Remnants of carcerality and fascism in contemporary literature from Equatorial Guinea

When it comes to incarceration in the small nation of Equatorial Guinea, Black Beach prison is the most infamous name, being synonymous with political violence and assassinations. The penitentiary, in Malabo on the island of Bioko, is most commonly known for the human rights violations, tortures, and executions that occurred there during the dictatorships of Francisco Macías Nguema (1968–1979) and Teodoro Obiang Nguema (1979 to present). Notably, Macías was executed at Black Beach during the “Golpe de Libertad,” (Coup of Freedom) coup d'état that instituted the brutal regime of his nephew, Obiang. However, Black Beach prison is not a singular, exceptional institution but the epicenter of a network of carceral violence throughout Equatorial Guinea and its history.

Incarceration has been a significant facet in the development of Equatorial Guinea's political and economic history. However, due to Equatorial Guinea's dictatorial and colonial histories, there is a dearth of historical or sociological research on punishment and imprisonment, with research hindered by a vast lacuna of historical documentation. Literature written by Equatorial Guinean authors is crucial to filling this gap by offering an arena of discussion and the preservation of collective memory under the guise of fiction during times of dictatorship and censure. After La crisis del 1898 and the decadence of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and Asia, Spain looked toward Africa. The active settlement of Spanish Guinea began with the prison-island of Fernando Póo where radical Afro-Cubans were deported in the nineteenth century (Sundiata, 1996; De Vito, 2018; Sampedro Vizcaya, 2019). The question of a penal colony arose again after 1926 when the Directorate General of Morocco and the Colonies elaborated a plan to resolve labor shortage problems and reduce costs (Nerín, 2010: 188). While this plan was never enacted, during the first half of the twentieth century, the pervasive and routine incarceration of Guineans to develop a continuous supply of cheap and forced labor became the norm. Then, with the rise of nationalist and anti-colonialist movements beginning in the late 1950s, imprisonment in Santa Isabel became a key form of punishment and deterrence for nationalist sympathizers (Ekong, 2010: 72). During the post-Independence regimes, the prison infrastructure has remained a central institution of social and political control and a site of state-sponsored terror (Artucio, 1979: 40). As Ugarte details, “the Macías government was filled with state-sponsored terror: the death or exile of up to one-third of the entire population, imprisonment of thousands of citizens, pilferage, ignorance, and neglect of the hunger and infirmity that many citizens were forced to endure” (Ugarte, 2010: 25).

While Black Beach prison looms large in the Equatorial Guinean imaginary, its origins and history are largely unknown. But whilst Guinean carceral history is defined by silences, the literary canon is replete with representations of incarceration and carceral violence. While Equatorial Guinean literature as a whole has not been examined from a carceral lens, the following anthologies of Equatorial Guinea literature, including the Antología de la literatura guineana (1984) by Donato Ndongo Bidyogo and Nueva antología de la literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial (2012) by M’bare N’gom and Gloria Nistal, as well as Marvin A. Lewis's monograph An Introduction to the Literature of Equatorial Guinea: Between Colonialism and Dictatorship (2007) provide a comprehensive examination of themes of colonialism, dictatorship, censorship. In popular culture, literature, and media, Black Beach is also a symbol of the disillusionment with the promise of freedom that independence from Spain would bring to Equatorial Guinea. Within few years of the democratic election of Macías in 1968, he had declared himself president for life and unleashed a brutal and repressive campaign against real or perceived opposition to his government. The Macías Regime incarcerated dissenting members of the political class or the military in prisons or workcamps across the country, notably in Black Beach prison in Malabo and Bata Prison in Bata, or they were sent to work the cacao plantations in Mongomo (Anti-Macías, 1978: 54). Prisons became the locus of the most egregious torture, and Black Beach in particular became the synonymous with the Macías regime's violence.

