RETHINKING THE ARCHIVE AND THE COLONIAL LIBRARY: EQUATORIAL GUINEA

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Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies

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RETHINKING THE ARCHIVE AND THE

COLONIAL LIBRARY: EQUATORIAL

GUINEA

Benita Sampedro Vizcaya

Version of record first published: 15 Dec 2008.

To cite this article: Benita Sampedro Vizcaya (2008): RETHINKING THE ARCHIVE AND THE COLONIAL

LIBRARY: EQUATORIAL GUINEA, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 9:3, 341-363

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RETHINKING THE ARCHIVE AND THE

COLONIAL LIBRARY: EQUATORIAL

GUINEA

Equatorial Guinea has conventionally, and often uncritically, been approached under the sign of two interrelated cliche´s. On the one hand, the linguistic ostracism derived from being the only nation state in Africa in which Spanish is the official language is often invoked as a defining and essentializing condition. On the other, its limited territorial extension and demographic density (some 28,050 sq km, and fewer than 1 million inhabitants) has been seen as theraison d’eˆtrefor the country’s invisibility, even within the continent itself. Colonial configurations have more or less fixed these numerical facts, but their centrality can be interrogated; one of the main projects of European expansion in Africa was, after all, the imposition of a new world of territorially-bounded nation-states (Ballantyne). The time has come to move beyond obstructive representational markers and anxieties, direct inheritances of imperial scrambles, and to allow Equatorial Guinea a space in contemporary debates relating to colonialism in Africa, Western imperial practices, and the diverse decolonization strategies. Far from adopting a distant and impartial academic approach, I propose a critical look at the past, and its legacies, from a historically-motivated and politically-committed position. In rethinking spatial categories, this strategy will allow a reading of history (and literary and discursive historiography) not from a single, fixed, geographical and conceptual cartography*be it linguistic, ethnic or otherwise*but according to multiple maps, simultaneously unfolded, as Steven Feierman (‘‘Africa in History’’) would put it. This flexible approach should carry with it an opening up of boundaries of historical space and, possibly, a fundamental challenge to what we generally understand by the term ‘‘Hispanism’’.

In this essay, I will follow two simultaneous venues for interrogation and analysis. I will first address selectively, rather than exhaustively, some of the ways in which Equatorial Guinea, as an entity and as a point of reference, has been co-opted in the Spanish popular imaginary, through the representation and consumption of a range of historiographical sources and cultural icons that have, collectively, re-invented it as a racialized other, a space of difference and alterity. Secondly*and no less importantly*the essay will attempt to dislocate the traditionally central and privileged role of these metropolitan texts and (neo-) colonial discourses in order to engage, instead, with the cultural and intellectual production of Guinean intellectuals themselves, for ‘‘African narratives must carry their full weight’’ (Feierman 59). This project involves a radical re-envisioning of the field, addressing ‘‘an enormously expanded subject matter, with historical narratives originating in Africa that must be given full weight alongside those originating in Europe’’ (Feierman 60). I am, therefore, proposing a re-evaluation of the colonial library and archive that re-inscribes local agency. By re-locating canonical texts and privileged categories of analysis such as race, capitalism, empire or nation*this type of shift attempts to

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies Vol. 9, No. 3 November 2008, pp. 341363

ISSN 1463-6204 print/ISSN 1469-9818 online–2008 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14636200802563600

reconfigure, appropriate, transform and transgress the colonial, historical and linguistic inheritance of which ‘‘the local’’ is also a conduit.

More than a decade ago now, Jacques Derrida was preoccupied with the etymological, as well as the ontological, nature of the archive: ‘‘Nothing is thus more troubled and more troubling today than the concept archived in the word ‘archive’’’, he concluded (‘‘Archive Fever’’ 90). My take on the term will be more explicitly concerned, however, with a reflection of the archive as a historically-charged critical site. Along with Carolyn Steedman, I reject an exclusive, or even primary, understanding of the term as ‘‘a prosaic place where the written and the fragmentary traces of the past are put in boxes and folders, bound up, stored, catalogued’’ (The Archive and Cultural History 69). The concept of archive I invoke surpasses its institutional, physical and material definition, focusing instead on its possibilities as a basis for knowledge production, identity formation and the projection of community imaginaries not only in the past and present but also, notably, in the future.1 The archive, in its conventional physical and institutional sense, has been traditionally perceived as susceptible to the idea of preservation, internment, storing and forgetting, as a ubiquitous space for perpetuating memory and containing the past. This orthodoxy, however, has been widely questioned, unveiling the ways in which archives*both physical and conceptual*construct, sanctify and finally bury a variety of pasts. Derrida, among others, reiterated the ways in which memory and forgetting are associated, and in which the archive should be connected more directly with the future than with the past:

The question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. (Archive Fever36)

In 1998 a group of archivists, anthropologists, museum curators, philosophers, literary critics and artists at the University of Witwatersrand*some from abroad, but the overwhelming majority of them from Africa*initiated a collective project that came to be known as ‘‘Refiguring the Archive’’. Jacques Derrida took part in the corresponding seminars, and his Archive Fever was widely debated in a South African context radically different from that in which it had initially been generated (The Freud Museum in London). The project participants, while resigned to the idea that ‘‘there is no easy remedy, no obvious redress to past exclusion from mainstream archives’’ (Hamilton et al. 2), took upon themselves a new rethinking of the archive, ‘‘extending its boundaries and theorizing its limits’’ (14), hoping that, through their interventions, archives might emerge ‘‘not simply as sources but as sites of contested knowledges’’ (15). Their more immediate hope was that a reconfigured archive might escape traditionally and colonially-conceived boundaries, and find expression in new sites and new forms.

The link between the concept of archive and that of the colonial library is well-established. Gaurav Desai, drawing explicitly from V. Y. Mudimbe, and implicitly from Foucault, attempted ‘‘to reimagine the colonial library as a space of contestation’’ (Subject to Colonialism 4) and, indeed, conceived it as ‘‘an important

terrain of colonial tension and struggle’’ (7). Accepting that such a ‘‘colonial library’’ might be a ‘‘convenient label,’’ he recognized, at the same time, that ‘‘it is by no means a body of texts that can be isolated in any absolute or rigid way’’ (Subject to Colonialism4). My entrance into the colonial library and theorizing on the archive, in this essay, acknowledges among its limitations its adherence to the dominance of the text, as a privileged*although by no means exclusive*object of analysis, but also aims to escape from being theoretically ‘‘haunted by the literary legacy’’ (Taylor 27). I concur with Diana Taylor that the ‘‘repertoire’’ is key to expanding the traditional boundaries of the archive, and even challenging ‘‘the preponderance of writing in western epistemologies’’ (16). I remain, therefore, fully aware that there are infinite forms of inscribing the Guinean archives besides writing, and besides writing in Spanish, all of which can be equally empowering against imperial centres and colonial pasts. To explore narratives in other ephemeral and non-ephemeral cultural practices such as wood-carving, mask-making, drum performances, storytelling and oral history, and rituals, to mention but a few, could indeed pose a further challenge to our discursive methodologies. The confluence of projects I have discussed, which attempted to link current intellectual concerns of enormous historical and cultural transcendence to the pressing social and political situation of the African continent, have*to some extent*been the driving force behind my own research on Equatorial Guinea’s rethinking of archives and libraries. Against this backdrop, my preoccupation with the colonial archive, and the colonial library, should be understood as an awareness of the power of those sites, not only in terms of the day-to-day functioning of the empirecolony relationship, but also in regard to the epistemic and representational weight they carry in broader cultural and political practices and projects, both colonial and neocolonial. I turn to the potential of the archive and the colonial library as sites from which the seemingly irreversible power of colonialism can simultaneously be enacted and contested.

