The Invention of Portuguese Guinea

This article scrutinizes how the historical and mnemonic narrative about the ‘discovery’ of Portuguese Guinea was invented, narrated and established publicly as official history, even though the sources and the chronicles of the time do not corroborate, with thorough accuracy, that fact. It explores the commemoration of the Portuguese Guinea Centennial, highlighting the ceremonies carried out in the metropolis and in the colony, the institutional contexts of its production, the cultural technologies engineered to promote the image of the colony, as well as the strategies executed to forge the concept of the ‘discovery’ of Portuguese Guinea. This article reveals, on one hand, how the Portuguese commemorative colonial enterprise in Africa acted in the invention of imperial historical facts. On the other, it proves that the colonial Portuguese Guinea commemorated in 1946 was not nor did it correspond in historical, geographical and semantic terms to the territory of the West African coast approached by the Portuguese explorers of the fifteenth century. The ‘discovery’ narrative of so-called Portuguese Guinea was an invention promoted by the Portuguese colonial authorities and scholars who forged the memory of the colony and contributed to influence, even in post-colonial period, the global understanding of that fact.