On October 12, 1968 Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Spanish Minister of Information and Tourism, sat across from Equatorial Guinea's first elected president, Francisco Macías Nguema, as he signed over the independence of the newly created nation-state. Independence in Equatorial Guinea was a four-year process, a gradual transition during the autonomous period from 1964 to 1968. As the drafting of the new constitution began, the “paradox of an authoritarian regime proposing a democratic constitution for its colony was another of the difficulties of the process of decolonization” (Campos, 2003: 111). This theme is the central inquiry in this paper. The legacy of Francoist violence in post-colonial Equatorial Guinea has been variedly characterized as colonialism's residual legacy or the perpetuation of Afro-fascism or a self-inflicted colonialism. In this paper, I will analyze two contemporary novels from Equatorial Guinea from the perspective of their engagement with dominant historiographies at the moment of decolonization and transition to independence. Beyond a writing of alternate history from a subaltern perspective—as post-colonial studies have defined the post-independence literary trends in Africa—these works of literature, through their engagement with carcerality, question and reshape commonly held concepts of temporality and historicity. These novels posit incarceration as a violent and ubiquitous source of oppression, but this research is the first to analyze them from this perspective. As seen through the narratives of Equatorial Guinean fiction, it becomes possible to pose new questions about the nature of history and the difficulties in narrating archival absences-presences. These novels help to rethink post-coloniality in Equatorial Guinea not as a rupture with the past but a renegotiation of colonial-era violence, expressed through both symbolic and institutional carceral violence. Moreover, the novels engage with how history can be re/written to reflect a tangled and multidirectional relationship past and the present.

This article is based on the analysis of two key novels. Through fictionalized references, José Fernando Siale Djangany in Autorretrato con un infiel (2007) engages with the role of the colonial prison in the history of decolonization negotiated over eight years between Spain and Equatorial Guinea. As Independence is achieved in the city of “Civilianjaïl,” punishment and torture remain as the strategy to deal with political opposition. The prison becomes the representation of the continuities between colonial and post-colonial regimes. Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, Equatorial Guinea's foremost novelist, examines the role of Black Beach in Los Poderes de la Tempestad (1997) both as space for incarcerating political opposition during the Macías dictatorship and more broadly, as a metaphor for repression that permeates life during a dictatorship. These novels explore the complex mechanisms that inextricably linked the relationship between incarceration and colonialism in a non-linear temporality. I propose that this canon, rather than simply constituting a post-colonial corpus of literature, are colonial carceral narratives. Graeme Harper's concept of the colonial carceral is defined “as an instrument of discipline and punishment,” based in part “on empirical fact and in part on myth, on explicitness and mystery, on reality and unreality, on knowledge and ignorance, on past and present,” (Harper, 2001: 10). The colonial carceral is particularly valuable for it considers the part (space of the individual cell), as well as the whole (carceral systems and their societal reverberations at large), all the while taking into account the disciplinary regimes of colonialism, where we find “one culture imposed upon by another, one made subservient to another, one imprisoned by another,” (Harper, 2001: 14). The novels analyzed in this paper attempt to rescue forgotten histories of incarceration, draw connections between the colonial and post-colonial carceral histories, and represent the interplay between the structural and individual violence of the carceral state. Most importantly, these colonial carceral narratives carve out the space of fiction as African gnosis to excavate silent discourse operating below the surface of official histories.

Afro-Fascist violence in Los poderes de la tempestad by Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo

Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo is a historian, novelist, and essayist He was born in 1950 in Niefang, (then Spanish Guinea) Equatorial Guinea. He has been living in exile in Spain since 1994 because of his critical stance to the government of Teodoro Obiang. In addition to journalistic work and essays, he is best known for his novels: Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra (Shadows of Your Black Memory), El metro and Los poderes de la tempestad (The Power of the Storm). Notably, he published the first anthology of Equatorial Guinean literature in 1984. In 1998, he co-authored España en Guinea: construcción del desencuentro, 1778–1968, a comprehensive history of Spanish colonialism in Equatorial Guinea. His works have been crucial in introducing Spanish-speaking and Western audiences to Equatorial Guinean history and literature.