Because my interest in rethinking archives differs from Derrida’s ‘‘desire to find, or locate, or possess that moment of origin, as the beginning of things’’ (Steedman 3), I deploy here an arbitrary beginning. During the second half of the nineteenth century, vivid depictions of journeys and voyages across the Gulf of Biafra, written within the markedly colonial and commercial ideological framework of the geographical and natural history societies, by figures such as Jose´ Mun˜oz Gaviria (financial administrator during the governorship and lieutenancy of Jose´ de Ga´ndara on Fernando Poo),2 Amado Osorio (doctor and explorer)3 and the well-known Manuel Iradier Bulfy,4 began to circulate in Spain, transporting*narratively*the islands and mainland of Guinea into a privileged space in the Spanish public and political imaginary. At the turn of the 1890s, the Compan˜ı´a Transatla´ntica, over which the marquis of Comillas presided, financed a series of voyages with the aim of exploring the agricultural possibilities of Fernando Poo (now the island of Bioko), voyages that would culminate in the emergence of a constant and regular mercantile traffic between colony and metropolis.5 In the aftermath of 1898, when Spain lost what remained of its credibility as a global force and imperial anxieties passed through one of their most critical phases, the scramble for Africa by the European powers left little to appropriate.6 Equatorial Guinea would become, along with Morocco, the essential locus for covering the economic and psychological trauma and contributing to the formation of a public imperial imaginary.7 This cultural shift gave rise to an

intensification of Spain’s African presence, politically accentuated by French colonial designs on the mainland frontiers of Guinea, which provoked the immediate dispatch of an official commission (in the spring of 1901) to demarcate the limits of the disputed border. Pablo Ferrer Piera provides an account of these tensions:

Perdido para siempre el inmenso poderı´o Colonial en Ame´rica y Oceanı´a, so´lo nos resta una pequen˜a porcio´n de territorio africano, tan menospreciada por nosotros, desde los gobernantes hasta los pobres diablos de la Nacio´n, como codiciada por las potencias extranjeras. (Fernando Poo y sus dependencias)8

Throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, a multitude of publications on this African territory ceaselessly proliferated in Spain, often with the generic title La Guinea Espan˜ola: an intensive collective effort to inventory and publicize the territory as the prelude to a phase of massive exploitation. The books by Ricardo Beltra´n y Ro´zpide (1900 and 1903) were paired by those of Manuel Planelles Monfort (1901), Elodio Lo´pez Vilches (1901) and Federico Montalvo (1902), to mention but a few. A journal with precisely the same title was founded by the Claretian missionaries in 1903 and continued its publication almost uninterruptedly until the country’s independence in 1968.9In the following decade, among the equally repetitive titles of many new publications on Guinea,Espan˜a en el Muniand, especially,Espan˜a en A´frica, are the most commonly found in the archives.10 The shift seems to indicate a late phase of the imperial project, less concerned with exploration and more oriented towards exploitation and the direct intervention and agency of Spain in the colonized territory. The years 19141925, coinciding approximately with the prolonged term of A´ngel Barrera Luyando as governor general, are conventionally portrayed as one of the most stable periods in the active colonization phase, witnessing a significant increase in the medical and educational infrastructure both in the islands and on the mainland territories.11It should not be forgotten, however, that within the political and military structure of empire, stability is always intrinsically dependent on force, in other words, repression and stability are deeply interrelated and interconnected concepts.12 On the island of Fernando Poo, alongside his missionary activity, Padre Joaquı´n Juanola proudly describes his frequent expeditions to accompany the artillery gunner of the colonial administration in order to intimidate the bubis, its indigenous inhabitants turned colonial subjects.13In the continental part or Rı´o Muni, Operation Rokobongo consisted of the crushing of local leadership, in the outskirts of the city of Bata, an operation that should be framed within a broader colonial project of demarcating colonial spaces, delineating jurisdictions and appropriating sites of authority held independently until then by missionaries, traders, even ethnographers or travelers, and now on the way to centralized imperial control.14

Of the Spanish writers of the so-called Generation of 1927, Leo´n Felipe had a distinctive initiation as a poet. Assigned to Guinea as a colonial health official during the Barrera y Luyanda period, as a pharmacist and hospital administrator at the San Carlos health centre (now city of Luba), and later in the island of Elobey, he resided in the colonial territories for two years, from September 1920 to the same month in 1922, and gave poetic expression, often saturated with colonial exoticism, to some of his everyday experiences, while efficiently leaving testimony of the brutality of the

colonizing process.15 His poem entitled ‘‘Escuela’’ reproduces the traces of that violent colonial apprenticeship:

He dormido muchas noches, an˜os, en el A´frica Central, alla´ en el golfo de Guinea, en la desembocadura del Muni, acordando el latido de mi sangre

con el golpe seco, mono´tono y tenaz del tambor prehisto´rico africano de tribus indomables . . . He visto a un negro desnudo

recibir cien azotes con correas de plomo por haber robado un viejo sombrero de copa en la factorı´a del Holande´s. (Creus and Nerı´n 21)

The title, however, is not totally uncharged for we do remember that often the development of the racialized colonial discourse, any discourse including the poetic, has been articulated within the frame of a pedagogical site, for it allows the refiguring of ‘‘normative colonial subjects who could adapt to the rapidly changing colonial economies’’ (Desai 49).

