SPANISH VOICES AND AFRICAN MEMORIESTop

The goal of this article is to counterbalance contemporary Spanish voices with Moroccan and Equatorial Guinean memories in order to renew the foundations of Hispano-African colonial history. As Spain is one of the few western European countries that has not promoted public reflection about its colonial past in Africa, the task is imperative (Rizo, 2012, p. 32; Santamaría Colmenero, 2018, p. 446; Fernández Parrilla and Cañete, 2019, p. 113). This goal, formulated from a Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies perspective, is grounded on the one hand in Santos and Meneses’s (2014) epistemologies of the South,[1] which Quijano (2014) argues reveal the continuity of colonialism in the form of the “coloniality of power and knowledge” – as Mignolo (2004, p. 668) points out, while colonialism may be understood to be a relic, coloniality is very much alive. In this article I will focus on historical knowledge and its impact on Spanish colonial memories in order to encourage a shared social history: following the profound theoretical and methodological work in Subaltern Studies of Thompson (1988) and Spivak (1988), I will highlight the need to move towards a history “about the everyday life and experiences of common people” (Lee, 2005, p. 3). By recovering epistemologies of the South from Moroccans and Equatorial Guineans we can contrast their versions of daily life with those of the Spanish and thereby enrich the accounts of Spain’s colonial past; by questioning the most widespread Spanish rhetoric, a path opens up towards building and consolidating more plural shared stories. The final goal is to put versions of the Spanish colonial past in Africa into circulation that give all voices equal weight and lay the foundations for a more consensual history. According to Santos and Meneses (2014, p. 16) the epistemologies of the South should enhance horizontality, as they are “an invitation to a broad recognition of the world’s knowledge experiences, which include, after their reconfiguration, the knowledge experiences of the Global North”.

The starting point for this article is the complementarity between history and memory. These are understood as lived oral experiences by the ethnographic tradition that eventually recognised the importance of historical analysis of social processes (Evans Pritchard 1961, Sahlins 1993), gathering oral records (Vansina 1961), questioning colonial memories (Stoler and Strassler 2000), using colonial archives (Stoler 2002), and the theft of Western historical writing (Goody 2007), to mention a few of the thematic spaces that have strengthened the link between memory and history in anthropology. In this article, colonial memories are understood as oral and written testimonies and personal stories from a given time and a specific context that allow, as Stoler and Strassler (2000, p. 4) have pointed out, “an explicit engagement with the nature of colonial memories not only with what is remembered and why, but with how the specifically ‘colonial’ is situated in popular memory at all”, because what is relevant is that the “Marking off of a colonial ‘then’ from a postcolonial ‘now’ flattens out a set of intervening and cross-cutting points of reference” (Stoler and Strassler 2000, p. 9). Elsewhere, I have noted the necessity of “the circulation of new narratives of otherness that balance the past from a more egalitarian perspective which restores memories, including peripheral versions, changing centralities, and favouring intercultural encounters that subvert the stereotypes” (Aixelà-Cabré, 2018, p. 129).

An excellent example of the fruitful combination of memory and history in the scientific production on Morocco was offered by the ethnographer Boum. In Memories of Absence (2013) he studied the way four generations of Moroccan Jews remembered the Jewish community, research that straddles anthropology and history. Before that, Schroeter (1988, 2002) had done robust work on Jews in Morocco, after long warning researchers to be conscious of the uses of memory (Schroeter, 2018)[2]. In the case of Equatorial Guinea, the writer Donato Ndongo (1977) reconstructed the country’s colonisation by blending the versions and experiences of Equatorial Guineans into an extraordinary feat of colonial memory and history. Both examples challenge the supposedly difficult fit between memory and history in my case studies. It is a debate that authors such as Huyssen (2007, p. 8) assumed had already been won when they argued that memory should not be trivialised by historians, as the intensity of the discourses of memory are “characteristic of contemporary culture in the most diverse places in the world” (Huyssen, 2007, p. 4)[3].

This article therefore seeks to reconstruct colonial history out of the memories and personal experiences of Spaniards, Moroccans and Equatorial Guineans, with the awareness that memories have many biases and are clearly marked by a historically constructed otherness, as noted by Mudimbe (1988, p. xi), Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel (2007, p. 31), and Mignolo (2018, p. 106).

A need therefore exists to gather voices to contrast Spanish versions of everyday life with Moroccan and Equatorial Guinean memories and experiences. Spain’s missing colonial history and the concerning overlaps between the colonial rhetoric of otherness and Spanish aims in Africa and the memories and practices of Spaniards during the colonial era suggest a linkage that reinforces certain coloniality effects towards both communities in Spain[4].

This review of the colonial past will be carried out through the selection of representative testimonies recalling what daily life was like in the colonies. In this way we can place into circulation the narratives that structured the relations between Spaniards and Moroccans and Equatorial Guineans, as well as testing whether Spanish colonial rhetoric persists among former settlers in 21^st century Spain. The result may help overcome Spain’s invisibility in Africa and the stigma created by Spanish preconceptions about the Hispano-African colonial past; it may help banish the imperial nostalgia (Lorcin, 2014, pp. 146-149) that could obstruct the consolidation of a more balanced and shared social colonial history.

