Description
Self-determination movements usually form around the right of a people to determine their identity and destiny. In Africa and elsewhere, they continue to have diverse interests and stake claims to their right by principles in United Nations documents while typically demanding and struggling for autonomy and freedom to determine their political, economic, social, and cultural identities and development. While some self-determination movements in Africa are engaged in the struggle for a re-connection with their pre-colonial conditions of political, economic, social, and cultural affairs; others are engaged in struggles to radically disrupt the existing (neo)colonial order. However, whilst the goals and modalities of the struggle of the contemporary African self-determination movements have been severally explored by scholars, not much attention has been paid to constructing a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of memory in the repertoire of the African self-determination movements. For example, how memory is shaped, reshaped, and deployed in the engagement of the self-determination movements with the (neo)colonial state, and the production of postcolonial narratives in their quest for legitimacy. Similarly, not much has been done to track the trajectory and modalities of the responses of the state in Africa to the campaigns of the self-determination movements including the invention and reinvention of memory, identity, and space, as well as their instrumentalization, among others. This paper explores the entanglements of space, memory, and identities and how they are reproduced and instrumentalized in the contemporary campaign for independence by self-determination movements in the Gulf of Guinea. To this end, how space, memory, and identities become entangled and instrumentalized in the self-determination struggles of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (in Nigeria) and the Ambazonia Defence Forces (in Cameroun) will be examined in this paper as the Gulf of Guinea case studies.