Los poderes de la tempestad (1997), his second novel is about a young man from Equatorial Guinea who leaves the seminary to study law in Spain. With the onset of independence in Equatorial Guinea, the protagonist-narrator returns to his home country with a newly minted law degree, a Spanish wife, Ángeles, and their five-year-old daughter, Rut. The novel, while autobiographical in tone, according to Michael Ugarte “manifests the familiar tensions between politics and an invented reality, politics and its fictional representation, ambivalences felt by many writers not only of his age,” (Ugarte, 2006: 274) Carcerality becomes an inescapable and central focus in Ndongo-Bidyogo's novel as the protagonist-narrator, upon his return, finds his homeland hostile to the ideas he had acquired during his studies abroad.

Upon landing in Malabo, he and his family are met with a zealous nationalist and anti-imperialist spirit of the militia at the airport. “His wife and mixed-race daughter comprise a physical manifestation of his ties to the former colonial master” according to Joanna Boampong. “The agents and enforcers of the dictatorship's nationalist agenda […] persecute and attack him. In an oblique way he becomes a victim of racial violence, perpetuated not by people of a different race but his own,” (Boampong, 2015: 92). While undergoing an inspection at the airport, the protagonist's wife, Ángeles, is sexually assaulted by the militiawoman, Ada, during her interrogation at the airport. Although Ada appears in the novel only a few times, she is perpetrator of violence against the protagonist and his family. This interaction between the protagonist and officials of the newly independent state reveals complex negotiations between the colonial dichotomies of colonizer/colonized and Black/White. In 1968, the repressive colonial and authoritarian Francoist regime in Spain orchestrated the “democratic” election of Francisco Macías Nguema, a former colonial bureaucrat from Río Muní. The paradox of the Francoist dictatorship organizing the first democratic election of the newly autonomous Equatorial Guinea, would reveal itself to be a premonition of the fragility of the imposed democracy and the fascists foundation upon which it was constructed (Sundiata, 2020: 16). Democracy quickly descended into a brutal dictartorship as Macías Nguema declared himself president for life. He organized underemployed youth into a militia, Juventud en Marcha con Macías, and established the Partido Unico Nacional de Trabajadores (The Sole National Workers’ Party). Macías Nguema's ideological mission was to rid Guinea of real or perceived enemies. “Almost as if he were imitating the early patterns of the Franco regime,” writes Michael Ugarte, “by 1972 Macías had taken complete control of the government, outlawed all political parties except one (PUNT - Partido Unico Nacional de Trabajadores) and assumed the title of President for Life, imitating yet in many ways going beyond the Generalísimo in his obsession with power” (Ugarte, 2010: 25). Macías's anti-imperialist ideology was imposed and policed with Francoist disciplinary tactics. While the epicenter of violence and persecution was Black Beach prison, with its walls witness to the most brutal tortures and executions (Mengue, 2004: 189), wide segments of society were mobilized as surveillance mechanisms of the state.

In the novel – as in history - while Black Beach is the center of atrocities, violence and brutality permeated every space of public and private life. As soon as the protagonist and his family arrive, they are witnesses to and victims of violence. While walking on the streets of Malabo, they witness a man being struck by Macías Nguema's Mercedes Benz and flattened on the street as the motorcade on the way to the Presidential Palace repeatedly runs over his body. This scene encompasses the multiple disillusionments with the promise of independence from the colonial past While rejecting Spanish colonial legacy and disavowing the West, the presidential motorcade, symbolizing a new regime, employs tools of its imperial past to exert its arbitrary and pervasive violence without consequence.

Not long after, in Bata on their way to the protagonist's hometown, the family witnesses the public execution of ninety prisoners.