As the century progressed, more explicit colonial sentiments began to be voiced in Spanish peninsular discourses. In the same decade, the 1920s, Miguel de Unamuno accepted the invitation to write a prologue to a book by Jose´ Ma´s, a Spanish trader, based in Fernando Poo from the age of twelve. The book was entitledEn el paı´s de los bubisand constituted one of the many ethnographic volumes published in Spain during the period, again laden with primitive and tropical exoticism.16 With a predictable fixation on the ‘‘savage’’ versus ‘‘civilized’’ dichotomy, Unamuno used the opportunity to express a profound enthusiasm with regard to the colonial project, interwoven with tropical sexual complexes, but perhaps the most personal touch in his prologue is the transposition of the ‘‘quixotic’’ Spanishser to the Guinean setting. Unamuno suggests that it is, precisely, the reading of novels, and the subsequent need for adventure, that*as for the hidalgo from La Mancha*has transported Jose´ Ma´s and, by extension, the Spanish colonial enterprise as a whole, to the distant territories in tropical Africa:

Hay en este libro, lleno de intere´s como todos aquellos en que un espı´ritu de veras poe´tico nos cuenta casos y cosas de paı´ses de salvajes, un largo pasaje sobre la primera caja de libros que llego´ para la venta a Fernando Poo, pasaje que ma´s de una vez tendremos que recordar. Los anteriores colonos de la isla tropical africana no tenı´an libros; ‘‘nos aburre la lectura’’ le decı´an a Jose´ Ma´s; pero e´ste, a quien fue la lectura la que le lanzo´ a los doce an˜os a su vida aventurera, deseaba libros para alimentar su fuente de accio´n, porque e´l vivı´a y los otros se dejaban vivir; e´l era un emigrado, los otros emigrantes. Escribio´ a su casa pidiendo libros y le enviaron unas cuantas novelas. (Unamuno, quoted in Ma´s 2)

The arrival of the Spanish book in Guinea, or rather the box of books, just like the narrative of their transportation, are inscribed within the category of the myth of origin. At once a moment of epiphany and authority, it marks a complex process of

displacement which functions simultaneously, in Homi Bhabha’s words, ‘‘as an insignia of colonial authority and a signifier of colonial discipline’’ (The Location of Culture102). Furthermore, in a very Unamuno-like interpretation, a sort of existential unity between life and literature is established, as if the author of the book whose prologue he is writing (a synecdoche of the colonial enterprise in and of itself) were inhabiting no less than a textualized reality.

The end of the 1920s saw a surge of titles in Spanish presses related to the agricultural and commercial exploitation of Fernando Poo and the forestry enterprises of Rı´o Muni. The editorial success of Joaquı´n Rodrı´guez Barrera’s three substantial and popularManuales del agricultor de Fernando Poo, subtitledEl banano,El cafetoandEl cacao respectively,17 was matched by Bravo Carbonel, who explicitly attempted to convey the riches of the land and the need to invest there in every sector.18Scientists and soldiers, as well as governors, colonial administrators and entrepreneurs, became involved in the task of publicizing the possibilities for the commercial exploitation of the so-calledSpanish Guinea. In his Posesiones espan˜olas del golfo de Guinea, Luı´s Valde´s Cavanilles wrote:

Encontra´ndome desempen˜ando el cargo de jefe de la seccio´n de asuntos militares de la Direccio´n general de Marruecos y Colonias, realice´ el siguiente estudio concienzudo, sobre el propio terreno, y una orientacio´n ordenada y te´cnica dirigida, previa a toda empresa que trate de cometerse en las posesiones espan˜olas del Golfo de Guinea. (Posesiones espan˜olas del golfo de Guinea)19

Even the Claretian religious order, which had a significant presence in Guinea, contributed actively in these years to heightening the expectation of colonial wealth in works such asLo que es y lo que podra´ ser la Guinea espan˜ola:

Claramente aparece en el mismo tı´tulo el fin que nos proponemos en este opu´sculo: dar una idea de lo que es nuestra colonia ecuatorial de la Guinea espan˜ola, por cuyo conocimiento hay verdadero afa´n en la actualidad. Estamparemos en el papel lo mismo que diariamente estamos manifestando de viva voz a multitud de espan˜oles que se nos acercan en busca de informaciones sobre la colonia africana de Espan˜a. (Misiones claretianas)20

By the end of the Spanish Civil War, the ideologists of Francoism, informed by a variety of Falangist and militarist discourses in which the territorial expansion of the patriawas a central condition of their political and propagandistic agenda, undertook a new imperial campaign recalling past greatness. The term ‘‘empire’’ would not be used in vain, predicted the Falangist intellectual Dionisio Ridruejo.21 Hand in hand with colonial exploitations and imperial aspirations, the cultural institutions of the Franco regime prioritized the dissemination of an expansionist doctrine. The treatise Rutas del imperio. Fernando Poo y Guinea (su significacio´n actual y potencial ante las necesidades econo´micas de Espan˜a)(1940), by the consular official Jose´ Ce´sar Banciella y Ba´rcena, is emblematic. Politicians, economists, historians, anthropologists, military pharmacists, colonial governors and administrators ranging widely in rank, all contributed to the creation of a national discourse designed to legitimize colonialism. The Instituto de Estudios Africanos, dependent on the Consejo Superior de

Investigaciones Cientı´ficas and known by the curiously ironic acronym IDEA, assumed responsibility for the publication of numerous series of manuals and texts on Guinea, along with the edition of the widely-distributed journalsA´frica andArchivos del IDEA. There is no better example of a state apparatus specifically created with the assigned task of rigidly controlling all matters related to the African colonies, at both the scientific and propagandistic levels, often conflated as one and the same mission.22 The IDEA is also a conspicuous example of how ‘‘colonial archives were both sites of the imaginary and institutions that fashioned histories as they concealed, revealed and reproduced the power of the state’’ (Stoler 8990). But the politics of the archive are not always the product of state machinery for, parallel to*if not directly motivating*the political and military agendas of the post-war were powerful economic interests, such as those of the Catalan and Levantine mercantile associations that emerged in the 1940s, among them theUnio´n de Agricultores de Fernando Poo and the Delegacio´n Peninsular de las Ca´maras Agrı´colas de Guinea (seccio´n Cafe´).

The above economic, political and intellectual projects associated with Spanish colonialism in Africa found their imaginative corollary in the literature and journalism of the period.23 The abundant travel narratives and epistolaries, or commonly titled Cartas de la Guinea, were accompanied by various plays aspiring to bring Guinean scenes to the Spanish theatres and the popular audience. Bartolome´ Soria Marcos’s Bajo el sol de Guinea. Comedia drama´tica en cuatro actos(1945), or Domingo Manfredi’s more lyrical Ischulla (La isla) (1950), which received the ‘‘Premio A´frica de Literatura’’, awarded by the IDEA, are some of such examples. A plantation novel, Germa´n Bautista Velarde’s Fang-Eyeya´ (1950), appeared the same year, and later Manfredi’sTierra negra(1957), on the Christian colonization of the island. Nor should one overlook the unprecedented commercial success of the sentimental plantation novels by Liberata Masoliver*such asEfu´n (1955) or La mujer del colonial(1962)* evoking the daily life of Spaniards in specific Guinean locations despite the fact that the author had seemingly never left her native Catalun˜a. The centrality afforded in her novels to the white man, or white woman, as the axis of the heroic action, along with their exhausting labours of plantation life, presented within the frame of the romantic adventure novel, should not deviate the reader’s attention from the reality of Guinean colonial history: one of servitude, exploitation, extortion of property, forced labor, forced resettlement and deportations, alteration of family, clan and local structures, and paternalism in every case.

