The return from Africa: Illegitimacy, concealment, and the non-memory of Portugal’s imperial collapse

Abstract

Decolonization resulted in more than half a million Portuguese settlers giving up their life in Africa. Most of them headed to Portugal, where they were called retornados (returnees). As living reminders of an illegitimate history, they do not fit into the dominant post-imperial historical narratives in Portugal and have until recently been invisible within the public arena. This article explores the memorial vacuum left by the collapse of the Portuguese empire and the return, while also addressing the present-day resurgence of retornados’ memories in Portuguese society. For these purposes, the article is based on the concept of non-memory, a concept which relates to gaps in the social memory that arise from the concealment of certain problematic historical events regarded as illegitimate or shameful for the myths and ideologies of national consciousness. Although it focuses on the Portuguese case, this article is placed in the wider context of the memorial place of the end of the empire in postcolonial Europe.