verde, renewed representations of Cabral also emerge from politicized youth

sectors and diaspora-related groups. Redy Wilson Lima (2018) identifies various forms of

these actions, including rap music, public petitions, cyber-activism, the resurgence of

Afrocentric and Pan-Africanist cultural expressions, and community-based youth activism.

This political and cultural landscape is closely connected to Marxa Kabral, a demonstration

held annually on 20 January, the anniversary of Cabral’s assassination, which serves as

both a protest and an alternative political performance countering the institutionalized

representations of the revolutionary. The evocation of Cabral during the Marxa serves not

only to honour his political legacy and theoretical teachings but also as an occasion to

assert “Africanity”, a commitment expressed through choices of clothing, hairstyles, and

music, in slogans and in the use of capoeira as a globalized symbol of Black resistance.

The event also functions as a platform for challenging the dominant political order in an

archipelago where youth unemployment is high and where many consider the ideals of the

liberation struggle to have been betrayed by current leaders.

The 2019 edition threw these dynamics into sharp relief. On the morning of every 20

January, senior government figures, foreign representatives, and former combatants

gather at the Cabral memorial for the state’s official ceremony of wreath-laying and

homage, and in earlier years the Marxa had kept its distance, march and ceremony

occupying separate spaces. In 2019, the march turned, spontaneously and unannounced,

toward the monument while the official ceremony was underway; police lines immediately

blocked the demonstrators’ approach, splitting the space between what participants called

the “ceremony of power” and the “demonstration of the youth”. Condensed in the episode

were the Marxa’s defining gestures: the claim to be Cabral’s legitimate heirs against those

who govern in his name; the crossing of the invisible lines that separate the capital’s

spaces of power from its popular neighbourhoods; and the insistent chant of Cabral ka

mori (Cabral did not die), at once memorial affirmation and political critique. Capinero

(Adérito Gonçalves Tavares), activist and former president of the Pilorinhu association, a

driving force behind the Marxa since 2013, recalled: “as we climbed to the Plateau, we

didn’t take half the road; we took the whole road” (interview to the authors, Praia, 20 May

2019).

Cutting across both countries, and increasingly beyond them, the diaspora has emerged

as a distinct and significant memorial actor. The Luxembourg petition and the cyber-

activism Redy W. Lima identifies among diaspora youth, all point to the same

phenomenon: the diaspora does not merely transmit or preserve Cabral’s legacy but

actively reframes it, often with a freedom from local political constraint that is harder to

sustain within the archipelago itself. This dynamic is inseparable from Cabo Verde’s own

liminal position relative to Africa: a country whose relationship to African identity has been

historically contested, whose population abroad has long outnumbered those at home, and

whose political culture is shaped as much by European frameworks as by pan-Africanist

solidarities. For diaspora actors, Cabral functions as an anchor of African belonging and

anticolonial commitment, a figure through whom Cabo Verdean identity can be asserted

as unambiguously African, antiracist, and resistant, in contexts such as Lisbon,

Luxembourg, and Rotterdam, where those assertions carry their own political charge. The

memorial field around Cabral is thus not contained within national borders but is genuinely

transnational, shaped by migrations, political conjunctures, and antiracist movements that

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connect the archipelago to Portugal, West Africa, Brazil, and beyond (Batalha and Carling,

2008; Lima and Robalo, 2023).

In 2024, the centenary of Cabral’s birth was celebrated worldwide. In Guinea-Bissau and

Cabo Verde, academic and associative institutions organized a significant colloquium to

mark the occasion, with sessions held simultaneously in person and virtually across both

countries. Shortly afterwards, the first Marxa Cabral took place in Lisbon, an initiative of

the Black movement in Portugal, bringing together several collectives and hundreds of

participants to protest fascism, racism, and xenophobia (Público, 2024, p. 11). For those

who marched, many of them descendants of Cabo Verdean and Guinean migrants, with

no direct experience of the liberation struggle, Cabral functioned less as a historical figure

than as a living political language through which claims against colonial continuities could

be publicly articulated. That a demonstration invoking his name took place in the former

colonial metropole was, in this sense, less a departure than a return: a reminder that

Cabral’s politics were always forged in the intersections between Africa, Europe, and the

Atlantic world that his own life traced. The following year, on 13 September 2025, a second

Marxa Cabral again filled the Avenida da Liberdade, this time marking the fiftieth

anniversary of the independences. Its organisers marched, in their own words, “inspired

by the vast and rich legacy of Amílcar Cabral’s anticolonial thought and practice of struggle”

under the motto “Di Povu pa Povu: Libertação, Dignidade, Soberania Popular” (From the

People to the People: Liberation, Dignity, Popular Sovereignty), denouncing in the same

gesture Umaro Sissoco Embaló’s dictatorship in Guinea-Bissau, state violence in Angola,

racism in Portugal, and the way the Cabo Verdean state had treated Cabral’s figure –

“Cabral belongs to the people and to the world” (Segunda Grandi Marxa Cabral, 2025).

That the marchers claimed Cabral against the very states founded in his name measures

how fully his memory now circulates as a living popular language rather than an official

inheritance.

Conclusion

This study opened with Nha Fala, and it is fitting to close with it. Gomes uses the bust of

Cabral as a recurring comic device: institutions and individuals reject it, exposing how

elites have appropriated his image for personal gain, yet as the film advances, the bust

grows. Arenas (2011, pp. 128–129) reads this growth as a “return of the repressed”, the

haunting persistence of Cabral’s legacy in societies grappling with present challenges.

