The Birth of Hispano-African Literature in Equatorial Guinea. Spanish and Guinean Trends in Colonial Literature

Abstract

The aim of this article is to reflect on the origins of Guinean literature written in Spanish, also known as Hispano-African, Hispanic Negro-African or Hispano-Guinean literature. This literature was born during the colonial period and it was marked by the uprooting of Africans from their traditional ethnic cultures and by forced assimilation, which significantly influenced the content and form of the first literary works. Some of the work by the first Guinean writers can be included in the so-called “imitative trend” literature, whose authors limited themselves to imitating the patterns of Spanish literature, deemed as the artistic ideal and the only, mandatory point of literary reference. This conviction resulted from the upbringing within the colonial education system and the submission to the ideological colonial indoctrination. Guineans believed in the civilisational and cultural superiority of the white man, described by the creators of the Spanish colonial literature. Although the readers of this literature were mostly those from the metropolis, it is worth analysing it precisely because of the ideology it was submitted to, and which was imposed upon the colonised Africans as a valid model of thinking. In the article, I present the problems of this literature, especially its ideological and political background, starting from nineteenth-century „Orientalism” to the ideology of Francoism. Then, I analyse the first works of the Guinean writers who, despite being subjected to the European assimilation and Christianisation, became the representatives of the first native Guinean intellectual elite. This elite began to develop literary works in the language of the coloniser, contributing to the birth of Hispano-African literature, which with time evolved into the national Guinean literature.