The Land That Gave Us Our Cocoa

As a child, I imagined Fernando Póo to be a faraway, exotic land with roads paved with chocolate, and trees laden with "pebbles." Surely, if that was the place from which Tetteh Quarshie had brought cocoa to Ghana, as I had learned in school, then its rivers must be made of chocolate milk, I fantasized.

Like everybody else I had to give up fantasies for age and wisdom. I soon learned that Fernando Póo was not that far away from Ghana after all. It was the colonial name of the Island of Bioko in Equatorial Guinea, which was a Spanish colony until 1968. Equatorial Guinea may not be a land of chocolate and "pebbles," far from that; it has, however, produced some very fine writers with whom I have become acquainted in the last few years.

As a student of Spanish and French at the University of Ghana many years ago, Equatorial Guinean writers did not feature in any of the literature to which I was exposed. There are demographic and linguistic reasons that explain in part why Equatorial Guinea is isolated from the literary and general cultural context of Africa.

Equatorial Guinea is a country of only half a million inhabitants. Furthermore, it is the only Spanish-speaking country, amidst Francophone and Anglophone neighbours, in sub-Saharan Africa. Although in 1998 French was declared the second official language in the country, Equatorial Guinean writers mainly publish in Spanish.

There are also political and related socio-economic reasons for Equatorial Guinea's cultural isolation: Since its independence, Equatorial Guinea has had the misfortune of suffering two successive repressive regimes which have undermined the creation of a vibrant cultural and intellectual climate in that country. It is quite revealing that the first post-independence Equatorial Guinean novel, Ekomo by María Nsue Angüe, was published abroad almost twenty good years after independence.

Today, nearly forty years since its independence, many of Equatorial Guinea's writers continue to write and publish their works far away in Spain. One of the very few exceptions who lives and writes in his birth country is Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel whose recent collection of essays, Vísceras (Viscera 2006), offers an excellent overview of Equatorial Guinean society.

His compatriots, fleeing their country's economic hardships and its repressive regime, have chosen to make their home abroad and it is from them that we get most of contemporary Equatorial Guinean literature. One of the best-known among them is Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo whose first novel, Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra (Shadows of Your Dark Memory 1987), is a beautiful coming-of-age story set in the colonial era.

He has just published his third novel, El metro (The subway, 2007), which deals with the contemporary theme of emigration from Africa. Poet, journalist and musician Francisco Zamora, also writing from Spain, published a scathing essay, Como ser negro y no morir en Aravaca (How to be black and not die in Aravaca 1994), on the racism suffered by African immigrants in Europe.

I have just read the second collection of poetry by professor and writer Justo Bolekia Boleká, Ombligos y raíces (Navels and roots 2006). I was particularly fascinated by the poems that are inspired by African oral tradition and in which Bolekia Boleká combines Spanish with Bubi, his mother tongue. These are only a few of the writers that I can mention given the limited space of this column.

For us Anglophone readers we have to count on translations to enjoy these wonderful works of literature by people who were born in the land from which Tetteh Quarshie brought us cocoa more than a century ago. Of the works I have mentioned so far, only Ndongo-Bidyogo's first novel has been translated into English. There is a lot of work ahead for these works to become available to a wider reading public and to make them a part of our African cultural experience. This is a challenge to our own publishing industry and to those of us who are bilingual in Spanish and English.

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