Colonial Monuments, Portuguese Commemorations and the Writing of the History of the Colony of Cabo Verde

Abstract

Taking as a case study the commemorations and the monuments erected in the colony of Cabo Verde to memorialise the Portuguese ‘discoverers’ of the fifteenth century, this article scrutinises how those mnemonic schemes acted in the construction of the public memory of the ‘discovery’ of the Cabo Verde islands. It analyses the management of those schemes in the fixation of the narrative established as official history of ‘discovery’, in a context featured by controversies, uncertainties, omissions and historical lack about that very ‘discovery’. It also critically examines the contradictions, the concoction of facts and the distortions created by the promoters of the commemorations and monuments, as well as the role they played in that process. This article proves how, through the commemorations held and the monuments erected, the promoters of colonial memory distorted the protocols of interpretation of the information on the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde present in the Portuguese official documents and how they shaped the global understanding of that fact.

Le colon fait l'histoire et sait qu'il la fait. Et parce qu'il se réfère constamment à l'histoire de sa métropole, il indique en clair qu'il est ici le prolongement de cette métropole. L'histoire qu'il écrit n'est donc pas l'histoire du pays qu'il dépouille mais l'histoire de sa nation en ce qu'elle écume, viole et affame. [The colonist makes history and he knows it. And because he refers constantly to the history of his metropolis, he plainly indicates that here he is the extension of this metropolis. The history he writes is therefore not the history of the country he is despoiling but the history of his own nation's looting, raping, and starving to death.]

Frantz Fanon¹

Introduction

The history of the ‘discovery’ of the Cabo Verde islands is entangled in doubt and controversy. To this day, there is no consensus among scholars, nor clear historical evidence of the circumstances in which the first European and Portuguese navigators of the fifteenth century arrived on the archipelago. A number of scholars had researched the topic, but none were able to establish an irrefutable set of facts.² To disguise the uncertainty and disagreement, the Portuguese colonial authorities and the promoters of colonial memory produced commemorations and erected monuments in 1958 and in 1960–1 with the purpose of imposing a public narrative intended to be accepted by all as the official history of the ‘discovery’ of the islands. This history of the commemorative monuments founded in Cabo Verde during the colonial period has not been given critical attention. The purpose of this article is to contribute to that debate, taking as a case study the two monuments to the ‘discoverers’ erected during Salazar's dictatorial regime on the two most important islands of the archipelago – Santiago and São Vicente. This study analyses how the Portuguese commemorations and the monuments erected in the colony to celebrate the ‘discoverers’ of the fifteenth century served to construct the public memory of the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde. These mnemonic arrangements – commemorations and monuments – molded the narration of the facts, the chronologies, the protocols of interpretation and the writing of the history of the ‘discovery’. The narrative delivered through commemorations and the visual representation constructed in the urban public space by these monuments, as well as the historical imagination which these mnemonic schemes inspired, are crucial for a critical analysis of the Eurocentric and colonial idea of ‘discovery’.

This article is structured in four parts. The first highlights the controversies regarding the exact details of the ‘discovery’. The second scrutinises the role that, in 1958, the commemorative practice and the first monument to the ‘discoverer’ played in constructing the memory of the colony's foundation. The third reveals how the 1960–1 celebrations further shaped the account and established it as the official public history of the ‘discovery’. The fourth examines the weight of ceremonies, commemorative discourses and the monument to the second ‘discoverer’ in the fixation of the concept of ‘discovery’. This study draws on colonial documentary sources held in the Portuguese National Library, in Lisbon, including commemorative texts, writings by historians of the time, speeches delivered during the ceremonies and during the inaugurations of the monuments and, finally, writings by the promoters of the memory of the ‘discovery’ published in the Portuguese and Cabo Verdean periodicals of the time.

By analysing these processes, the article emphasises, on the one hand, the agency of the promoters of these commemorations and monuments: thus, metropolitans and local elites working in the colonial administration played an important role in this mnemonic enterprise, in addition to the influence of the political and cultural circulation of ideas and artifacts between the metropolis and the colony. On the other hand, the article critically examines the historical contradictions and distortions produced by the promoters of the colonial idea of ‘discovery’. In short, the article traces the historical genealogy of these two monuments, examines the commemorative policies that instituted them and clarifies the interactions that such mnemonic strategies fostered with the colonial and imperial politics of memory. The scrutiny will contribute to a more critical understanding of the public uses of the past and of the history of Portuguese expansion for purposes of colonial domination. More broadly, it will shed light on the invented mechanism and apparatus of the writing of the history of the colony by means of the repertoire of mnemonic references imposed by the coloniser. This mechanism is part of imperial power and colonial relations. As Frantz Fanon explains, the coloniser makes history, and he knows it. By referring constantly to the history of his metropolis he clearly indicates that, in the colony, he is himself the extension of this metropolis. The history he writes is therefore not the history of the country he is despoiling, but the history of his own nation's looting, violating and starving of others.³

The construction of the memory of ‘discovery’ by the former European colonial empires demands, in our own time, a more complex and thorough historiographical engagement. Commemorations and statues are an integral part of the colonial apparatus and machinery. The colonial world is, among other things (as Fanon states), a world of statues: the statue of the conqueror, the statue of the general who led the military campaign, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge.⁴ In fact, monuments make commemoration possible.⁵ The Portuguese case study scrutinised in this article is by no means a historical exception. The historical specificities examined here can be placed in a broader theoretical analysis of European colonial memorialisation processes.⁶ Scholars of memory studies working on various colonial and postcolonial contexts have revealed how colonial memory has been used, reinterpreted, performed and managed according to specific conveniences to shape the representations of colonial history and deeply influence public interpretation of colonisation.⁷ With this in mind, this article seeks to elucidate, for instance, how the making of the metropole's memory in the colonies entailed an array of connections with politics, distortions of history, foundation myths, arbitrary appropriation of colonial space and artifacts, colonisation of identity, inaccurate interpretation of information and invention of historical facts. This constitutes a key theme of memory studies which has not yet been given the attention it deserves by contemporary Cabo Verdean and Portuguese historiography and post–colonial Lusophone criticism.

The actual ‘discovery’ of the Cabo Verde islands was not, in itself, a relevant historical fact. For the first Portuguese colonial explorers (as secular as well as ecclesiastical authorities), the territory was not something that inspired a great deal of attraction.⁸ In that sense, the central argument of this article can be stated simply: what the promoters of Portuguese colonial memory instituted, centuries later, as the official history of the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde represents an arbitrary distortion of the historical facts rather than an accurate and rigorous interpretation of existing information in the Portuguese official documents about the ‘discovery’.