Previous studies comparing Spanish colonial policies in the Spanish Protectorate and Spanish Guinea[5] have not contrasted the justifications employed by Spanish civilians during the occupations (Martínez Carreras, 1993; Salafranca, 2001; Martín Corrales, 2002, 2008; Sánchez Gómez, 2006; Martín Márquez, 2011; Álvarez Chillida and Martín Corrales, 2013; Aixelà-Cabré, 2017). Commendable work has been done in Literary Studies, analysing Equatorial Guinean and Moroccan voices through literature (Mbare Ngom, 1996; Ndongo, 2000, 2010; Fernández Parrila, 2006; Otabela and Onomo-Abena, 2009; Abrighach, 2015; Borst and Gallo González, 2019), but Spanish civilian memories have not been revised. Moreover, there has been no systematic research on Spanish civilian memories in Equatorial Guinea and Morocco, aside from a few interesting pieces of work such as those by Nerín (1999, 2019), Rodríguez Mediano (1999), Iliescu (2017) and Aixelà-Cabré (2019b). Their profuse explanations of themselves, especially in books and journals, provide no Moroccan or Equatorial Guinean points of view. Moreover, Moroccan and Equatorial Guinean colonial memories have barely been gathered, even though they contradict Spanish interpretations and data (Ndongo, 1977; Aziza, 2003). Coloniality from a gender perspective will also be included, as the colonial experiences of women and men differed. As Walsh described (2018, p. 16), “Decoloniality has a history, herstory, and praxis of more than 500 years. From its beginnings in the Americas, decoloniality has been a component part of (trans)local struggles, movements, and actions to resist and refuse the legacies…”.

Retelling the common Hispano-African past to incorporate African versions is necessary, but opportunities are declining dramatically due to the advanced age of the witnesses. It is also disturbing that the Spanish state has not encouraged an extensive review of its presence, accepted its mistakes and made them clear to the Spanish public. It has prior experience of this in relation to its past in America[6]. The failure to rethink Spain’s past and its colonial memory has reinforced a kind of imperial fantasy (Delgado 2014, p. 74) that took root in the Spanish state (Aixelà-Cabré, 2018, p. 38), as Buettner (2016, p. 423) has demonstrated for other European metropoles. For Kamen (2006, p. 14) “there are few people so married with imaginary visions of the past as the Spanish”.

The ultimate aim of this work is nothing less than a revision of Hispano-African pasts, promoting a renewed approach to a more shared colonial history, using epistemologies from the South in order to favour the construction of a more consensual past and plural memory for Spain in Africa.

METHODOLOGYTop

The research has combined different methodologies typical of Cultural Anthropology and Anthropology of History: oral history has been used, together with the study of various documentary and archival sources; fieldwork was based on participant observation and informal and semi-structured interviews conducted in a multisited ethnography framework (Marcus, 1995). The oral sources were compiled following the work of Thompson (1988) and Jelin (2002), as the goal was to recover life stories that allowed different historical periods to be constructed from the informants’ experiences, giving greater weight to the ethnographic approach, as Palmié and Stewart (2019) propose. The study of Equatorial Guinea (specifically on the mainland) began in 2015, although my intense fieldwork in Equatorial Guinea took place from 2004 to 2012, including several stays each year, and multisited ethnography in African and European countries. For this research, I interviewed six Spaniards and 17 Equatorial Guineans, some over a number of years (for details see the notes on each informant), I analysed the Resúmenes Estadísticos del Gobierno General de los Territorios Españoles del Golfo de Guinea from 1942 to 1964 and studied the Colección Giménez Ferrer (IMFCSIC), where I was able to read the words of Irmina Margenat and Ramón Reig, a couple that lived in Equatorial Guinea from 1927 until 1965. The study of Al-Hoceima started in 2015, but my long experience of fieldwork in Morocco began in 1991. In this research, I have interviewed 35 people: nine Spaniards, 24 Riffians, and two from other parts of Morocco. I have also studied files in the Archivo General de la Administración (Alcalá de Henares); 20 of the 50 issues of the postcolonial newsletter Heraldo de Alhucemas (numbers 25 to 45); some censuses of the Spanish Protectorate during the colonial period; and different publications by former settlers such as Rubio and Alfaro (1992) and Roman (1994). For both case studies, throughout the article I recommend watching the NO-DO Spanish newsreels from the Franco dictatorship, which help contextualise the geographical areas studied, the unequal relations between Spaniards and Moroccans and Equatorial Guineans, and the changes that took place in colonial narratives towards the end of colonisation.

CONTEXTS OF STUDYTop

This work focuses on the study of the two most important Spanish colonies in Africa, in what are now Morocco in North Africa and Equatorial Guinea in Sub-Saharan Africa. Both stood out for being the only Spanish colonies of settlement on the continent.