The democratic Spain of the post-Francoist period is far from having freed itself completely from nostalgic attitudes towards colonial Guinea, which continue to operate at several political and public levels. Josefina Aldecoa’s novelHistoria de una maestra (1990), which met with a respectable degree of commercial success, despite the author, again, having never visited the country, continued to approach Guinea as an arena for escapism and exoticism. But furthermore, if colonial nostalgia drives the selection of location for the first job appointment of the protagonist, Gabriela, sent to Bata in the years immediately preceding the Spanish Civil War, there is an indisputablemission civilizatricein the nature of that first appointment, a rural teaching position. It would be unnecessary to rehearse here the way in which colonial spaces have always been privileged arenas for experimentation, a laboratory in which to put in motion metropolitan utopias, frequently under the aegis of educational or religious projects and programs.

The last twenty years have witnessed a doubling of publications by other authors of Spanish origin who, having lived, or been born, in Guinea before its independence, or having parents or relatives who were part of the colonial enterprise, know the country first-hand and, with varying levels of critical distance and ideological introspection*although similar nostalgic illusion*recall, and retell, the past in ways that often coincide with other common topoi: a golden age or a gilded youth, interrupted by the sudden expulsion from paradise at the moment of independence in 1968. Among them we may recall the various narratives by Marı´a Paz Dı´az, Elsa Lo´pez, Fernando Garcı´a Gimeno and Marı´a Jose´ Barry, or by the film-maker Cecilia Bartolome´ Pina and, more recently, by Carles Decors or Eduardo Soto-Trillo, among others.24 The website collectively maintained by the so-called nin˜os de Guinea (including some of the above), fully furnished with period video footage, extensive collections of colonial photography, digitized documentation*from postcards to postal stamps*and lively blogs, must be understood as another configuration of the archive, the repository of memories of a past that they refuse to relinquish.25 The hitherto privately-held albums and collectible colonial artifacts and memorabilia are now leaving family confinement to re-circulate: the archive has effectively been uploaded to the World Wide Web. In its interactive and multifaceted digital existence the site should be read as a compelling display of colonialism at work, in its fully paternalistic operational mode. However, airing the archives has had the effect too of operating a shift in the nature of its holdings by, on the one hand, opening up the colonial debate all over again and, on the other, exposing its contents as the best inculpatory proof of colonial practice and privilege.

In a novelistic fabrication of almost grotesque dimensions, Manuel Garcı´a Rubio’s Greenrelates the story of a young anthropologist, newly graduated from the University of Barcelona and sent with a grant to study a community of chimpanzees in the jungle of Equatorial Guinea. Predictably, perhaps, in a text which embodies the cultural obsession with Guinean fauna in the contemporary Spanish panorama, one of the chimpanzees*known by the English name of the book’s title*comes to commu-nicate verbally with the researcher, and narrates his own story. This obsession with the Guinean fauna is most conspicuous, however, in the case of Copito de Nieve, a totally albino, blue-eyed gorilla, captured in Guinea in 1966, star of the Barcelona Zoo, and one of the most photographed and publicized tourist attractions of the city for the almost four decades during which he was exploitatively exhibited. The primatologist who acquired him, Jordi Sabater Pi, agreed to pay 15,000 pesetas if he lived a reasonable length of time. Copito, in fact, would exceed all expectations, in terms of both lifespan and marketability. Africa, once again, came to serve as the exporter not only of the exotic but also of the anomalous. Francisco Zamora Loboch, a Guinean poet and journalist residing in Spain, invariably attentive to the grim reality of his country, responds with irony to the episode in a poem suggesting the selective preferences of the West for whiteness:

‘‘Salvad a Copito’’

Mi enhorabuena Copito, mi enhorabuena.

Gracias a que gasta usted forros blancos y ojos azules ha podido abandonar la selva

con gran alborozo por parte de Occidente.

Ası´, tras civilizados barrotes

no volvera´ a sufrir la zozobra de saberse acechado, la angustia que precede a la emboscada del depredador: la hiena, el leopardo o el furtivo indı´gena.

Gracias a la extran˜a mutacio´n que padece disfruto´ un buen bibero´n desde el primer dı´a el rumor de las Ramblas, cacahuetes, pipas, un hermoso nombre de detergente a granel ası´ como pequen˜as obscenidades en catala´n. Recibe usted visitas con tratamiento de ilustrı´sima, tiene amigos en el Ministerio

calefaccio´n y agua caliente en invierno. Primero de la clase, sus compan˜eros

no pueden reprimir su admiracio´n cada vez que le nombra el domador Copito de nieve, el u´nico gorila del mundo con el alma blanca. Pero si bien eludio´ usted definitivamente al tse´-tse´

al ano´pheles y a un cierto neocolonialismo sentimental

el precio por el bombı´n, los tres tenedores y el lenguado mernier han sido bien altos, aunque cuando le sugiero

que todo pudo haber sido muy distinto

Ud. se permita recordarme que a otros de su mismo tropel

les fue peor. (Ndongo-Bidyogo, Antologı´a de la literatura guineana 129)

If, as Juan Toma´s A´vila Laurel rightly underlines, European colonial irruption deviated the course of African history (‘‘La violencia como herencia’’ 102), the neocolonial intervention that underlies the case of Copito de Nieve also indicates an unreconstructed mentality. The capture, deterritorialization and public exhibition of the singular gorilla is a political act, saturated with ideology, in all its dimensions. Those Westerners who cannot allow themselves a journey to the heart of Africa to contemplate its fauna, or enjoy the exoticism of a safari, are offered the more comfortable possibility of a walk through the zoo in a modern European city. The zoo, like the museum or the art gallery, is by definition a utopian place, with colossal powers of decontextualization, in which the juxtaposition of different elements from distinct locations scarcely serves to advance cultural dialogue.26The poem ‘‘Salvad a Copito’’ encapsulates the necessary reflexivity that these experiences of cultural decentralization entail. In his call to the dissident, Copito, Zamora Loboch resumes metaphorically the impotent dialogue with the other, but more broadly, the poet sardonically alludes to the indulgent deceits of modernity. ‘‘Salvad a Copito’’ is not merely a challenge to the expectations of progress and development, but also an indictment of colonization and neo-colonial attitudes. It is, too, a poem that appeals, directly, to representation from the perspective of the minority and to the articulation of difference: or, in other words, to the right of expression from a position of marginality, and indeed the right to remain on the margins.27

