Vol. 143 No. 3 (2026): Visualidad colonial de África. Perspectivas desde el sur de Europa
Dosier

On Ultraviolence. Photography as a Weapon in the Decolonisation Wars in Africa

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Afonso Dias Ramos
Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Published 2026-09-15

Keywords

  • atrocity photography,
  • political propaganda,
  • decolonisation wars,
  • psychological operation,
  • public memory

Copyright (c) 2026 Alfonso Dias Ramos

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

On Ultraviolence. Photography as a Weapon in the Decolonisation Wars in Africa. (2026). Ayer. Revista De Historia Contemporánea, 143(3), 165-199. https://doi.org/10.55509/ayer/3312

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Abstract

This article analyses one of the most decisive, yet least known, moments in the ever-tightening nexus between the visual world and political violence in the contemporary era: the relationship between violent images and the decolonisation wars across Africa in the mid-20th century, and how this determined the conduct, interpretation, imagination and memory of all such historical events under the aegis of ultraviolence. Taking three different contexts as case studies hitherto understudied —Algeria in 1957, Kenya in 1953 and Angola in 1961—, a comparative analysis looks into the visual rhetoric of atrocity in the context of political propaganda and of psyops within decolonisation wars in Africa, which not only impacted the official history and public memory of such events, but also boasts parallels with the visual culture of present-day political polarisation.

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