The Problem of Narration: The ‘Discovery’ that Remains Covert

Cabo Verde is an African country. It is an archipelago composed of ten islands and some islets located off the West African coast, about 500 kilometers from Senegal. The archipelago was a Portuguese colony from 1462 to 1975 and it is generally admitted that, before colonisation, the islands were uninhabited. But the history of the arrival of the first European or Portuguese ‘discoverers’ is still shrouded in controversy.⁹ The only official historical evidence of the ‘discovery’ lies in the Portuguese Royal Charters of 3 December 1460, 19 September 1462, 29 October 1462, and 8 April 1497. These Charters named the Genoese Antonyo de Nolle [António de Noli] as the ‘discoverer’ of five Cabo Verdean islands – Santiago, Fogo, Maio, Boa Vista, Sal; and the Portuguese Diego Affomso [Diogo Afonso] as the ‘discoverer’ of the others – Brava, São Nicolau, São Vicente, Ilhéu Raso, Ilhéu Branco, Santa Luzia and Santo Antão.¹⁰ However, these charters omit three pieces of information which are key to a comprehensive knowledge of the history of those ‘discoveries’: (i) they do not indicate the year of the arrival of these navigators; (ii) they do not mention the specific days of the ‘discovery’ of each island; (iii) they do not describe the contexts and circumstances in which these ‘discoveries’ occurred.

Aside from these fundamental omissions, there are still further complexities. Some chronicles and travel memoirs suggest other ‘discoverers’ and other chronologies. For instance, the chronicle of Damião de Góis, published in 1567, states that Cabo Verde was discovered in 1445 by Vicente de Lagos, Luís de Cadamosto and Antonieto de Nolle.¹¹ In the travel account disseminated from 1507, the Venetian explorer Luís de Cadamosto declares himself to be the first ‘discoverer’, in 1456, of some Cabo Verdean islands.¹² In the memoir of the fifteenth-century Portuguese explorer Diogo Gomes, re-published and disseminated between 1845–59 in Europe,¹³ he claims to be the first to ‘discover’ the Cabo Verde islands, on a return expedition from the West African coast back to Portugal in the company of António de Noli.¹⁴

Of these various alleged ‘discoverers’, the only descriptions are the travel accounts of Diogo Gomes and of Luís de Cadamosto. But their writings contain several inaccuracies or inconsistencies, especially in how they narrate the ‘discovery’ as a single act, referring in their accounts to islands which are geographically distant and impossible to be approached all in a single day with the navigation means of the time.¹⁵ There are other writings which amplify the controversy still further. Some of these literatures suggest that the island of Santiago had perhaps been inhabited before the arrival of the Portuguese.¹⁶ Others argue that the archipelago was probably known by geographers and naturalists of antiquity, such as Strabo, Pliny and Ptolemy.¹⁷ But these hypotheses were never proven by any kind of rigorous historical research.

In historiographical terms, the first analyses of the documented history of the ‘discovery’ of the Cabo Verde islands began to be published from the first half of the nineteenth century. For instance, in 1844, the Portuguese scholar José Joaquim Lopes de Lima addressed the topic. Lopes de Lima argued that António de Noli was the first ‘discoverer’, on 1 May 1460, of three Cabo Verdean islands: Maio, Santiago and Fogo. In addition, he refuted the claim of Luís de Cadamosto to be the first ‘discoverer’ of Cabo Verde in 1456.¹⁸ Subsequently, in 1868, English scholar Richard Henry Major examined the matter. His analysis also refuted the account of Venetian Luís de Cadamosto, but considered the Portuguese Diogo Gomes to be the ‘discoverer’, in 1460, of the Cabo Verdean islands.¹⁹ Henry Major was one of the first scholars to argue that Diogo Gomes was the first ‘discoverer’ of the Cabo Verde islands, because Gomes's travel memoirs only started to be more widely known and disseminated between 1847–50.²⁰ Despite this, the controversy persisted because the name of Diogo Gomes is not quoted in the Portuguese Royal Charter concerning the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde. To be cited in the Royal Charter represented an official act of establishing and naming the ‘discoverer’ of a given territory.

In a book published in 1881–2, the Portuguese author Emiliano Augusto Bettencourt continued the discussion. Bettencourt was familiar with the works of Lopes de Lima and Henry Major. His ideas benefited from the arguments set forth by Lopes de Lima. For Bettencourt, António de Noli was the one who, during the first days of May 1460, ‘discovered’ three islands of Cabo Verde: Maio, Santiago and Fogo (or São Filipe).²¹ By contrast, in 1899, the Cabo Verdean historian Christiano José de Senna Barcellos brought new perspectives into this debate.

According to Senna Barcellos, considering the information existing in the Portuguese Royal Charter of 19 September 1462 quoting five islands found by the Genoese navigator, it is ‘indisputable that António de Noli was one of the discoverers’.²² Like Lopes de Lima and Richard Major, Senna Barcellos also disregards Luís de Cadamosto's claim to be the first ‘discoverer’ of the Cabo Verdean islands. Likewise, Senna Barcellos accepts Diogo Gomes’s travel memoir as a valid historical source. For him, Diogo Gomes should be considered, alongside António de Noli, as one of the first to ‘discover’ the first islands in 1460; and between 1461 and 1462, Diogo Afonso ‘discovered’ the rest. In short, for Senna Barcellos, ‘the discovery of the archipelago of Cabo Verde took place between 1460 and 1462’.²³

The historiographic research published in the following decades did not add anything substantially new to this debate. Between 1899 (the year of publication of Senna Barcellos’ study) and 1960–1 (the year of the commemorations performed in the colony), all writings about the ‘discovery’ of the archipelago simply approve or disprove the various hypotheses proposed since José Joaquim Lopes de Lima first addressed the question in 1844. These studies can be organised into four groups: those that attribute the ‘discovery’ solely to António de Noli or solely to Diogo Gomes or that do not argue in favour of either;²⁴ those that suggest Diogo Gomes and António de Noli as simultaneous first ‘discoverers’;²⁵ those that quote António de Noli and Luís de Cadamosto;²⁶ and those that suggest the hypothesis according to which, before the Portuguese, some Cabo Verdean islands had already been ‘discovered’ by Arab explorers and peoples of the African coast.²⁷

The dispute among these scholars centred around the question of the first ‘discoverers’, since as regards the second – Diogo Afonso – there was no dispute. From 1958 onwards, the debate was politically framed within two mnemonic schemes: (i) in 1958 the colonial authorities erected a statue to honour Diogo Gomes as first ‘discoverer’ of Cabo Verde; (ii) in 1960–1, they commemorated the Half Millennium of the Finding of Cabo Verde. But how did those schemes shape the concept and build the public memory of ‘discovery’ in a context characterised by controversies, uncertainties, gaps and deep historical omissions?