It was a last act of external intervention*euthanasia*which ended the life of Copito, afflicted by skin cancer (the price he was going to pay for its whiteness) in November 2003, still behind the bars of the Barcelona Zoo. The authorities responsible for his exhibition communicated his imminent, programmed death

through the available national and international media, urging all citizens to visit the zoo while (as the daily El Paı´s reported) Copito ‘‘todavı´a mantiene sus plenas facultades’’. His death merited a final homage in the weekly Spanish television programInforme Semanal, while in the USA in 2005 PBS produced a documentary for its Video/Nature archive entitled Snowflake: The White Gorilla. In a more critically imaginative gesture, the autumn of 2004 saw the Madrid theatre company Animalario premiering a work by Juan Mayorga, U´ltimas palabras de Copito de Nieve, which reflected on themise-en-sce`neorganized by the city of Barcelona in the face of the death of the ‘‘ilustre primate’’, formally decorated as ‘‘ciudadano ejemplar’’ by the city mayor, Joan Clos, who held an official press conference to communicate the news. In the play, the animal questions the manipulation to which he has been subjected (including the antidepressants which had been administered to him, even before his cancer had appeared, in order to boost his spirits) and his status as an icon of local identity, having been abducted from his natural habitat to be placed behind bars for human curiosity. Indeed, the ultimate co-opting of Copito was his appropriation in the tensions between two competing nationalisms, two cities, Madrid and Barcelona, and two iconic zoo exhibits: the whitest gorilla in the world and the panda bear proudly displayed in Madrid.

We may leave the zoo, now, clearly a genuine type of repository in and of itself, to return to the colonial library. It seems redundant to state that ‘‘the colonial library must include those African subjects who took it on themselves to engage with the discourses of the colonizers and to produce their own inventions of Africa’’ (Desai 7); however, in observing it at work, it is interesting to note how, more often than not, the Guinean writer searches for, and engages with, the genealogy of the colonial library as a preliminary impulse. It is as if, in its domiciliation, ‘‘the desire to recover moments of inception: to find and possess all sorts of beginnings’’ (Steedman 5) has become indispensable. Jose´ Fernando Siale Djangany rails, in the prologue to his first book, Cenizas de kalabo´ y termes (2000), against the limitations of the autochthonous library:

Nuestro paı´s ha sido pintado, delineado, coronado e incluso desmenuzado por extranjeros. Muchos de ellos con excelente maestrı´a, otros con mucha pasio´n y gran entusiasmo, pero libros nuestros, en estas cuatro u´ltimas generaciones, por nosotros mismos y para nosotros, casi nada. (Cenizas de kalabo´ y termes13)

These are limitations, evidently, which he is contributing to overcome, but which he also supplements with the validation of a literary genealogy in which to insert himself, by underlining the symbolic importance of the literary father through his reading of Cuando los combes luchaban (1953), a colonial-era novel by Leoncio Evita Enoy which many have claimed to be the first to have been published by a Guinean colonial subject. Evita’s novel means, for Jose´ Fernando Siale, not just the precursor for his combe ethnic adscription within the country, but also an emblematic instance of the moment in which the local Guinean colonial library was opened.28 He goes on to ensure that this genealogy will have continuity in the next generation:

Mis hijos menores de edad sintieron curiosidad por ese libro. ‘‘Este es el libro que queremos leer’’, dijeron. Tambie´n lo leyeron, apreciando la manera en que

Leoncio Evita nos conduce a trave´s del Pueblo Combe en sus primeros contactos con hombres de tierras lejanas. (Siale Djangany,Cenizas de kalabo´ y termes 17)

Drawing deeply on the ethnographic reservoir the novel offers a desire to posses, to inhabit, the past, as an individual and collective ethnic narrative of growth, identification and encounter with the other unfolds, while simultaneously allowing for a construction of the self and the communal. This is, undoubtedly, a necessary exercise in revisiting the archive: ‘‘[t]here is no archive without a place of consignation’’, Derrida (11) advised us. The symbolic analogy in the novel with (ethnographic) ruins, fragments, pieces of memory, as well as the questioning of the history and meaning of these remains, is a gesture to uncover what has been buried by the colonial erasures. But more so, unearthing the past allows for a linking to the present, and helps to shape identity. This being said,Cuando los combes luchaban can surely be*and indeed has been*read as a text with far broader historical ramifications. For critics such as Adam Lifshey the novel ‘‘demonstrates that the geographic and temporal parameters of the misnamed Spanish American War of 1898 need to be reenvisioned from Africa as well’’ (‘‘No podemos son˜ar’’ 133). Furthermore, for Lifshey too, ‘‘Cuando los combes luchaban, like the literature of hispanophone Africa in general, forces a rethinking of the planetary axes of the Spanish-speaking world’’ (133).

The archive, however, has been invoked and articulated from multiple ethnic sites in contemporary Guinean literature. As Francisco-J. Herna´ndez-Adria´n puts it, ‘‘the archive splits into archives’’, and ‘‘names not an origin but a series of mnemonic repositories, sites, and, potentially, places of historical recovery and empowerment for the subhistorical ‘native’’’ (‘‘On Imperial Archives’’ 177). For Justo Bolekia Boleka´, his collection of poems Lobela (1999) is the result of ‘‘lo que sucede al escuchar en versos la historia que de nosotros cuentan los archiveros de nuestra comunidad idı´lica bubi, la vida de ayer y de man˜ana’’ (13): that is, a compendium from which to gather the fundamental points of reference of his ancestral culture. Communal oral tradition serves here, as in his two following collections,Ombligos y raı´ces (2006) and Poesı´a en lengua bubi (2007), as perhaps the most definitive concretization that ‘‘[t]he archive is never closed. It opens out of the future’’ (Derrida 68). Bolekia’s evocative quotation is enormously suggestive regarding questions of power and the transmission of culture, for it puts oral history at the centre of the stage, as a way of engaging with the pre-colonial past, and the means by which community/ethnic knowledge, interrupted by the colonial parenthesis, is restored.

Ironically, for its focus lies precisely within this parenthetical colonial frame, Jose´ Cervera Pery’s introduction to Raquel Ilombe´’s collection of poems Ceiba (1978) invokes through the archive a different type of ruin, the colonial ruin, in which the most obvious point of reference for the Guinean island from which the poet comes, the palm trees, are the guardians, silent witnesses, of the forgotten pages of history.

Si Corisco fue modelada para la contemplacio´n, Elobey Grande esta´ hecha para sonreı´r y Elobey Chico para meditar, porque au´n en ella se siente el recuerdo entran˜able de vivir una pa´gina de olvidada historia. Todavı´a sus antiguas ruinas conservan sombras rituales de pasadas grandezas, y hoy guardan su rubor sobre un archivo de palmeras silenciosas (Ceiba 8).