El teniente que había dirigido la ejecución erguido impávido tras el pelotón, con ademán estudiadamente aguerrido,[…]disparó sobre cada una de las cabezas de los ajusticiados, otras diez detonaciones, una a una, y los milicianos, con diligencia inusitada, recogían los cadáveres y los iban arrojando enérgicamente dentro de la caja del camión, y se formó una nueva hilera de reos, otros diez y otros diez y otros diez y otros diez y otros diez y otros diez y otros diez y otros diez, porque noventa hombres fueron fusilados en aquella mañana de sol esplendoroso sin que sus familiares pudieran emitir siquiera un grito de angustia o de espanto (Ndongo Bidyogo, 1997: 138)

The lieutenant who had led the execution, standing undaunted behind the squad, with a studiedly brave gesture, […] fired another ten detonations on each of the heads of the executed, one by one, and the militiamen, with unusual diligence, collected the corpses and they were energetically throwing them into the box of the truck, and a new line of prisoners was formed, another ten and another ten and another ten and another ten and another ten and another ten and another ten and another ten, because ninety men were shot on that bright sunny morning without their families being able to even utter a cry of anguish or fright.

The violence of this scene is multiple. In addition to “private” tortures away from the public's eye—which functioned as “open-secrets” exerting fear and self-discipline over society at large; the public executions, the traumas of those bearing witness, and the protagonist's incapacity to emote and speak represent the culmination of the dictatorship's brutality. The image of disposing of dozens of corpses in a vehicle conjures up historical atrocities like victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Holocaust And according to Alexander G. Weheliye, the historical atrocities like Nazi death camps are not deviations but rather “sine qua non of modern politics as sovereignty, one that resonates in various current biopolitical institutions […] in which the central aim of politics is the manufacture of bare life” (34). Weheliye's proposition is to “disentangle” the severest iteration of the bare life as an historical aberration of modernity, to make its “intimate history with different forms of colonialism and genocide” visible (Weheliye, 2014: 35). The gathering of ninety people at gunpoint, their public execution, and the transport of their bodies in a truck, makes visible the brutal violence of fascist and carceral regimes. As Achille Mbembe argues in “Necropolitics” that "the death camps [are] the central metaphor for sovereign and destructive violence,"(Mbembe, 2003: 12). and in Ndongo-Bidyogo's novel the metaphor extends into society at large, turning the new nation into a pervasive carceral state.

Ndongo-Bidyogo's narrative from a lens of incarceration, allows us to reconsider the historical phenomena of fascism and colonialism. Conventionally, fascism has been represented as a European phenomenon, although Max Liniger-Goumaz argues that fascism in Europe had no distinguishable European feature, and “in post-colonial Africa, the many different types of crises which have occurred, giving rise to authoritarian or ‘emergency’ regimes, are also not spontaneously African’’ (Liniger-Goumaz, 1983: xii). The thirty years under Francoist fascism set the stage for the Nguemist dictatorship's afro-fascistic tendencies, including: suppression of all ideological confrontation and contestation; suppression of political and cultural pluralism; institutional incarnation of the dictator as a superior of the people; and the fetishization of the caudillo [military/political leader], (Liniger-Goumaz, 1989: 14). At the nexus of fascism and colonialism, as this scene in the novel demonstrates, is a pervasive violence that is carceral and disciplinary in nature.

Written within this historical context, the novel's idealistic protagonist-narrator returns to take part in the nation-building process but is quickly disillusioned by the suspicion and repression of the post-independence regime. The Black Equatoguinean protagonist-narrator upon returning to his homeland is ostracized by the newly independent post-colonial state determined to mercilessly eradicate all historical vestiges of Spanish imperialism. Traces however remained in the state's own conceptions of hegemony. Colonialism in Spanish Africa had been justified as a civilizing mission that would incorporate the African territories and its people into the Spanish nation and place them on a teleological path to redemption. ¹ Now Fascist discourses purportedly elevated individuals to be part of a transcendent and mythical nation, with the nation to be put on a path to redemption. In the novel, the protagonist-narrator's post-colonial illusions of freedom and progress end in disillusion with the new nation-state's promise to eliminate its colonial past through colonial era institutions of state violence. As Weheliye writes, colonial power dynamics “translate the lacerations left on the captive body by apparatuses of political violence to a domain rooted in the visual truth-value accorded to quasi-biological distinctions between different human groupings […] kin, family, gender, belonging, language, personhood, property, and official records” (Weheliye, 2014: 40). These hierarchies reduce the protagonist to sub-human, to an animal in the forest Ultimately, wariness of his ties to Spain lands the protagonist in prison, where he is subjected to torture.