Commemoration, Monument to the ‘First Discoverer’ and Invention of the Colony's Memory

On 14 June 1958, in Cabo Verde, the colonial authorities celebrated the centenary (1858–1958) of the elevation of the town of Praia, on Santiago Island, to the rank of a city. Praia was the capital of the colony. The commemorative day, 14 June, coincided with the date of publication of the Official Bulletin of 14 June 1858, which contains the Decree of 29 April 1858 attributing to Praia the city status. It was against this backdrop that the authorities inaugurated a statue to memorialise Diogo Gomes as the ‘first navigator to come ashore on this island [Santiago]’ (Figure 1).²⁸

Figure 1. The statue of Diogo Gomes in Praia, Santiago Island. Source: © Photos by Víctor Barros [City of Praia, May 2015].

The monument was erected in the oldest part of the city, facing the sea, showing a navigator looking at the ocean as if taking sight of islands. The semiotics of the statue representing this gesture of Diogo Gomes conveys a type of action which induces the imagination towards the act of ‘discovery’. The discourse which inaugurates the monument endorses this idea: ‘From here, dominating the horizon, as faithful guardian of the blessed land You discovered, eyes fixed on the sea that bewitched You, You will receive on Your face the soft sea breeze, enticing invitation for Your spirit of eternal and audacious Sailor for the deep of the Sea, the Sea where all Your dreams were realised!’.²⁹

The statue of Diogo Gomes was entrenched in the colonial project and constituted a doubly coded artifact. On the one hand, it was a colonial gift. On the other, it was a political and cultural tool to subjugate the colony's population with references to the metropole. The historical genealogy of this monument helps to clarify this purpose. In 1955, then President of the Portuguese Republic, Craveiro Lopes, and then Minister of the Overseas, Sarmento Rodrigues, visited the colony. Their tour throughout the islands took place from 15 to 27 May. It was in the context of this visit that Craveiro Lopes and Sarmento Rodrigues offered the statue as a gift for the colony's capital – the city of Praia – to acclaim the memory of Diogo Gomes. At the same time, the monument served as a ‘reminder’ of Craveiro Lopes's visit to the archipelago.³⁰

The statue, cast in bronze, was produced in Portugal by sculptor Joaquim Correia and depicts a commanding figure looking out to sea, holding a map and quadrant in one hand, a sword in the other. It was inaugurated on 14 June 1958 by then governor of the colony, António Augusto Peixoto Correia. The inauguration was the first act of the commemoration of Praia's centenary. This act speaks to the weight of the symbolism credited to the event. For then vice-mayor of Praia, Hermenegildo Ramos, the monument corresponded ‘to the noble purposes which have always guided our Government in marking the achievements of our national heroes’.³¹ Diogo Gomes was being placed in the gallery of the heroes who built the Portuguese colonial empire. But it was not with this inauguration that the official discourses started to establish Diogo Gomes as first ‘discoverer’ of Cabo Verde.

In 1955, during this visit, President Craveiro Lopes gave a speech in which he named Diogo Gomes as the sole ‘discoverer’ of the archipelago and 1460 as the year of the ‘discovery’.³² In the colony, acknowledgement of those two references – Diogo Gomes and 1460 – was also being influenced by writings coming from the metropolis. For instance, in 1956, Frazão de Vasconcelos, a member of the Portuguese History Academy, published an article attributing to Diogo Gomes the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde. Two years later (1958), the promoters of the Praia centenary reprinted Vasconcelos's article on Cabo Verde in one of the most important magazines of colonial propaganda of the time – Cabo Verde: Bulletin of Propaganda and Information.³³ The republishing of this article attests well to the kind of reception that, in the colony, Vasconcelos's analysis was enjoying among the commemorators of the Praia centenary. It also attests to the credibility which these commemorators were fostering regarding the supposed legitimacy of the figure – Diogo Gomes – that Vasconcelos suggested as first ‘discoverer’.

Aside from these influences generated by the circulation of ideas between metropolis and colony, the inauguration of the monument and the delivery of commemorative speeches contributed to fix the name of Diogo Gomes in public memory as the first ‘discoverer’ of Cabo Verde. According to Hermenegildo Ramos, ‘Diogo Gomes was, indeed, one of those brave men who also took the light of Civilization to the African interior . . . his most cherished and powerful incentive’. The commemoration was ‘the moment of sublime recognition that we are experiencing with the inauguration of this Statue’. With ‘jubilant hearts and eyes turned in reverence to the altar of the Fatherland’, all should be ‘serenely and profoundly in awe of what he [Diogo Gomes] represents, in order to better understand the transcendental meaning of this act, in which we come to reiterate our respectful tributes’ for he who has the ‘legitimate quality of first navigator to come to shore on this island’.³⁴

When analysed critically, it becomes clear that the monument and the commemoration distorted the information and silenced extant controversies regarding the arrival of the first European and Portuguese navigators to the archipelago. For instance, the commemorative speech disseminated the idea (historically false) according to which Diogo Gomes ‘on his last journey, returning to the Fatherland, in 1460, brought to his dear and enlightened Master the good news of the discovery of the island of Santiago as well as others of the eastern group of Cabo Verde, a discovery which provoked such lively and diverse controversies among historiographers’.³⁵ This claim, its falsehood aside, contradicts the accounts of Diogo Gomes himself. Firstly because, if Gomes had narrated the ‘discovery’ (as the commemorative speech claims), he would have been named as ‘discoverer’ in the official documents (in the Portuguese Royal Charters) and there would never have been any controversy about his role in the event. Secondly because, though Gomes had written in his travel memoir ‘we saw some islands in the sea’,³⁶ he does not mention that those islands belong to the ‘eastern group of Cabo Verde’. In order to mention that, he would have to have known all the islands of the archipelago and how they are geographically distributed, which was not the case in that context. And thirdly, even when Gomes states that he was on the island to which ‘we gave the name of Santiago and as it is called up to this very day’, he does not mention in his travel memoir that he brought news of the ‘discovery’ of Santiago and other islands to his master.³⁷