Sabine (2019) sees the film asking how Cabral’s revolutionary path might be revived in a

postcolonial nation undermined by deregulation, corruption, and clientelism. For both, the

closing scenes stage Gomes’s vision of cyclical rebirth and the enduring relevance of

Cabral’s ideals for future generations in Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, and beyond (Arenas,

2011, p. 129; Sabine, 2019, pp. 161–162). The film’s allegory points toward something

the comparative analysis in this article has sought to make analytically precise. Cabral

shares with other anticolonial founding figures – Nyerere, Sankara, Lumumba – the

capacity to be selectively appropriated, mythologised, and detached from the constraints

of historical context. What this article has argued, however, is that Cabral’s case combines

several features that, taken together, answer the two questions that organised the

analysis.

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The first question asked why memorialisation took broadly consensual and dispersed form

in Guinea-Bissau and openly partisan form in Cabo Verde. The divergence is not primarily

a matter of different popular attachments to Cabral. It is an effect of the interaction

between his specific memorial conditions and the distinct political trajectories each state

followed after the 1980 rupture. In Guinea-Bissau, the coup paradoxically preserved broad

consensus: by detaching Cabral’s memory from the Cabo Verdean leadership while

claiming to act in his name, the coup’s architects regrounded his legacy in the liberation

struggle itself. In Cabo Verde, the democratic transition of 1991 inserted his memory into

competitive multiparty politics, transforming it into a resource that different actors had

actively to contest, defend, or appropriate. The divergence is, in this sense, institutional

as much as ideological.

This divergence is visible in recent developments that confirm rather than complicate the

argument. In Guinea-Bissau, Cabral remained widely recognised across political divides as

a founding hero whose memory no actor could openly repudiate, yet the regime of Umaro

Sissoco Embaló has been accused of progressively downplaying his legacy, an accusation

that became particularly visible during the centenary commemorations of 2024, when

sectors of civil society and former combatants denounced the absence of official initiatives

commensurate with the historical importance of the revolutionary leader. The charge is

itself revealing: even in a context of growing authoritarian consolidation, critics reach for

Cabral’s memory as the standard against which the present government falls short. In

Cabo Verde, the divergence takes a different form: the ‘decabralisation’ process of the

1990s, the anti-Cabralism of sectors of the political right, and the counter-mobilisations

by veterans' associations, foundations, and youth movements have made Cabral

simultaneously a national symbol and a marker of partisan and ideological divides, present

in Cabo Verdean public life not in a consensual but in a specifically contested register.

The second question asked what this divergence reveals about the conditions, both

domestic and international, under which postcolonial states secure political-symbolic

legitimacy. Three features of Cabral’s case illuminate this question in combination. The

first is the conjuncture of political sacrifice and bi-nationality. Unlike Nyerere or Nkrumah,

who governed and therefore accrued the liabilities of actual power, Cabral was

assassinated before independence and before the fracture of the binational project he had

built. This double rupture produced not one memorial context but two structurally

divergent ones and, in doing so, revealed a more general mechanism: symbolic capital

accumulates most durably around figures removed from the compromises of governance.

Because Cabral never held power, the moral authority of the liberation struggle, condensed

in his figure, remained available to competing actors across decades without being tested

against a record. The absence of a single custodian, produced by the binational fracture,

multiplied rather than diminished his memorial force: no party, state, or generation could

monopolise his legacy, which is why it continued to circulate across such a wide range of

political and social registers. That the same figure could generate such different memorial

politics in two states emerging from the same liberation project is, moreover, analytically

instructive in ways that the existing comparative literature on African political memory,

focused as it largely is on single national cases, had almost no occasion to examine.

The second feature – the range and depth of vernacular appropriation documented in Cabo

Verde – reveals a further condition of postcolonial symbolic legitimacy. The millenarian

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testimonies, the rabelados’ sacred incorporation of his figure, and the Christian Rationalist

“astral president” in Mindelo represent a form of memorial agency that bypasses the state

entirely, drawing on Cabral’s constitutive absence from the archipelago to generate

mythological elaborations that official commemoration neither authorised nor controlled.

These appropriations show that the most resilient and often the most transformative

dimensions of a founding figure’s legacy reside in registers that formal political culture

neither controls nor fully comprehend. Whether comparable elaborations exist elsewhere

remains underexplored; this dimension of Cabral’s memorialisation is rooted in specific

biographical and geographical conditions that cannot be reduced to the general

mechanisms of founding-figure mythification.

The third feature – the transnational dimension – reveals that political-symbolic legitimacy

is never a purely domestic achievement. Each reconfiguration of his memory tracked a

political rupture that exceeded national borders. Mnemonic change and political change

moved together, and both were shaped by the international conjunctures (Cold War

alignments, structural adjustment, post-1989 democratisation, the global antiracist

mobilisations of the present decade) within which these two small states have had to

operate. Cabral’s legacy has always circulated beyond the two states that claim him:

forged partly through internationalist networks, it has been reactivated by diaspora

communities, by the Black movement in Portugal, and by Pan-Africanist actors for whom

his figure anchors a claim to African belonging. The authority of a founding figure, this

suggests, is never exhausted by the domestic institutions that claim to manage it: it

escapes into diasporic and transnational circuits where it acquires new political content

and new constituencies.

As this study has argued, in Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, and Portugal, Cabral continues to

function as a living political reference through which significant segments of youth and

society articulate claims for social justice, democratic accountability, and alternative

futures. His enduring force is inseparable from the specific conditions that produced it: a

martyrdom that arrived before the compromises of power, a binational project that

fractured and left his legacy without a single custodian, and an absence that proved in

many respects more generative than presence might have been.

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