Pero no podía hacer nada salvo pensar en mi propia inutilidad, en mi terrible desprecio por mí mismo, me abandonó toda sensación de autoestima y me vi peor que un animal en el bosque, reducido a la nada, y sólo pude cubrir mi sexo con las manos entumecidas a pesar del intenso dolor que repercutía en todo mi cuerpo al más leve movimiento. (Ndongo Bidyogo, 1997: 203–204)

[But I could not do anything except thinking about my own uselessness, in my terrible contempt for myself, all sensation of self-esteem left me and I saw myself worse than an animal in the forest, reduced to nothing, and I could only cover my genitals with my numb hands despite the intense pain in my body at the slightest movement]

After this arrest, the protagonist-narrator is tortured, and regains consciousness to find himself in a Black Beach prison cell, contemplating what is left of his humanity in the aftermath of brutality. Ada reappears in the novel when the protagonist regains consciousness in Black Beach prison. She interrupts his tortures and takes him into her custody. But Ada does not rescue him from his torturers. She takes him for herself, only to rape him moments later. The protagonist is petrified with fear, but his body reacts:

“No pude evitar las arcadas, y los vómitos se proyectaron tempestuosos y cálidos contra su pubis enmarañado[…]

-Ya no podrás seguir follando con blancas, ni traicionando a tu propio pueblo. Este es tu fin, porque yo misma te voy a romper la crisma.” (Ndongo Bidyogo, 1997: 207)

[I couldn't help gagging, and vomit projected stormy and warm against her tangled pubis […]

-You will no longer be able to continue fucking with white women or betraying your own people. This is your end because I myself will break your neck.]

The assault, which according to Ada is at the service of the dictatorship and in the name of nationalism and anti-imperialism, leaves him petrified to speak; he reacts with his body by vomiting on Ada. Ugarte argues that the scene exposes “the militia woman's black mask […] as an ideological justification for the whiteness of her behavior” (Ugarte, 2010: 74). In other words, Ada embodies what David Scott calls anti-colonial Tragedy positing liberation in negative referential terms to colonialism, reproducing the violent power of the regime which she purportedly aims to eradicate (Scott, 2004 :12). In the scene, Ada is the only character that speaks. In the novel, she is the only female character with a presence in public space. However, her role is exclusively reserved to furthering the dictatorship's efforts to eradicate imperialist vestiges of Equatorial Guinean society. In fascist ideology, great emphasis was placed on the role of women as nurturers and moral educators of children, and therefore the future of the nation. As Boampong argues, Ada breaks with convention by occupying a public role in the military and the prison systems (Boampong, 2015: 64); however, she mainly speaks and intervenes in scenes of national construction and consolidation, which she exerts through pervasive sexual and carceral violence.

The protagonist's bodily response forcefully rejects the violation and the ideological implications of the regime's power, and the “physicality has the effect of a reflex unmasking the whiteness” (Ugarte, 2010: 74). The novel ends with the family fleeing in a small rowboat, a risky escape as they were at the mercy of their smugglers who “el único lenguaje que entiende esa gente es la violencia” [the only language that these people understand is violence] (251). As they gain distance from the shores of the island, the narrator remarks “al menos podíais contarlo” [at least you could tell the story] (Ndongo-Bidyogo, 1997: 252). In this paradox of telling a story where only violence is legible, his reaction of disgust is a powerful interruption of the logic of language and narration. “[D]isgust [is a way of] admitting an alterity that otherwise would fall prey to repression” (Menninghaus, 1999: 13). Vomiting represents a bodily rejection of the linearity and coloniality of the post-colonial narrative.

As Julia Hornberger, Frédéric Le Marcis, and Marie Morelle remind us: “Prisons are often centred on the idea of ‘putting people away’.” (Morelle et al., 2021: xvi) But in Equatorial Guinea, as seen through the porous carceral depictions of Ndongo-Bidyogo's novel, the firm boundary is not around the prison. Ndongo-Bidyogo's contribution is significant because it attempts to break open the fortress of a violent and secretive dictatorship and its colonial predecessor that was censored history “materia reservada.” His historical fiction attempts to revive these histories to demonstrate the centrality of carceral violence that persists since Francoist colonialism.