There is yet another contradiction produced by the commemorative speech. According to then mayor of Praia, José Soares de Brito Júnior, ‘The city of Praia, in Santiago, was discovered on 1 May 1460 by the Genoese António da Noli’. But in the following paragraph, Brito Júnior immediately revises this statement: ‘I will make a parenthesis here to clarify that the thesis that considered António da Noli as discoverer has been already abandoned. The chronicler João de Barros says it was the Genoese António da Noli who discovered the island. However, in 1868 in his book Prince Henry, The Navigator, the remarkable researcher Major shed new light on the subject, publishing a letter from Diogo Gomes to Martin of Bohemia, in which he tells how, sailing in the company of António da Noli, he discovered Santiago, whose land he was the first to step on.’³⁸ The first contradiction in Brito Júnior's speech lies in declaring that the city of Praia was ‘discovered’ by Noli. Even when he amends his mistake, attributing this act to Diogo Gomes, his statement does not correspond to the historical truth. There are no documents corroborating that the first navigators came to shore in the region later designated as Praia city. The second contradiction of Brito Júnior's speech lies in the chronology – 1 May 1460. The official documents (the Portuguese Royal Charters) and Diogo Gomes's memoir are simply silent with regard to both the day of the month and the specific location of the navigators’ arrival on the archipelago. In this perspective, Brito Júnior's statements are not only wrong but historically unsubstantiated.

Lastly, it is crucial to highlight the contradiction between commemoration, monument and the invention of the physical site chosen to remember the ‘discovery’. The space elected for the statue bore no relation of mnemonic correspondence with the place of the ‘discovery’ itself. There is no historical evidence attesting to Praia as the place of arrival of the first Portuguese ‘discoverers’. And the Diogo Gomes travel memoir does not quote the name of the site where he supposedly came to shore in Santiago. The commemorators’ resolution in establishing the monument in the capital of the colony was an arbitrary choice and a speculative decision. The words of vice-mayor Hermenegildo Ramos confirm this fact: ‘For us Your best seat was here, magnificently crowning the Boardwalk dedicated to You, in such expressive terms’.³⁹ In short, the choice of location for the monument, the commemorative speeches, as well as the semiotic gesture of the statue, contributed to fix the representation of Diogo Gomes's action as an act of ‘discovery’.

To mask this contradiction between the centenary of Praia and the distorted invention of the physical site of ‘discovery’, the colonial authorities juxtaposed a set of mnemonic events. On 16 June 1958 the promoters of the Praia centenary undertook a pilgrimage from the colony's capital to the old city of Ribeira Grande, located in the south of the Santiago island, about 15 km from Praia. The purpose of the pilgrimage was to visit the ruins of the old city (Fortress of S. Filipe, the Cathedral, the old Franciscan Convent and other monuments); to celebrate Ribeira Grande as a ‘volume in the History of the Portuguese Fatherland’; to evoke the opulence and admiration that the city inspired in the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries; to acclaim Portugal's role in the foundation of the colony, and so on.⁴⁰ Ribeira Grande was the colony's first capital. According to scholars such as Iva Cabral and Maria Emília Madeira Santos, Ribeira Grande was the first urban centre founded by the Portuguese in the tropics.⁴¹ And as Ilídio Baleno argues, it was the place where the colonisation of the archipelago began.⁴² For the promotors of that pilgrimage, ‘It would make no sense for the commemorations of the first centenary of the City of Praia to forget the old city of Ribeira Grande’.⁴³ This pilgrimage, aside from assembling histories and memories disconnected in time and space (in this case, the Praia centenary and the remembrance of Ribeira Grande's past), was interpreting and representing Portuguese colonisation in the archipelago as a linear process.

The Commemoration of 1960–1 and the Institution of the Public Memory of the ‘Discovery’

A few years after the erection of the first statue in 1958, additional public commemorations took place in 1960–1 which played a crucial role in the further consolidation of the public memory of the ‘discovery’. The event was synchronised with the Fifth Centenary of the Death of Prince Henry the Navigator (1460–1960). This celebration had an imperial dimension because it was solemnised both in the metropolis and in all of the colonies.⁴⁴ Prince Henry was one of the sponsors of Portuguese maritime expansion in the fifteenth century and it was within the context of that expansion that the first Cabo Verdean islands came to the attention of the Portuguese Crown.⁴⁵ Because of this, the colonial authorities decided to celebrate the ‘Commemorations of the Fifth Centenary of the Death of Prince Henry and the Half Millennium of the Finding of Cabo Verde’.⁴⁶

In September 1958 the Portuguese authorities had already appointed the organising committee of the forthcoming Prince Henry centenary; and in June 1959, the Half Millennium committee of the Cabo Verde ‘discovery’ was also constituted.⁴⁷ The Prince Henry commemorations started on 4 March 1960 and ended on 13 November, the days of his birth and death respectively. The celebration of the 500 years of Cabo Verde's ‘discovery’ began on 1 May 1960 and ended on 3 May 1961. In Cabo Verde there were many activities across all of the islands: religious ceremonies, solemn sessions in town halls, performances of the Portuguese anthem, conferences, theatre shows, military parades, fairs, photography competitions, sporting tournaments, exhibitions of agricultural producers and commercial establishments, inauguration of public works and monuments, etc.⁴⁸

According to the organisers, one commemoration seemed to justify the other: ‘This coincidence of history is sufficient for the memory of the Prince to be forever associated with the islands . . .. Thus, any Commemoration of the Finding, or rather, the birth of Cabo Verde is, in itself, a Commemoration of Henry’.⁴⁹ The promoters of the commemorations accepted without any historical critique the chronological coincidence of these two mnemonic events. The choice of the place to kick off the celebrations of the Prince – next to the monument to Diogo Gomes – reveals well the link established not only in the chronology, but also in the imbrication of mnemonic references capable of inducing the idea of the singular event of ‘discovery’ in 1460.⁵⁰ To commemorate 500 years of the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde in 1960 entailed accepting 1460 as the year of the arrival of the first navigators to the archipelago, and presupposed accepting the 1st of May as the day of ‘discovery’ of the first islands.

In the specific context of the mid-twentieth century, the purpose of remembering Prince Henry in 1960 was to acclaim the memory of Portuguese maritime expansion and to reinforce the imperial ideology of the Salazar dictatorship regime.⁵¹ The juxtaposition of the memory of the Prince and of the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde was based, partly, on a relation. According to official sources, the first islands of the archipelago were found while Prince Henry was still alive.⁵² But that memory and chronological relationship is vague, because the official documents do not state that the first islands were found in 1460, or on the 1st of May of that year. This decision to celebrate 1460 as the year of the ‘discovery’ was based only on the information according to which five islands of Cabo Verde had been ‘discovered’ while Prince Henry was alive (he died on 13 November 1460). Thus, the juxtaposition of these two commemorations was disseminating a skewed version of the chronology of the ‘discovery’ of the first islands.

