Spain was also in black Africa

The historical break with Spain that Equatorial Guinea wanted to establish since its independence in 1968 and the policy of silence of successive governments of the former metropolis in relation to that territory have erased from the collective report of the Spaniards the only colonial episode that we starred in sub-Saharan Africa. We Spaniards certainly live with our backs to our history; we are not a people with the objectivity of historians, but with the passion of 'politicons', that is why all discussion about the past revolves around something recent, close and ideological as the Civil War. However, in recent years an effort has been made to become aware of what the centuries of presence in Spanish America meant, and now the book by journalist Antonio Caño exhumes the Spanish action, more briefly, in Equatorial Africa.

Without the need to combat any previous black legend, against which the new narratives that vindicate the action and bequest of the Spanish American empire have been born (which is why they sometimes have a nationalistic tone), Caño's book makes an approach resorting to all shades: whites, blacks and, of course, grays. Thus, the Spanish colonization of Fernando Poo and Rio Muni, provinces that became independent as Equatorial Guinea, was by no means exemplary, but it was less dramatic than the one carried out in neighboring nations; Franco's authorities did not know how to bring about a successful decolonization, although the governments of democracy did not manage the links with the former colony correctly either; Macías was 'our' monster -the atrocities he committed are on a par with Amin or Bokassa-, but the responsibility does not fall on Spain but on the character himself (in any case, only the connivance of the lawyer and politician Antonio García-Trevijano, advisor the Guinean dictator and the only Spaniard who looks particularly bad in this story is pointed out).

In 1979 Caño covered the trial and execution of Francisco Macias, the first president of Equatorial Guinea, who after a decade in office was overthrown by his nephew Teodoro Obiang, still in office today. Over the years Caño has wanted to investigate the figure of Macías, not especially because of the impression he had at the time, but because of the desire to document a historical period so closely linked to Spain but completely forgotten by Spaniards, as if we had never had anything to do as a nation with black Africa or the European colonialism of the 19th century and part of the 20th century.

The Spanish Monster' does not deal properly with the colonization process of Guinea, but it starts from this as a context to focus on the figure of Macias: his youthful training as a boy for everything of the white farmers, his progress in the local bureaucracy due to his good command of the Spanish language , his entrance into politics with great admiration for Franco and the casual opportunity he knew how to take advantage of when the time came to draft a Constitution, proclaim independence and hold the only free elections the country has ever had. Against a background of internal struggles of Franco's regime, between Carrero Blanco and Castiella, about the policy with which the independence of Guinea had to be faced, Macias' profile grows in complexity to soon revolt against Spain, the Spanish heritage -including the Catholic Church- and his own people.

In writing the book, perhaps Caño was more intellectually motivated by the fact of delving into the mystery of human evil, bringing it closer to our Spanish experience: talking about the banality of Hitler's evil or the Central African Bokassa is far away, but we can feel more challenged by the case of a monster with the same characteristics but who spoke Spanish and who had Spain as his political universe. But in addition to that, the book fills a gap in our history and in Spanish foreign action; it is not that it casts blame on the governments of the time for the lack of geopolitical vision and their failure to take advantage of the fact of having a country in Africa for which Madrid was the reference letter -just like Paris or London for West or East Africa-, but it shows that something bad has been done all this time when the Spanish language has been lost in that country.

The work reads with the ease of a story. It is a wise choice to use the first person, using in part the content of the diary written in his day by Ramón García Domínguez, who managed to live a couple of years in the country of Macías teaching his son and other Guinean children. This allows Caño to go farther than the few facts documented in the annals, conveniently qualifying each time what are direct testimonies, well-founded suppositions or especially plausible conjectures.