Writing history through carcerality in Autorretrato con un infiel by José Fernando Siale Djangany

José Fernando Siale Djangany is a jurist, writer, and literary criticic who lives and writes from his hometown, Malabo. He was born in 1961 in, then, Santa Isabel, Spanish Guinea. Autorretrato con un infiel (2007) is one of Siale Djangany's best known works but has received scant critical attention. It tells the history of the city of ‘Civilianjaïl’. Civilianjaïl is a play on the English and Pichi words ‘civilian’ and ‘jail’. In his fictitious cartography, Siale Djangany superimposes the prison upon the city, as way to argue for the carcerality of the entire city, and by extension the colony.

As the narrator explains, the account is based on the notes written in illegible handwriting of the copyist Juvenal de Golas, who unearthed an archive of the city. With urgency, he decided to piece together the city's history “before history erases the details,” relying on the assistance of the “infallible memory and overflowing imagination” of the nuns of Oblatas de la Virgen (Siale Djangany, 2007: 20). The framing of the narrative posits that official colonial history is a composite of memory, imagination, and official colonial and missionary sources. To show that history is neither self-evident nor a neutral concept, especially within the context of post-colonial Africa, where a teleological historical discourse was a central justification for imperialism, Siale Djangany transposes Spanish imperialism in Guinea onto a fictitious cartography, therefore destabilizing history revealing its ideological nature.

In addition to the reconstructions of archival and colonial institutional histories, the narrator weaves histories of the private lives the inhabitants of Póor Donanfer, giving insights into the violence and repression suffered by the general population under colonialism. These glimpses of microhistories reveal how incarceration is an everyday reality for the residents of Civilianjaïl, as seen in the narrator's retelling of Segismundo Apëllë Lökká's story. Segismundo had been in and out of the jail cell since he was a young man, until colonial officials instituted a program whereby “the protestants, objectors, unemployed, and miscreants” were sent to work on a plantation on the island of Póor Donanfer. Segismundo was there subjected to forced labor and corporal punishment sanctioned by the law. As Christian de Vito notes, due to Spanish Guinea's “penal utilitarianism” punishment within the prison system was historically “strongly connected with extramural public works” and this historical reality informs Siale Djangany's writing (De Vito, 2018: 175). Segismundo's narrative exemplifies the all-encompassing nature of incarceration in Civilianjaïl. Siale Djangany's fictional narrative juxtaposes the carceral absences of official historiographies with the ubiquitous presence of carcerality in the lives of the citizens of Civilianjaïl. The juxtaposition of presence-absence mirrors the reality of historiography of Spanish Guinea during the colonial period as it relates to incarceration and the abuses suffered by Guineans.

In Civilianjaïl, Siale Djangany creates an inextricable relationship between state and prison to demonstrate the state and the carceral system as mutually constitutive entities. The “objectors and unemployed,” like Segismundo, who were deemed unproductive or subversive were subject to discipline and punishment as a way to be reformed by the state. Thus, the state depended upon the carceral regime as a force of social and economic control within the prison and in society at large. At the same time, “delinquents” like Segismundo were crucial in building the infrastructure; “convicts and deportees were viewed as useful agents of colonization, primarily as a temporary workforce for building infrastructures and to serve in the military, and at times as settlers” (De Vito, 2018: 181). In turn, this porosity of the prison walls “suggest[s] that the history of punishment was not so much characterized by a developing immobilization of prisoners within the walls of jails but by their ongoing geographical mobilization as forced labour, on a global scale” and by extension settling and rendering the colony profitable (Anderson, 2018: 9).