As was mentioned above, the 1st of May (declared in the commemorative discourses as the arrival day of the first navigators) is not confirmed by any chronicle, nor by any other source of the time. The commemorators adopted and established this reference, probably persuaded by ideas inherited from an anonymous writing of 1784 that proclaims the 1st of May as the day of the ‘discovery’ of Boa Vista, Maio, Santiago and S. Filipe.⁵³ Or they were perhaps influenced by the views of nineteenth-century scholars such as José Joaquim Lopes de Lima and Christiano José de Senna Barcellos, who associated the names of the islands and the day of ‘discovery’ with the Christian calendar, considering 1 May as the day of ‘discovery’ as it was the day of the celebration of Saint James and Saint Philip. But this association, as those authors reveal, is merely hypothetical.⁵⁴ The exact day of the arrival of the navigators on each of the islands remains unknown. However, in order to mask this lack and this enigma, the colonial authorities embraced the local municipal holiday as a reference to celebrate the ‘discovery’ of each island.⁵⁵

Another activity which also acted in the construction of the public memory of the ‘discovery’ was a series of lectures which constituted the scholarly part of the official commemorative programme. These lectures were delivered by authoritative figures who disseminated the Portuguese perspective of the ‘discovery’. For instance, on 4 March 1960, then vice-rector of the Gil Eanes High School in Cabo Verde, Marques de Oliveira, delivered a lecture at Praia Town Hall on the occasion of the opening of the Commemorations of Prince Henry. Marques de Oliveira knew the weight of the controversy surrounding the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde and was resolute in the words he addressed to the audience: ‘regardless of the debate we have already made the figure of Diogo Gomes eternal in bronze, and marked 1460 as the year of the finding’.⁵⁶ But the most eloquent example of the weight of those lectures comes from another intellectual, a native of the colony, Félix Monteiro.

Félix Monteiro was one of the key collaborators of the scholarly section of the commemorative programme. It was he who, in the Great Hall of Praia Town Hall, on 1 May 1960, delivered the inaugural address regarding the Half Millennium of the Finding of Cabo Verde. Monteiro examined a range of topics with remarkable erudition. He acknowledged the lack of clarity regarding certain points related to the arrival of the navigators to the archipelago, criticised the descriptions of Luís de Cadamosto, emphasising instead the arguments by authors such as Lopes de Lima and Senna Barcellos, and argued against the foreign memorial competition which tried to remove Portugal's legitimate historical role in the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde.⁵⁷ According to Monteiro, ‘It is worth telling the story starting from the beginning, given that Cadamosto is being painfully rehabilitated’.⁵⁸ This statement was not a mere presumption. In fact, in 1956, Tullia Gasparrini Leporace organised, in Italy, a bibliographical, documental and cartographic exhibition commemorating the fifth centenary of the Atlantic exploration and the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde by Luís de Cadamosto. This event did not go unnoticed in Portugal (among the members of the Lisbon Geographical Society) nor in Cabo Verde (among the native intellectuals of the colony).⁵⁹

The promoters of the Half Millennium of Cabo Verde's ‘discovery’ were aware of the commemoration which had been held in Italy. The purpose of Monteiro's speech was to refute the perspective of the Italian celebration which claimed Luís de Cadamosto as ‘discoverer’ of the archipelago. Monteiro considered ‘the implausibilities and falsehoods contained in the account of his second journey, in the part regarding Cabo Verde, so blatant, that it is remarkable that there are still those who believe it was he who discovered the islands of Cabo Verde’.⁶⁰ Thus, Monteiro's positivistic suggestion – ‘to tell the story starting from the beginning’ – was a way of reinforcing the historical genealogy of the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde stemming from Portuguese sources. His speech emphasised the Portuguese narrative as the only valid historical discourse on the topic.

A third example reveals the weight of these scholarly events in the fixation of the memory of the ‘discovery’ and, simultaneously, the role that the cultural circulation of knowledge and ideas between the metropolis and the colony had in that process. On 25 May and 6 July 1960, Portuguese priest and historian António Brásio delivered two lectures in Santiago and São Vicente islands respectively, which focused on the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde. Both lectures were included in the official commemorative programme and Brásio travelled from the metropolis to the colony exclusively for the purpose. Like Félix Monteiro, Brásio started his speech with refutations. According to him, Cadamosto's account of the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde ‘c'est un faux from an historical point of view’.⁶¹ In contrast Brásio argues that António de Noli and Diogo Gomes were the first ‘discoverers’ of the Cabo Verde islands. To support this statement, he quotes the Royal Charter of 19 September 1462 (which, paradoxically, only mentions António de Noli as ‘discoverer’ of five islands). At the same time, Brásio considers as an ‘honest account’ the travel memoir in which Diogo Gomes claims to be the first to come ashore on Santiago island. And to justify the absence of Diogo Gomes's name from the Royal Charter, Brásio proposes two suppositions: that ‘Gomes cannot have been interested in establishing himself on a completely uninhabited island’; that Gomes had important roles in the Portuguese Crown and was therefore ‘never interested in exploring the islands’.⁶²

Brásio's argument contains several paradoxes and may not survive the rigour of accurate historical critique. First, there is no documentary evidence that Diogo Gomes was not interested in establishing himself on an uninhabited island, nor any passages in his memoir justifying such a claim. Second, not having an interest in exploring the islands does not mean that his name would not be in the Royal Charter as ‘discoverer’. Third, if ‘Noli was Gomes's companion in the discovery’ and ‘Gomes was leading an official mission that explicitly placed the very Noli under his authority as leader’,⁶³ then Noli had no reason to leave out the name of Diogo Gomes (as chief of the exploration mission of the west African coast), nor to silence his role in the ‘discovery’. Fourth, if it is true that Diogo Gomes was busy with roles in the Portuguese Crown, as Brásio suggests, this only proves that he was an important figure in the royal administrative milieu, a reason why his alleged involvement in the ‘discovery’ (alongside António de Noli) would not be omitted from the Royal Charter. Fifth, Brásio states that the departure of ‘Gomes from Lagos [Algarve] to Guinea took place in mid-April 1460 and the discovery on 1 May that same year’.⁶⁴ This statement contradicts both the official sources and Diogo Gomes's own travel account. There is no documentary evidence corroborating 1 May 1460 as the day of ‘discovery’, nor does Gomes's memoir suggest dates of that occurrence. Furthermore, the alleged contact with the islands took place, Diogo Gomes records, on the journey back to Portugal coming from the Guinea coast and not from Lagos to Guinea as Brásio states.⁶⁵

Despite these paradoxes, Brásio's analysis served to reinforce specific ideas previously disseminated in the colony by Marques de Oliveira and Félix Monteiro at the earlier lectures held on 4 March and 1 May 1960 respectively. Brásio was, in that period, a historian of considerable intellectual renown. His academic authority – as a member of the Portuguese Academy of History – contributed additional prestige to the commemorative programme and reinforced the narrative already disseminated in the colony as official public history of the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde. In short, there was a clear common identity between the perspective constructed by Brásio (in terms of chronology, hypotheses, refutations, names of the ‘discoverers’, etc.) and the arguments developed by the native intellectuals of the colony who collaborated in the scholarly section of the commemorations.