The tree, the ancient natural witnesspar excellence, is often as much the depository of history as the bearer of tradition in a community. Not incidentally, for Marı´a Nsue Angu¨e, in her now classical novelEkomo(1985), ‘‘Bajo la ceiba sagrada de mi pueblo se hallan enterrados los huesos de los ancestros . . .duerme la raı´z de la tribu’’, for the ceibatoo ‘‘guarda el totem de la tribu pues en sus raı´ces esta´n enterradas las ventures, desventuras, las epidemias, el hambre y la abundancia de la tribu’’ (25). If it is true to say that ‘‘‘woman’ becomes a synecdoche for tradition’’ (Desai 8), it must also be stated that the importance of gender in the colonial archive is often associated with (preservation of) ancestrality. Ironically enough, women’s narratives are also the most susceptible to preservation in its integrity, the most vulnerable to mutilations, interventions and violations. The prologuist to the first edition of Ekomo, Vicente Granados, over the course of several pages, unashamedly lists the manuscript’s grammatical ‘‘errores,’’ assuring the potential metropolitan reader that ‘‘Marı´a Nsue ha corregido en su novela los errores de dispersio´n del sistema voca´lico del espan˜ol guineano’’ (10) while, as far as the consonantic system goes, he writes:

lo ma´s notable es la neutralizacio´n entre /r/ y /r/ en posicio´n intervoca´lica. Dicha neutralizacio´n se refleja en la escritura por medio de innumerables confusiones. En un recuento provisional, encontre´ en Ekomo ma´s de cincuenta casos: amarrillo al lado de horible, ferroz junto a arepentirse. Esta neutralizacio´n criolla . . . tambie´n ha sido eliminada por la autora en la u´ltima correccio´n del manuscrito (Granados, Ekomo 1011).29

We should recall here that questions about (the purity of) language, editing and censoring are also a fundamental part of the task in rethinking the archive. The corrections, elisions, deletions, forced upon the author by Ekomo’s authoritarian prologuist, are one of the most powerful and uncontested truths of archival exclusions. His normativizing demands, almost two decades after the country’s independence, closely resemble*and indeed are reminders of*the endurance of the colonial system of power. Granados does not contemplate the alleged linguistic variations and grammatical idiosyncrasies of the manuscript as a possible form of resistance, but stubbornly forces the author’s reversion to orthodoxy and linguistic normativization, before the text reaches its audience, while simultaneously eliminating the possibility of a linguistic escape. This imposition, an exercise in reverting the manuscript to Castilian metropolitan linguistic style, is an anxious effort to preserve colonial/linguistic hierarchies, an anxiety nowhere more fully evoked than in the prologuist’s final endorsement (as well as final negation of the author’s agency) of the novel for publication:30

Pero no hay en la novela ni el ma´s mı´nimo resentimiento, ni trata ninguna cuestio´n polı´tica de cara´cter panfletario, porque la obra cumple una de las caracterı´sticas de la literatura guineana escrita: la ausencia de sentimientos anticolonialistas. (13)

The archive (as inEkomo’s manuscript) has been efficiently altered, mutilated, perhaps forever, but the politics of the archive do not escape us, and Granados’ introductory remarks are the best example of how political and cultural discourse produced,

reproduced and even archived empire, not just in pre-Francoist and Francoist Spain, but also in post-Francoist and postcolonial Equatorial Guinea.

The narratives by contemporary Guinean writers tackling the archive in order to rewrite their colonial past, engaging with its uses and abuses, are numerous. Juan Toma´s A´vila Laurel’s La carga (1999) may serve as one good example of a novel attempting to open a door to a specific colonial moment. The archive in this novel would be both what it contributes to build (as a sort of edifice) and what it contributes to exorcize (as a kind of colonial imaginary). The sardonic irony displayed by the author in conveying the burdens (la carga) of the colonial status quo, including native female subjugation (and their unwanted pregnancies by white men, hence pregnancy ascarga) gives us a hint of his sense of intellectual responsibility towards rethinking the archive. But the writer also confronts, as subject, the history of which he has been made an object: the very gesture of reflecting upon Spanish colonialism is a challenge to the status and relevance of metropolitan colonial libraries. With a temporal structure defined by a constant interchange between a colonial past and a dictatorial past and present,La cargare-enacts, in the foreground, the apparently peaceful life of a coastal village, Mbini, re-baptized by the Christian colonizers as Rı´o Benito, in the continental part of Guinea during the 1940s.31Geopolitical, geo-economic and post-imperial consciousness obliges us to remember that the location could not have been serendipitously selected by the author for his historical recreation: it marked the point of contact with the ocean of one of the most lucrative and rapacious river trades in precious woods (caoba, cedar, ebony,teka,ukolaandokumetrees, sometimes reaching 60 meters in height). A plethora of publications on the wealth to be extracted from the Guinean forests appeared in Spain during the 1940s and 1950s*its exploitation having begun at the end of the nineteenth century*and serve to document the essential economic value to the metropolis.32 In A´vila Laurel’s heavily ironic novel, Sr. Navarro, the governor’s lieutenant in the region, suffers the torment of the tiny mite larvae orniguaswhich eat away at his feet, and which only local knowledge can alleviate, while the inhabitants erect mock epitaphs to the ‘‘mysterious colonial lady’’ Anita Villamar in the precise location in which she once urinated:

ACUCIADA POR UNA NECESIDAD NATURAL AQUI´ SE AGACHO´ EN UN DI´A 8 DE MARZO DEL AN˜ O DEL SEN˜OR 1940 LA EXCELSA SEN˜ORA DON˜ A ANA VILLAMAR Y LO´PEZ DE MONTESANO

QUE DIOS CUIDE DE ELLA.RI´O BENITO, MARZO 1946. (La carga 39)33

In this colonial stage of the absurd, space is painstakingly negotiated with other local characters and, at the epicentre of this politics of negotiation, the reductive notion of subalternity*like other conceptions directly inherited from the colonial mentality which equally take for granted the unidirectional nature of power*is powerfully transgressed. The challenge derives from an autochthonous ideology that does not underestimate such categories as colonial exploitation (of gender and labour) and indigenous agency.

La carga is not alone in this task of rethinking, reconstructing and narratively conjuring the colonial Guinean experience,34but it could easily be paired with other simultaneous archival efforts, perhaps some of them more physical, involving the

