language evoked the authoritarian reign of Salazar and because it
perpetuated a history of putting the Eurocentric subject at the centre of
the story, since surely the first people to discover Africa or the Americas
were their original inhabitants. Indeed, the Portuguese case has been
defined as “amnesiac memory” (Cardina, 2016) arising from the social
trauma caused by the bloody colonial wars that raged between 1961 and
1974. The lack of public and institutional initiatives, however, has not
impeded the literary boom of the past decade, which has contributed
significantly to the recovery of the “history” of Portuguese Africa. In
the end, the political silence has been overtaken by the proliferation
of publishers, output of academics and initiatives of civic engagement,
which once again have come primarily from migrant and Afro-
descendant groups. In 2017, for example, the Djass Associação de
Afrodescendentes successfully launched a popular legislative initiative
to gain approval for the construction, in Lisbon, of the country’s first
memorial to the victims of slavery, which has yet to break ground as a
consequence of political resistance.
The Spanish case shares many parallels with the Portuguese
case. In Spain, however, the amnesia is not only institutional, but
also collective. If Spain had a colonial past in Africa, it is generally
unknown even in academic circles as a consequence of a policy of
“reserved material” (1969) and a well-established Americanist tradition
(Muñoz, 2017). The Spanish colonial enterprise has always been
linked to the Americas, underpinning an identity of “hispanidad”—
the “Spanishness” of the whole Spanish-speaking world—that was
prevalent during the Franco dictatorship and remains so even today.
Not only has no political apology yet been issued, but the glorifications
of Spain’s colonial past have become normalised. Only a few months
ago, Spain’s current foreign minister, Josep Borrell, made the following
statement:
«Spain is not going to offer the
untimely apologies that are being
requested, it seems a little odd
now to call for apologies about
events that happened 500 years
ago».
«Borrell on the letter from López Obrador: ‘España no va a presentar esas extemporáneas disculpas que se piden’». [in English, “Spain is not going to offer the
untimely apologies that are being requested”] in ABC (26 March 2019).
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Observing Memories
ISSUE 3