The Final Mnemonic Act: Commemorations and Monument to the ‘Second Discoverer’

In May 1961 the colonial authorities erected in Mindelo city, on São Vicente island, a monument to memorialise the Portuguese colonial explorer Diogo Afonso as second ‘discoverer’ of the Cabo Verde archipelago. According to the Royal Charters of 19 September and 29 October 1462, it was Diogo Afonso who found seven more Cabo Verdean islands: Brava, São Nicolau, São Vicente, Raso, Branco, Santa Luzia, and Santo Antão.⁶⁶ The commemoration and monument included these islands in the public narrative instituted as the official history of the ‘discovery’. Mindelo was the city chosen to close the commemorations of the Half Millennium of the Finding of Cabo Verde, and the inauguration of this monument was one of the last mnemonic acts performed (Figure 2).⁶⁷

Figure 2. The statue of Diogo Afonso in Mindelo, São Vicente Island. Source: © Photos by Víctor Barros [City of Mindelo, May 2015].

The statue of Diogo Afonso was erected on one of the central avenues of Mindelo, overlooking the sea. Again fashioned in bronze, the statue is the work of Portuguese sculptor Gustavo Bastos and was inaugurated on 2 May 1961 by then governor of the colony, Silvino Silvério Marques, one day before the end of the commemorations of the Half Millennium of the ‘discovery’.⁶⁸ Like the monument to the colonial explorer Diogo Gomes erected in the capital of the colony, the monument to Diogo Afonso also represented a navigator looking purposefully out to sea, a scroll in one hand, quadrant in the other.

The inauguration speech was delivered by then mayor of São Vicente, the Cabo Verdean doctor and writer Henrique Teixeira de Sousa, who validated the statue, honoured Diogo Afonso and considered the ‘discovery’ an event as meaningful as ‘the great facts that mark the collective lives of the peoples'. Thus he reinforced the perspective that should be narrated and reproduced publicly as the official historical version of the ‘discovery’. According to him, ‘All cities have their monuments. They are works of fine art that are made to be erected . . . to remember remarkable facts or figures . . . Gathered around this modest statue, erected in memory of Diogo Afonso, our attitude is the same as that which presided over the construction of the world's most famous monuments. The bronze in which the figure of the navigator has been crafted reminds us of a historical event as meaningful as those marking decisive stages in the life of the peoples'.⁶⁹

Teixeira de Sousa also delimited the chronology of the ‘discovery’ and outlined the origin myth of the Cabo Verde islands found by Diogo Afonso. For him, the day of arrival of Diogo Afonso at the archipelago was the origin myth of São Vicente island: ‘Diogo Afonso d'Autoguia, valet of Prince Ferdinand, discovered the island of São Vicente . . . on 22 January 1462. Only then, did this ground we all now touch with our feet . . . begin to truly exist for the World and for us, the Portuguese that saw it become inhabited’. Hence, ‘The day of 22 January 1462 represents the date of birth of this island . . . That same year, Diogo Afonso d'Autoguia discovered the islands of Brava, S. Nicolau, Santa Luzia, Santo Antão and the islets Raso and Branco. The news of these discoveries . . . is given to us in the Charter of Donation . . . on 29 October of year mentioned, 1462’.⁷⁰

The commemorations and the monuments represented two mechanisms, among others, used to fabricate and disseminate a specific conception of national and imperial history. For Teixeira de Sousa, through the commemoration of the ‘discovery’ and the figure of the ‘discoverer’, the population of the colony recognised their historical debt towards Portugal and its great men, builders of the Portuguese empire. As he emphasised, ‘Only now, nearly 500 years after the landing of the first Portuguese, do we settle this debt towards he who was the finest of the seamen to come ashore on this archipelago. By erecting a statue to Diogo Afonso we are making even with History, in a gesture of civility and patriotism that very much dignifies us and recommends us to future generations’.⁷¹ The monument served, then, to connect the colonised with the past of the first navigators and, at the same time, served as a legacy for future generations who would continue to glorify Portuguese history in the archipelago.

The role of that monument was not just to materialise the social representation of the past. In addition, the monument served to publicise the very concept of the ‘discovery’ and to spread the invented image of the ‘discoverer’. It also served to legitimise the promoters of colonial memory as inheritors of a history which began with the ‘discovery’ and was continued by the settlers. This was the logic through which the monument was to generate cognitive effects and induce in the population a feeling of belonging based on the colonial history founded by the ‘discoverers’. The figure of the ‘discoverer’, as António Correia e Silva argues, ‘is equivalent to the founder of a new lineage. He marks the beginning . . . In that sense, discovery becomes a matter of identity’, which means that ‘the new land is a tributary of the identity of the discoverer’.⁷² To paraphrase Frantz Fanon (when he refers to the coloniser⁷³), the ‘discoverer’ is the absolute beginning, the unceasing cause. He is the man who founded the colony, the guarantor for its existence. The commemorative speech delivered by Teixeira de Sousa confirms this idea very clearly: ‘Here we are, then, in front of the first bronze statue erected in this city, paying homage to the memory, precisely, of he who must be considered the first man of the island. Henceforth, no one may ignore who Diogo Afonso was and what this monument we are inaugurating means to S. Vicente’.⁷⁴ It was this understanding which the population of the colony should memorise and reproduce as the official litany of the ‘discovery’. Thus, the monument to the ‘discoverer’ was a political artifact and a cultural resource which conferred visibility on the version imposed as official history of the ‘discovery’, and strengthened the public authority of the promoters of that same history.