laborious library work of compiling, collecting and preserving, from amongst the debris of history. They seem to emerge powerfully in the 1980s and early 1990s, as soon as Guinean intellectuals survive the first regime after independence, the sanguinary dictatorship of Francisco Macı´as Nguema (19681979).35 A move, however, from the archive as source into the archive as object, not quite in its analytical but rather its pragmatic and political dimension, is what we encounter in Constantino Ocha’a Mve Bengobesana’s voluminousFuentes archivı´sticas y bibliotecarias de Guinea Ecuatorial (Guı´a general del administrativo, del investigador y del estudiante) (1985). As if wiping away ‘‘dust’’ as his nation’s ‘‘narrative principle’’, he spent years composing volumes of data by mapping, charting and cataloguing library and archive holdings, land property records, import/export economic transactions and the country’s infrastructures. As for the very task of the social historian, Carolyn Steedman aptly reminds us that: ‘‘[i]n a proper and expanded definition of ‘archive’ this system of recording (listing in particular), storage and retrieval, is an aspect of the history of written language, and the politics of that history’’ (Steedman ix). In what could be labelled as the parallel task of the literary critic, Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo seemed to have taken upon himself not only the re-writing of history (colonial and postcolonial),36but also an equally archive-oriented concern: the collating of the only two existing compendiums of Guinean literature, Antologı´a de la literature guineana (1984), and the later, fully comprehensive up to publication, Literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial. Antologı´a(2000).37The claim could be easily made (as in the case of other postcolonial literatures in Africa written in European languages) that there is more in his collections of colonially inherited Western genre than an exercise in domestica-tion, for it is the conviction in written literature as a plurality of expression and representation, as well as its contesting power, that inspires the project. In the bilingual volume (Fang and Spanish) entitledProverbios, adagios y refranes fang (1997), drawing on the oral patrimony of his ethnic group, Federico Abaga Ondo duels on the very concept of the archive against popular, communal memory. A similarly sustained engagement with the archive, where the author claims to operate as almost no more than a medium of oral narrative and transmission, myth and popular discourse, is that of Mitos y ritos fang en Nzama Ye Mebegue(undated) by Rosendo Ela´ Nsue Mibuy. The point of convergence of the above impulses seems to be not just the concern with the legitimization of archival funds in a variety of supports*literature written in Spanish, ethnic idiomatic language expressions and proverbs, oral narratives*but, more fundamentally, the legitimization of its epistemologies. In their various manifestations, they are meaningful exercises in the politics of storage, as well as politically loaded exercises, and they speak of an archival turn which registers a rethinking of the materiality of collections.

Finally, in returning to the colonial library, we cannot underestimate the importance of those shelves filled with works by Guinean writers published during the colonial period, often under the watchful sight and narrative control and scrutiny (as much by the authors of prologues as by anonymous editors and censors) of metropolitan authorities. It is in this category that I want to ‘‘undust’’ bothCuando los combes luchaban, discussed earlier, and Daniel Jones Mathama’s Una lanza por el boabı´ (1962). I would differ here from the dangerously reductionist conclusions of scholars of Guinean Spanish-language literature who, delaying unduly the moment at which the

autochthonous Guinean library is traditionally considered to have been inaugurated, have perceived Evita’s novel as

un poderoso instrumento de propaganda para la administracio´n colonial espan˜ola que no so´lo defiende la necesidad del hecho colonial sino que lo justifica y que se encuadra, por tanto, dentro de la llamada literatura de consentimiento. (N’gom 412)

For such observers, Jones Mathama’s novel can be read similarly and indeed, as one scholar has deemed, is not even worth studying, by virtue of its allegedly pro-colonial sentiments.38As if touched by a tradition of academic interventionism that has come to dominate the construction and reconstruction of the colonial library through the circuits of academic power and knowledge, such exercises do not seem to favour openness and inclusiveness. On the contrary, to bracket these texts within the rubric of literature of consent, if not to eliminate them from shelves entirely, or to read later Guinean narratives separately from these precedents, has the effect of prolonging the colonizing project, and perhaps even, although maybe unintentionally, may be read as a postcolonial academic attempt to legitimize the colonizing project itself.39Besides the pragmatic reasons for their inclusion in an autochthonous archive as part of a genealogy (including the authors’ own adscription*combe and fernandino re-spectively*within the Guinean ethnic map), the exclusion of these novels is limiting and interventionist in regard to that archive. In echoing Desai, I quite intentionally read such colonial texts, written during the colonial period, that have been critically excluded by contemporary academics, as more crucial than ever, among other reasons because ‘‘to read the latter discourses without the backdrop of the former is to lose a great deal of their own historicity and their potentially interventionist intent’’ (Desai 5). Mathama Jones’s text, in particular, seems to fit comfortably the category of a ‘‘dangerous supplement’’ of both ‘‘the colonial archive as well as our own postcolonial consciousness’’ (Desai 10), in judging by the way literary history has this far dealt with it. The proposal would be, instead, to read the text as one of the many local engagements with colonialism, operating within it to transform it, or at least to offer its own model of colonization. Whether or not the author puts into use ‘‘the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house’’ (Desai 17), the truth is that, as Adam Lifshey described, ‘‘the tensions of empire are never relaxed’’ (‘‘And so the Worm Turns’’ 117).Una lanza por el boabı´andCuando los combes luchabanmay then ultimately be read as powerful instruments for the questioning, and even erasure, of simplistic divisions between the colonial and the postcolonial in the strict historical sense. The classic imperialist dichotomy of ‘‘civilized’’ colonizer versus ‘‘primitive’’ colonized is not always easy to escape. There is much more to these narratives, however, than a simple inversion of traditional hierarchies. Through multiple textual and contextual strategies, they serve as a useful means for addressing questions of representation, resistance, power and, in the end, the way in which the past must be contested, re-appropriated and reformulated.

To bury the past can be tempting, even comfortable, but it limits irredeemably the capacity for social change and transformation. It is for this reason that rethinking the archive, and the colonial library, seemed, for the purposes of this essay, a crucial task. ‘‘Ethical responsibility and political intervention are dynamically articulated here

as aresponseto the question of historical erasure’’ (Herna´ndez-Adria´n 178), and byhere I mean the site where history, the past, the present, is collected, interpreted, archived, memorialized, transformed and finally conjured. Needless to say, I remain fully aware that all, or any, rethinking of the colonial library, and of the archive, must remain, at best, partial and tentative.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the many friends and colleagues who have contributed to this project. Special thanks are due to Teobaldo Nchaso Matomba, for his generosity in sharing his bibliographical sources with me; Donato Ndongo Bidyogo, for his eloquent conversations and electronic exchanges; Juan Toma´s A´vila Laurel, for his companionship in Malabo and New York, and for his unchained prose; Diosdado Mba Ncony, for bringing Guinea to Santiago de Compostela; Alfonso Alogo, for sharing with me his unique vision of Bata; Jose´ Siale Djangany, for his searching and reflective questioning on national histories; and Gustau Nerı´n Abad, for his critical scholarship on colonial Guinea, and for his several suggestions in regard to my own. My collegial gratitude to Carlos J. Alonso and the public attending a presentation I gave on this subject at Columbia University, for their insightful comments. This essay originated as a plenary lecture given at the Spanish Cultural Centre in Malabo, and then in Bata, in July 2006 and I thank the organizers for the opportunity. I am grateful, finally, to the Program for Cultural Cooperation between the Spanish Ministry of Culture and US Universitiesfor the funding provided to travel, several times, to Equatorial Guinea.

Notes

1 This form of interrogating the archive bears, of course, a certain similarity with the manner in which the canon and traditions of Orientalism have previously been interrogated, and is also associated with other intellectual interventions such as those of subaltern studies.

2 Mun˜oz Gaviria.

3 Ossorio (Fernando Poo y el Golfo de Guinea).

4 See Iradier’s publications in theBoletı´n de la Sociedad Geogra´fica de MadridandA´frica. Viajes y trabajos de la Asociacio´n Eu´skara La Exploradora.

