Editorial | 25th April in History and Memory

On the cover of my recently published book History and Memory, which I owed to April, I transcribed a poem by Rui Namorado, a colleague of ours at the Faculty of Economics, who died recently (when I published it, I didn't realise that his life was hanging by a thread). It was certainly the last expression of the poet's political anguish. I'll leave just two verses from it here:

“[…] Não deixemos que Abril seja o tempo que passa

De si próprio perdido por não poder regressar. […]”

Rui Namorado, Melancolia em Abril

In fact, my generation, the 'D generation' (to quote the title of a 'Capitão de Abril', Carlos Matos Gomes) — the generation of dictatorship and democracy, which is a kind of utopia or different utopias, because there is no 'April' but 'Aprils' — fears that for many the Revolution is no more than a memory, lost in the midst of superficial political struggles. And my generation is the generation of the war, the colonial war, which we were forced into because it had little or nothing to do with our national and universal ideals, especially for those who (like us) spent two years in Guinea at the end of the 1960s, or even more so for those who suffered there in the 1970s during the end of the regime and colonialism.

This is why we must ensure that memory does not distort history, and that history, especially the history in which we live, does not forget the memory that stubbornly, but unsuccessfully, tries to erase the erosion of time.

We must write recent history as scholars and as citizens who carry the power of memory, because — let's not forget, to paraphrase Manuel Alegre in a well-known poem from O Canto e as Armas (1967), which I have also transcribed in the book — that the hands that make peace also make war, as we have seen in the daily life of the passing of time.

This is not a glorious view of the 25th of April, but perhaps the most constructive view, especially for an introductory text for an electronic journal of a research centre whose guiding principle was to study the 20th century. And it includes 25th April 1974, Freedom Day, and 2nd April 1976, when our Constitution was approved. We need to talk about these days and others so that they are not forgotten. Forgotten by citizens or even by historians and other researchers in the social sciences and humanities, for whom nothing on this planet should be foreign to them...

Coimbra, April 2025, still in the year of the Fiftieth Anniversary

Luís Reis Torgal