Teixeira de Sousa's speech should not be understood merely as a protocolar communication; nor was it simply the performative action of a speaker authorised in his role as Mayor and member of the Commemorations Committee.⁷⁵ His speech was the illocutionary act which inscribed the monument to Diogo Afonso as a public colonial symbol endowed with narrative authority. By stimulating the remembering of the idea of ‘discovery’, the statue contributed to reinforcing the colonial apparatus. Its presence in the public space, embedded in the everyday life of the colonised through colonial relations of power, constituted a daily renewal of colonial domination. Thus, the purpose of the commemoration and of the monument was to keep the population under Portuguese colonial rule, and Teixeira de Sousa did not hide that design: ‘On this festive date as we close the commemorations of the Half Millennium of the Finding of Cabo Verde, given the long presence of Portuguese blood and culture on this archipelago, what greater ambition can we formulate than for us to be allowed to live here for another 500 years under the same Lusitano sign of the first moment’.⁷⁶

Critical analysis of Teixeira de Sousa's discourse reveals that he made up facts, distorted content and added false information in his interpretation of the ‘discovery’. This is firstly because no source, not even the Portuguese Donation Charter of 29 October 1462 which he quotes, reveals that Diogo Afonso ‘discovered the island of São Vicente . . . on 22 January 1462’. Secondly because no document suggests 1462 as the year of the ‘discovery’ of that particular island, nor attests when Diogo Afonso found the other islands. Thus, the statement according to which ‘The day of 22 January 1462 represents the date of birth’ of São Vicente island and in ‘that same year, Diogo Afonso d'Autoguia discovered the [other] islands’ is historically false. Teixeira de Sousa's statement is an addition, probably influenced by the reading of Senna Barcellos's study. It was Senna Barcellos who, in 1899, suggested 22 January as the date of the ‘discovery’ of São Vicente⁷⁷ but this hypothesis was never proved by any document of the time.

Finally, just as with the monument to Diogo Gomes erected in the colony's capital, the location chosen for the Diogo Afonso statue in Mindelo also resulted from an arbitrary decision. The site where the monument was established bears no memorial relation to the supposed place of Afonso's actual arrival, and there is no any historical evidence attesting that the first island ‘discovered’ by him was São Vicente. Beyond merely lacking historical rigour, these choices reveal how the commemorations and colonial monuments modified space through the public use of the history of the metropolis for purposes of imperial domination, and reveal too how the production of commemorative artifacts and mnemonic schemes was used to colonise the political imagination and influence the population's perspectives of possibilities.

To understand the erection of those two monuments in that period (1958 and 1960–61) it is important to take into consideration certain historical dynamics, namely the place of Cabo Verde within the larger Portuguese colonial empire. Portuguese colonialism was based on the ideology of assimilation, the idea that the main goal of colonial rule was to bring colonised Africans into Portuguese civilisation. Through a series of decrees published between 1926 and 1962, this ideology established the Statute of the Indigenous (Estatuto dos Indígenas), a legal segregation between the small assimilated elite – known as assimilados (individuals considered to have been integrated into Portuguese culture) – and the majority of Africans defined as indigenous – indígenas (persons who still had not yet absorbed Portuguese civilisation).⁷⁸ Within the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa, the colony of Cabo Verde was not ruled directly by this statute because its whole population was considered assimilated. Additionally, from 1930s onwards, some Portuguese authors and Cabo Verdean native intellectuals themselves cultivated this ideology: they argued that Cabo Verde and its populations were culturally civilised in contrast with those of other colonies, due to the integration of Portuguese traditions in the archipelago that diluted the African customs considered uncivilised.⁷⁹ In 1951, Portugal changed the Constitution and defined itself as a multiracial and pluri-continental nation, renaming the colonies as overseas provinces and officially embracing miscegenation and the ideology of assimilation.⁸⁰ As a corrolary, from that period onwards, the New State (Estado Novo) dictatorship regime promoted openly Cabo Verde as a model colony of assimilation molded by the actions of Portuguese colonisers.⁸¹ For instance, according to some writings published between 1955–8, Cabo Verde was ‘one of the most original territories in the vast Lusitanian world’.⁸²

From this view, the commemorations and the statues of the ‘discoverers’ – Diogo Gomes (1958) and Diogo Afonso (1961) – served, on one hand, to emphasise the Portuguese origin of Cabo Verde and, on the other, to reinforce the propaganda of the image of this colony within the assimilation ideology of Portuguese empire. This is why the commemorations of the Half Millennium of the Finding of Cabo Verde was an occasion to highlight the example of Cabo Verde as the ‘land that was the stage – without equal – for the peaceful conversation between whites and blacks’: the land where European Portuguese colonisers and Africans were ‘in a wide and meaningful embrace of undeniable fraternity’.⁸³ Moreover, it is crucial to mention that the Fifth Centenary of the Death of Prince Henry the Navigator and the Half Millennium of the Finding of Cabo Verde were also sponsored and commemorated in 1960–1 in a context characterised by a global critique of European colonialism – ‘this confused hour of anticolonialisms’, as stated the commemorators,⁸⁴ and by the wave of decolonisation in Africa. In Cabo Verde for instance, according to the testimonials of Aristides Pereira, some militants were already active at that time, however clandestinely, with nationalist ideas for a struggle for national independence.⁸⁵ Moreover, the statue to Diogo Afonso (May 1961) was erected soon after the beginning of the armed insurrections for independence of Angola (February and March 1961). In sum, all these mnemonic arrangements served to disguise the weight of colonial rule and, most significantly, to strengthen in that historical context the Portuguese rejection of African demands for self-determination.⁸⁶

For all these reasons, the commemorations and the monuments to Diogo Gomes and Diogo Afonso in Cabo Verde should be understood in a broader and more inclusive historical perspective. They were part of the dissemination policies of the memory of Portuguese colonial empire, one of the leading themes embraced by the Estado Novo nationalist repertoire. During this regime, numerous events and cultural technologies – monuments, commemorations, historiography, colonial exhibitions and so on – were managed in both the metropolis and in all of the colonies in order to preserve the Portuguese empire, by inserting the memory of colonisation within public space and the popular cultural imagination.⁸⁷ The remembrance of the ‘discoveries’ and the statues to the ‘discoverers’ were part of the Estado Novo's colonial propaganda apparatus which promoted the celebration of the maritime expansion period and the memorialisation of the names of male figures considered as founders and constructors of Portuguese colonial empire.⁸⁸