In the city of Civilianjaïl, the narrative describes the life of the protagonist Baltasar Bulëtyé, a young man educated by missionaries. Before Baltasar is killed, he entrusts his cousin Hermenegildo with the safe keeping of a talisman. After burying Baltasar's body, Hermenegildo is taken to prison. When Nicomedes Espíritu Sesinando tours the prison establishment in order to get a hold of the talisman, he finds Hermenegildo's cell empty except for some bones and an inscription on the wall. On the walls of the prison in the city of Civilianjaïl, it reads: “Mis sufrimientos no cesarán hasta el día de tus penas. Porque sólo tu dolencia será la medida de aquello que teatralmente apelas alianza,” (My suffering will not cease until the day of your punishment. Because only your ailment will be the measure of which you theatrically call alliance) (Siale Djangany, 2007: 204). To make sense of the verses, Nicomedes Espíritu Sesinando calls upon experts from Cabo Norte (analogous to Spain) to perform radiocarbon dating. The results show that the inscription came from the eighteenth century, the same year as the death Böyòlla Bulëtyé's grandfather, who was imprisoned there. After committing the inscription to memory, Nicomedes Espíritu Sesinando orders that the inscription be removed. The space of the prison is literally and figuratively inscribed with a carceral palimpsest, as the reader discovers that Böyòlla Bulëtyé's grandfather arrived at Póor Donanfer (anagram of Fernando Póo) after having been rescued “by grace or misfortune” from “Black Cargoes,” drawing a web of histories interconnected in time and place of African confinement and forced labor, possibly referring to the Atlantic Slave Trade, the so-called “deportations” of Afro-Cuban radicals to Fernando Póo, or the agricultural workers coming from Nigeria under peonage contracts in the mid-twentieth century (Siale Djangany, 2007: 202; Martino, 2017).

In the mid to late nineteenth century, Afro-Cubans who opposed Spanish imperialism were “deported” the island of Fernando Póo, condemned to forced labor or “‘reconcentrated’ in the world's first concentration camps” (Anderson, 2018: 14). Those who were banished served their punishment while being integral in the settlement and labor force of the colony. Their opposition to Spain in Cuba was punished with exile and the labor that served to strengthen the Spanish Empire in Africa. Moreover, convicts were not only responsible for public works labor, but “They constructed their own huts, barracks and jails” (Anderson, 2018: 10). The inscription on the walls of the twentieth century prison in Siale Djangany's novel bears the symbolic vestiges of the island's carceral origin. Through this historical palimpset, Siale Djangany critiques how colonial epistemologies and official histories create a linear and euro-centric narrative of the past, which fragments narratives that are connected in time and space. Siale Djangany constructs a historical narrative structure that offers an alternative way to think about the past in relation to the present, a past and present momentarily co-existing.

Hermenegildo was special for “tenía cuatro ojos, dos de ellos inmateriales con los que le era posible distinguir aspectos del mundo inmaterial, del mundo de lo oculto y también percibir a aquellos que ya no estaban entre los vivos” (having four eyes, two immaterial with which he was able to distinguish aspects of the immaterial world, the hidden world and also perceive those who were no longer among the living) (Siale Djangany, 2007: 37). Hermenegildo's four eyes see the past within the present, detecting the dead and silenced histories. For Siale Djangany, the carceral palimpsest represents a historical narration that simultaneously considers the violence and traumas of the past and the present. The four eyes are representative of Mudimbe's notion of gnosis, or ways of knowing that lie beyond colonial epistemologies (1988). The novel proposes a way to represent history in the form of a narrative that takes into account the material and immaterial world. In other words, Siale Djangany offers a reflection on visible and invisible discourses in operation at the heart of historical knowledge production. What is more, these narratives offer a new way of thinking, analyzing, and categorizing present day Africa as a historical palimpsest of carceral regimes, interrupting “unquestioning habitation without becoming merely one more […] fortress” (Draper, 2012: 100). The carceral is crucial to uncovering this historical palimpsest because imperialist settlement in Equatorial Guinea began with convict labor, and changes in and consolidation of political power throughout the colonial and post-colonial history of Equatorial Guinea has been catalyzed through carceral power.