5 For a detailed examination of these voyages, see A. Gonza´lez Bueno and A. Gomis

Blanco (Los naturalistas espan˜oles en el A´frica hispana).

6 Brad Epps notes, very appropriately, that ‘‘[e]xaggerated or not, the defeat in 1898

exposed Spain’s technological backwardness and political inefficiency in a spectacularly international way, spurring Spaniards to give themselves over to melancholic lamentations and regenerative ventures alike’’ (‘‘No todo se perdio´ en Cuba’’).

7 On Morocco see, among others, Sebastian Balfour (The End of the Spanish Empire:

18981923and Deadly Embrace. Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War) for a

historical approach, and Susan Martı´n Ma´rquez (‘‘Performing Masculinity in the Moroccan Theatre’’) for a literary and representational perspective.

8 See Bhttp://www.jcmcrhp.net/libros.htm.

9 The religious order’s full name is Congregation of the Sons of the Immaculate Heart

of the Blessed Virgin Mary and they arrived in the Spanish territories of the Gulf of Guinea in 1883, exercising, ever since, a very visible presence there.

10 See, for instance, Gregorio Granados, Diego Saavedra y Magdalena or Jose´ Marı´a

Folch y Torres.

11 Angel Barrera is governor on two occasions: the first, very brief, between 20

September 1906 and 18 February 1907, and the second, far longer, between 10

September 1910 and 8 February 1924. See, for further details, Bhttp://

www.worldstatesmen.org/Equatorial_Guinea.html.

12 Gustau Nerı´n (Una guardia civil a la selva) provides a compelling case study of the disproportionate use of force during this period.

13 Epistolario del Padre Juanola.

14 See the introduction by Jacint Creus to Angel Barrera (Operacio´n Rokobongo).

15 For further details on the administrative measures relating to the appointment of

Felipe Camino Galicia, who adopted the nom de plume Leo´n Felipe, see Vicente

Granados (‘‘Leo´n Felipe, en Guinea Ecuatorial’’).

16 Gustau Nerı´n coins the term hispanotropicalismo to define a certain Africanist

ideology, circulating under Francoism, which combines three elements: the lusotropicalism of Freyre (passed through the ideological filter of Salazarismo), Hispanidad (retouched to apply to the African context), and the Regenerationismof Joaquı´n Costa and the Spanish civilianAfricanistas of the nineteenth century (Guinea Ecuatorial: Historia en blanco y negro1112).

17 See Rodrı´guez Barrera.

18 See Bravo Carbonel.

19 Quoted from Bhttp://www.jcmcrhp.net/libros.htm.

20 Quoted from Bhttp://www.jcmcrhp.net/libros.htm.

21 Cited in Nerı´n and Bosch (El imperio que nunca existio´40).

22 As Lluis Riudor states: ‘‘La creacio´n del Instituto de Estudios Africanos (IDEA) sera´ el instrumento escogido para controlar de forma fe´rrea todos los a´mbitos que tengan relacio´n con el africanismo, tanto los de cara´cter propagandı´stico como los de cara´cter cientı´fico (que con frecuencia se confunden)’’ (268).

23 Gustau Nerı´n considers that literary production about Equatorial Guinea in Castilian and Catalan was limited during the Franco years, and almost absent in the case of Galician and Basque, by virtue of an attempt to minimize the exotic aspects of the territory and thus present it as a successful model of colonization (‘‘Conferencia sobre Guinea en la literatura espan˜ola’’ 34). In my view, however, the production is still substantial while, in terms of marketing and publicity, a considerable effort was made to ‘‘bring the colony home’’, with its full weight of exoticism and escapism. It is sufficient to recall the advertising campaigns of Cola-Cao, or the extravagantly appealing postage stamps produced for Equatorial Guinea during this period.

24 See, among others, Marı´a Paz Dı´az, Elsa Lo´pez, Fernando Garcı´a Gimeno, Marı´a

Jose´ Barry, Cecilia Bartolome´ Pina, Carles Decors and Eduardo Soto-Trillo.

25 Bhttp://www.raimonland.net/.

26 As Ralph Acampora has eloquently written: ‘‘Throughout its past, the zoo has

demonstrated a relational dynamic of mastery. Originally, in its days as a private

garden, the zoo was a powerful symbol of dominion: it projected an imperial image

of man-the-monarch*ruler of nature, lord of the wild. Eventually, the zoo was

converted into a public menagerie and became a ritual of entertainment, projecting

almost trickster imagery of man-the-magician*tamer of brutes, conjurer of

captives. The contemporary zoo has become a scientific park and aesthetic site. Its meaning is redemptive; it stands as an emblem of conservation policy, projecting a

religious image of man-the-messiah*the new Noah: savior of species, the beasts’

benign despot’’ (70).

27 Part of the analysis of Zamora’s poem appears in Sampedro Vizcaya (‘‘Salvando a

Copito de Nieve’’), written and published shortly before Copito’s death.

28 Although Jose´ Siale bears both bubi and combe ethnic heritage.

29 I have maintained the bold as in the original.

30 Perhaps Granados was, however, missing the larger point that Nsue was attempting

to make with her novel, as eloquently stated by Baltasar Fra-Molinero: ‘‘Como

novela, Ekomoes un laborioso esfuerzo por presentar una sociedad tradicional con

historia anterior a la presencia colonial’’ (126).

31 For an earlier commentary of this novel see Sampedro Vizcaya (‘‘Estudio

introductorio’’).

32 See, for instance, Fernando Na´jera, Pedro Fuster Riera, Joan Jover Jane´s and Juan

Capdevielle San Marı´n.

33 The text is capitalized, in the original, in order to ironically evoke a tomb’s

inscription.

34 Jose´ Fernando Siale Djangany’s Autorretrato con un infiel is a striking example of a novel engaging with the colonial history of his native island (Bioko), fictionalized as Po´or Donanfer, as well as addressing the intended and unintended consequences of interventions, while reflecting also on the fact that political formations in postcolonial Africa need to be rethought and remade.

35 Macı´as Nguema assumed power electorally upon the granting of independence to

the country (12 October 1968), ruled Equatorial Guinea for eleven years, and was

then displaced by a coup d’etat led by his nephew Teodoro Obiang Nguema

Mbasogo, who is still in power at the moment of writing, nearly thirty years later. 36 An example of this isHistoria y tragedia de Guinea Ecuatorial.

37 References to this anthologizing impulse in Donato Ndongo are briefly developed in

Sampedro Vizcaya (‘‘African Poetry in Spanish Exile’’).

38 As stated in Jorge A. Salvo’s dissertation.

39 I share entirely Adam Lifshey’s view that categorizingCuando los combes luchabanas a collaborationist text is one means whereby scholars have sought to exorcize its hauntings of empire (‘‘No podemos son˜ar’’ 121).

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