Conclusion

Colonial commemorations and monuments constituted integral resources of the image politics of colonial power. But their functions were not decorative. Commemorations and monuments represented colonial domination and were tools of the legitimation of imperial power and mechanisms of the colonisation of imaginaries. The colonial memorialisation processes (through commemorations and monuments) were carried out by different European former empires. This article contributes towards situating the Portuguese case within the broader debate in memory studies. Colonial politics of commemoration and statues were forged to institute an official narrative in a moment characterised by absence of historical consensus regarding the ‘discovery’ of the Cabo Verde islands. According to official documents (the Portuguese Royal Charters), it was the Genoese explorer António de Noli who, in the service of the Portuguese Crown, ‘discovered’ five islands of Cabo Verde: ‘Santiago, sam Filipe [Fogo], Mayas [Maio], sã Christouã [Boa Vista] and Sall [Sal]’. But the documents do not describe how or when, or the contexts of that ‘discovery’. The only existing information is that they were found ‘while the Ifamte dom Anrrique [Prince Henry] was still alive’.⁸⁹ This means that, at the time of the prince's death (on 13 November 1460), these islands had already been ‘discovered’. Departing from that point, various historical critiques must be taken into account. First, the choice of 1460 as the year of the ‘discovery’ is mere conjecture based only on the information that five islands were found while the prince was alive. Critically, it can also be accepted as a likely hypothesis that they would have been ‘discovered’ before 1460. Second, no document declares that Santiago was the first island ‘discovered’, nor when the others of that same group were found. Third, considering the geographical distances between those five islands, it is not plausible that they were all ‘discovered’ on one single day, bearing in mind the navigation means of the time. Thus, the thesis according to which five Cabo Verde islands were ‘found’ or ‘discovered’ on 1 May 1460 is therefore uncertain, inconsistent and merely speculative.

The Royal Charters of 19 September and 29 October 1462 attribute to the Portuguese colonial explorer Diogo Afonso the ‘discovery’ of another seven islands: ‘Braua [Brava], sam Nycollao [São Nicolau], sam Viçente [São Vicente], Rasa [Raso islet], Bramca [Branco islet], samta Luzia [Santa Luzia] and Santa[n]tonio [Santo Antão]’.⁹⁰ Those are the only known pieces of information and the Portuguese Royal Charters do not reveal the day, the year, or the specific circumstances of the ‘discovery’ of each island. Historian Senna Barcellos argues that they were ‘discovered’ between 1461–2.⁹¹ It is possible that they were all ‘discovered’ in 1461 or all in 1462, but the Royal Charters do not allow for any clear conclusion on the matter. In other words, the evidence of documents does not enable a definite answer to this question. Therefore, the construction of a historical narrative and public memory of the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde was fueled by unstable, incomplete and weak suppositions. The only possible conclusion, based on the official documents, is that António de Noli and Diogo Afonso were the explorers who brought the Cabo Verdean islands to the awareness of the Portuguese.

The commemorative discourses forged in 1958 and 1960–1 by the promoters of Portuguese colonial memory distorted the interpretation of the information about the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde existing in Portuguese official documents. This distortion, as well as the mnemonic representation produced, shaped the global historical understanding about the ‘discovery’ of the archipelago. The colonial local elites also contributed to this mnemonic enterprise. All of them who delivered speeches to reinforce the commemorations and validate the monuments to the ‘discoverers’ occupied prominent positions in the Portuguese colonial administration in Cabo Verde. The promoters of the commemorations developed the same ideas, argued in favour of the same hypotheses, approved the same references – suppositions, ‘discoverers’, locations, historical chronologies – and produced the same conclusion about the ‘discovery’. The commemorative discourse that they forged created an explicit consent: it established Diogo Gomes as the first ‘discoverer’ and makes secondary the place and role of António de Noli in the history and public memory of the ‘discovery’ of the first islands. Only Diogo Gomes was commemorated and monumentalised publicly as the first ‘discoverer’ of Cabo Verde. The commemorators did not devote a single monument to António de Noli, and his image on a postage stamp for the Fifth Centenary of Cabo Verde depicts a stationary figure, in contrast to the representation of Diogo Gomes as a man of action and movement.⁹²

The inclusion of Diogo Gomes's name and the monumentalisation of his figure as first ‘discoverer’ (instead of the Genoese António de Noli) imposed the Portuguese nationalistic perspective in the construction of the public memory of the ‘discovery’ of Cabo Verde. Glorifying the male figures of maritime expansion and colonial exploration reinforced the Portuguese imperial nationalism that the Salazar dictatorship regime promoted in the metropolis as well as in the colonies.⁹³ The commemorations fabricated the colonial concept of ‘discovery’, established the figures to be designated as ‘discoverers’, disseminated their images, erected monuments and diffused a type of narrative that was meant to be accepted, embraced and remembered as the only legitimate version of the history of the ‘discovery’. The commemorations and the monuments established the Portuguese and Eurocentric idea of ‘discovery’ and publicised it as a memorable historical fact. This is crucial to understand critically some influences that the colonial memory of ‘discovery’ bequeathed to post-colonial posterity.

The colonial commemorative enterprise generated effects into the post-colonial period. For instance, in 2010, the Cabo Verdean government publicly celebrated 550 years of the ‘discovery’ of the archipelago.⁹⁴ And the school textbooks in use today in Cabo Verde reproduce, without any historical critique, the same coordinates about the ‘discovery’ bequeathed by colonial memory.⁹⁵ The two monuments to the ‘discoverers’ continue to decorate the Cabo Verdean urban public space where they were primarily instituted by the colonial authorities. After national independence (proclaimed on 5 July 1975), the statue of Diogo Gomes was dismantled, under influence of anticolonial revolutionary ideas. However, in the wake of political transformations generated in Cabo Verde in the 1990s – the end of the one-party period and the establishment of the multi-party regime – the statue was restored on its original foundation. Since 2020, following the recent transnational wave against colonial monuments in the public spaces, the two statues to the ‘discoverers’ are firmly contested today by actors from Cabo Verdean civil society.⁹⁶

The erected statues materialised all the points abovementioned. Through the ability they have of representing an idea and attracting the observation of the public, monuments generate the hypnotic fantasy of illustrating a historical context or fact. They induce the bringing about of material existence to the idea of ‘discovery’, conferring credibility to the commemorative discourses. As materialities, the monuments create the appearance of a historical truth about the commemorated event. The statues to the ‘discoverers’ also served to silence the controversy around the ‘discovery’ and transform the unstable and unclear knowledge of this issue into a supposedly consistent ‘historical fact’.

The monuments to the ‘discoverers’ were not (and are not) the history of the ‘discovery’. They are political artifacts and cultural resources produced with the purpose of representing ‘discovery’, strengthening the authority of dominant power and feeding the everyday of colonial domination. These monuments were political tools and aesthetic resources designed to subjugate the colonised with the historical narratives of the metropolis. On the one hand they disseminate an encoded message and colonial language which establishes the protocol of beginning the narration of time, of history and of the actions always stemming from the memory of the ‘discoverers’ and the agency of the colonisers. On the other hand the monuments convey to the population an uplifting perspective of Portuguese history, simultaneously silencing other pasts, as well as the places, the roles and the contributions of the colonised in the production of world history and of Cabo Verde history in particular.