The novel ends as the people rise up against their brutal dictator. After his overthrow, the mutilated cadaver of dictator Nicomedes Espíritu Sesinando is paraded around the city of Civilianjaïl. Instead of relief and redemption however, “a pesar de tantos años esperando ese día,” (despite many years awaiting that day) the narrator ends his tale experiencing a premonition that “todavía subyacía una punzada de tristeza e insatisfacción: “¡Coño! Mira que no se nos acaba el podrido odio ese de toda la vida’” (Still there was an underlying stabbing pain of sadness and dissatisfaction: Damn it! When will this lifelong, rotten hate end) (Siale Djangany, 2007: 224). Despite the euphoria of citizens celebrating the deposing of the despot, the narrator (like Ndongo-Bidyogo's protagonist-narrator) ends with a cynical tone. He reflects on whether the momentous shift will eradicate a long history of atrocities fueled by hate. The narrative is inconclusive and finishes with an open-ended question on the nature of historical ruptures. Decolonization does not constitute a renaissance. It is a negotiation and transition of power from the character of Franck Nkóh (referencing Francisco Franco) to the incumbent leader of post-colonial Póor Donanfer, Nicomedes Espíritu Sesinando (alluding to Francisco Macías). Franck Nkóh explains that “El deseo de Cabo Norte es que Nicomedes tome el poder en Civilianjaïl. [..] Le he pedido a Nicomedes que […] limpien las ciudades de toda la chusma de facinerosos” (Siale Djangany, 2007:109). The decolonization and the consolidation of power in Póor Donanfer signified a change in leadership, but also the creation of a regime that employed the very carceral and disciplinary strategies of the colonial past it aimed to eradicate. In the end, it perpetuated the repressive carceral discipline of the colonial period.

Conclusions

More so than any extant scholarly work on Equatorial Guinea, the fictional texts Los poderes de la tempestad by Ndongo-Bidyogo and Autorretrato con un infiel by Siale Djangany attempt to understand how decolonization and the aftermath of Spanish colonialism did not constitute a rupture with the past, but rather a renegotiation of colonial paradigms in the new sovereign nation-states. Ndongo Bidyogo's novels ends with a short epilog citing a Bamikelé saying “La espina saldrá por donde entró” [The thorn will come out where it entered] (Ndongo-Bidyogo, 1997: 254). As flashbacks in history revealed in Autorretrato con un infiel, “transport and internment of convict labour to and between colonies constituted one of the darker hallmarks of empire,” which with the onset of the post-colonial period “became a tool for the criminalisation and the forced exile of regimes’ perceived political opponents” as demonstrated in both novels (Havik et al., 2019). These works portray the post-colonial era as replete with continuities of colonial-era violence, expressed through both symbolic and institutional carceral violence. Moreover, the novels are concerned with how history can be re/written to reflect an interconnected relationship between the past and the present. These colonial carceral narratives use the space of fiction as African gnosis to excavate silent discourse operating beneath official histories. The prison is central to demonstrating the duplicity of colonial discourse by showing the discipline as underworld within colonial discourse.

Violence and nation-building are inextricable in Equatorial Guinea, given that unifying a group of territories and peoples under the idea of a post-colonial state relies on and enacts symbolic as well as institutional violence. The anti-colonial struggle formulated in terms of a narrative of overcoming the past and therefore (borrowing David Scott's terms) “cast in terms of what colonial power denied or negated” ultimately reproduces conceptualizations of history as teleological, on path to redemption (Scott, 2004: 209). Siale Djangany elegantly claimed in En el lapso de una ternura (2011), that “desde el 12 de octubre de 1968 no es nada recomendable establecer una marca e indelible línea divisoria entre realidad y ficción” (since October 12, 1968 it is not advisable to establish a mark and indelible dividing line between reality and fiction) (Siale Djangany, 2007: 176). As these novels show us, carceral violence cannot be seen as exceptional to the prison or the penitentiary, but rather it must be seen as part of a carceral regime reigning over society as a whole. And the fictional, interconnected temporalities and spatialities of incarceration elaborated in the novels, allow us to consider crucial intersections of Equatorial Guinea's history of carcerality, coloniality, and dictatorships.