Paper short abstract:

The place of high politics in the construction of heroes and villains favors men and de-historizes women in the process. This paper emphasizes the hyper-local realities of the disappearance of Ghanaian women from history and provides a blueprint for their memorialization as' heroes' or villains.

Paper long abstract:

Throughout history, people disappear in the process of consolidating the nation state from the past (pre-independence to independence) and the present (post-independence). A few people are remembered and cast as heroes or villains. The place of high politics cannot be over emphasized in the memorializing and the construction of heroes and villains in African countries given their complex histories. The politics of memorializing has, however, favored men in how history is recalled. We have grown accustomed to the underwhelming ways in which women are celebrated (heroes) or cast (villains). In this paper, I reflect on the problematic male-centered history of Ghana and the notable absence of women’s constituency in other national projects. I explore women’s labor and political participation in Ghana and reflect on how they remain crucial to the futures we intend to construct. I employ various monuments in honor of individuals such as schools, museums, and statues to highlight the relative weight we attach to women and men’s contribution to nation building. I argue that memorializing women underwhelmingly de-historize them making any counter-hegemonic account of their history impossible. The paper contends that, we emphasize the hyper-local realities of the disappearance of women from history whether 'heroes' or villains. It further provides a blueprint for state led memorialization or construction of individuals as heroes to include research of those who disappear despite their uncommon patriotic service, be inclusive, participatory, account for gender and undergo a collective public debate on the deserving, to affirm a collective ownership of the memorializing process.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the tensions between imagined, and hoped for, futures and present realities among Portuguese soldiers who fought in the anti-colonial wars. It will analyse the different images that emerge in narrative, exploring the afterlives of war in Portugal.

Paper long abstract:

Portugal’s late colonial wars have been silenced in national public memory until recently, remaining central in individual memory. Between 1961 and 1974 Portugal was engaged in three theatres of war in Lusophone Africa: Angola, Guinea Bissau, and Mozambique. Nearly one million Portuguese young men were mobilized to fight a war many did not understand and/or agree with. Upon returning home, especially in the aftermath of the 1974 revolution and the rapid political changes taking place in Portugal, the experiences and hopes of these young men and their families were silenced or left unacknowledged.

Drawing on ethnographic research on the history of combat trauma in Portugal I will explore collective (narrative and representational) and individual war memories and the realities of homecoming. I will highlight the temporality of silence, secrecy, visibility, and openness and the interplay between imagined, and hoped for, futures and present realities. The narrative expression of war experiences and memories highlights concurrent, if contradictory and ambiguous, images – victim, warrior, hero (Sorensen 2015), villain or perpetrator, that emerge with distinctive moral meanings and affective dimensions.

Paper short abstract:

Exploring the political uses of examples heroism and villainy in Angola, this communication unpacks the memory and moral legacy of Jonas Savimbi to analyse the ways his persona propitiates acts of memory and opposition making susceptible of political instrumentalisation.

Paper long abstract:

This communication explores the politics of heroism and villainy in Angola by unpacking the memory of Jonas Savimbi to analyse the ways his persona propitiates acts of memory susceptible of political instrumentalisation. To unpack this task, a focus on the politics of memorialisation can assist in unravelling the construction of historical figures, how they are remembered, forgotten or silenced and in which socio-political context. That is to ask, how is the memory of heroes and villains appropriated and for what political and moral purposes? In attempting to answer this question I analyse the memory of Jonas Savimbi in Angola to explore two particular domains: on the one hand the invocation of the persona of Jonas Savimbi and the memory of his time as a technology of political control and instilment of fear exercised by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) government; on the other as a blueprint of hope and morality, of a different state and social order. To do so, my communication is divided in three sections. First, I provide a brief historical background on Jonas Savimbi and propose reading his legacy through four mnemonic epithets embodied throughout his political career to better situate the reader. The remaining two sections analyse the two domains referred above, the memories of fear, violence and war harnessed as technologies of socio-political control and the legacies of the political and moral aspirations of Savimbi in Angola.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the roles of the press in the invention of images of political elites in Nigeria and how these images affected interpretive sovereignty of the past and the way people imagine and shape the future of Nigerian politics.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the roles of the press in the invention of images of political elites in Nigeria and how these images affected interpretive sovereignty of the past and the way people imagine and shape the future of Nigerian politics. The paper addresses three important and related questions. How does the press (newspapers) construction of heroic and villainous images of political elites archive the past and invent the future of Nigerian politics? How did the archived images of the elites reflect the past? In what ways can the archived images help us imagine and shape the future of Nigerian polity? The paper draws data from four major newspapers, the West African Pilot, the New Nigeria, the Nigerian Tribune and the Daily Sketch to examine how larger than life images of four Nigerian political elites, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello and Samuel Ladoke Akintola, were constructed, how the molded images continue to circulate and affect the way contemporary politics is imagined and the future projected.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the ways in which corporations are posed as villains in works of contemporary African fiction and thereby what possibilities of taking on the role of hero/protagonist are imagined for African individuals and collectivities confronting the local operations of these corporations.

Paper long abstract:

More powerful and affluent than some small countries, multinational corporations exert a tremendous influence on the functioning of global society. This paper analyzes the social impact of corporations across Sub-Saharan Africa by way of its conceptualization in recent works of African fiction – to what thematic and political ends the corporation is posed as villain (antagonist) in these work and thereby what possibilities of taking on the role of hero or protagonist these works thus imagine for African individuals and collectivities confronting the local operations of these corporations.

In analyzing Congolese author In Koli Jean Bofane’s novel _Congo Inc._ and Cameroonian author Imbolo Mbue’s _How Beautiful We Were_, this paper considers to what extent these authors see the operations of corporations within Africa as part of a long line of imperialism stretching back to the days of the large European colonial empires and to what extent they see this as a novel socio-economic phenomenon of our age of neoliberal globalization, as well as to what extent they envision the possibilities of local-level resistance to these forms of economic predation that threaten to stir up military conflict and despoil local ecosystems.