Afro-Portuguese Colonial-Liberation Wars (1961-1974/5) generated plural memories, conflicting evocations, and persisting amnesias that still reverberate in the contemporary societies of the former coloniser/colonised countries. CROME’s main objective was to produce a history of the memory of the wars fought by the Portuguese state and the pro-independence African movements. The project lasted six years (February 2017 – January 2023) and its focus resided on the political memories and social representations produced on those historical events, covering more than six decades (from the beginning of the conflicts until the present days). The project sought to identify how the wars have reverberated in distinct times and spaces, since the conflicts have triggered memorialisation and silencing processes which have their own historicity, according to each country and social-political context. That exercise required looking at the entanglements between the former metropolis, Portugal, and the former colonized territories: Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and S. Tomé and Príncipe.
To build this analysis, CROME resorted to different sources – written, oral, and visual – combining different actors, moments, and practices of memory production. The research included the analysis of primary and secondary sources, research data collected on private and public archives and libraries; and more than 100 interviews with former combatants, freedom fighters, politicians, artists, academics, military personnel, museum professionals and other memory producers and social actors. The fieldwork and data collection took place in 6 countries.
The research developed by CROME aimed to reach specialised and interested publics as well as wider audiences. It has – and will have – impact in both former metropolis and former colonised territories, promoting renewed ways to re-think the present and past relationships between the six countries, based on how the colonial past and the colonial-liberation wars have been politically and socially remembered and mobilised in the last 60 years. The societal repercussions of the project gain pressing relevance as the colonial pasts and the colonial-liberation wars are once again becoming the object of diverse historical-political disputes, triggering “memory wars” and public struggles across countries and continents. Considering the increasing visibility of national and international dynamics mobilizing colonial and anticolonial pasts, CROME’s research and results have been pivotal. CROME’s outputs – publications, school sessions, audio-visual products, conferences, social media, and website – as well as the regular researchers’ presence in the media extended the academic boundaries and had direct reverberations in the ever-growing debates around these issues.
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