Morocco’s colonisation lasted from 1912 to 1956 and took the form of a protectorate. Under French and Spanish rule, the country was split in two, the north under Spanish supervision and the south under French tutelage. The capital of the Spanish Protectorate was Tétouan, a city that shared prominence with the Spanish enclaves in Africa, Ceuta and Melilla, locations through which a large part of the Spanish civilian population that settled in the country during the colonial regime travelled.

The Spanish Protectorate will be analysed using the case of Al-Hoceima. The main city in the Rif region, Al-Hoceima was founded by Spaniards in 1927 and mainly populated by them until the 1950s, except for a few Moroccan potentates and the small community of Moroccan Jews. As can be seen in tables 1, 2 and 3 below, the high degree of Spanishisation of this city was exceptional compared to other cities of the Spanish Protectorate. Spanish people made up 91% of the population of Al-Hoceima in 1933, while in the protectorate as a whole they accounted for just 4.6%. The case of Al-Hoceima is especially interesting, as it presents new versions of the Spanish colonisation of Morocco beyond the extended Hispano-Moroccan brotherhood narrative studied by Mateo Dieste (2003), a narrative that was absent from Al-Hoceima until independence (Aixelà-Cabré, 2019b). It is not accurate to say that Spaniards attempted to develop direct bridges with Moroccans as the rhetoric proposed – they already exerted complete socio-political control of its urban context and the Rif area (Aixelà-Cabré, 2019b, p. 208).

The Spanish colonisation of Equatorial Guinea was stipulated in the 1777–1778 Treaty of El Pardo, although the country’s effective colonisation was delayed for decades. In 1843, the city of Santa Isabel was founded on the island of Fernando Póo by British missionaries; the very gradual Spanish settlement grew more significantly after 1880 when the island centralised the cacao, wood and coffee plantations. In the case of the mainland territory, the effective colonisation began to materialise after the foundation of the city of Bata in 1905, which was elevated to capital of the area and was the second-most important city in the country. The most significant socio-political changes in the colony were its provincialisation in 1959 and its categorisation as Autonomous Region in 1963.

Mainland Spanish Guinea (known as Río Muni) will be studied, along with the regional capital, the city of Bata. But I will also take into account the experiences in the colonial settlements of Fernando Póo and, specifically, Santa Isabel. In fact, unlike Al-Hoceima, which was an exception in the Spanish Protectorate, the colonisation of Río Muni presents significant overlaps and continuities with that of Fernando Póo, even though the mainland was colonised later than the island. One of the main characteristics of the Spanish colonisation of the Spanish Guinea was how few Spaniards settled there compared to the Protectorate, but this reality did not mean Spanish control, influence or exploitation were less effective. As Table 4 shows, in 1942 only 0.6% of the population located on the mainland were European (2.6% in the colony as a whole). As a powerful minority, Spaniards left a deep imprint on the social, political and linguistic spheres in Spanish Guinea, in some ways more strongly than in the Spanish Protectorate.

The Riffian city studied was far from typical of the Spanish settlements in colonial Morocco. Nevertheless, similarity emerges when Al-Hoceima is compared to Spanish Equatorial Guinean settlements, because, just as in the Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea, the Spanish interest in coexisting with the population was non-existent and there were strong parallels between the distant, hierarchical social relationships established by Spaniards with Riffians and those with Equatorial Guineans on the mainland.

SPANIARDS IN THE COLONIESTop

The emigration of Spaniards to the colonies was an opportunity for economic improvement for them, but also an escape route for many Republicans from the Civil War and the Spanish post-war period (López García, 2007, 2008). My ethnographic research showed that the Spanish settlement of the Rif region and Spanish Guinea fitted two distinct migratory models: family emigration in the case of Al-Hoceima, and men travelling alone in the cases of Fernando Póo and the mainland region of the Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea (until the 1940s). It is worth saying that the Spanish settlement of Al-Hoceima was a relatively fast process, as in barely 15 years the city went from a population of a few hundred people to various thousands (see Table 5)[7].

The Spanish emigrated with their nuclear families, which benefited their long-term integration and at the same time encouraged a daily routine similar to that of any city on the peninsula, with people of various generations and different social classes living there. As my interviewee Pepe recalled, “In Alhucemas[8], social class was clearly defined. There were military personnel, merchants … middle class business people … and fishermen”[9]. Moroccans never appeared in Pepe’s description even though they would have visited the city every day to work.

The situation in Spanish Guinea was very different. The Spanish settlement was much smaller there, with restrictions placed on the initial arrival of women that were only gradually lifted, facilitating a degree of family reuni-fication that was never fully realised. The scarcity of white women aggravated the abuse of black women, Miningas[10], who had to put up with constant harassment by numerous Spaniards (Nerín, 1999). The situation was partially eased as the decades passed, as the number of Spanish women increased to reach a third of the total by the end of colonisation. For example, in 1942 there were 4,124 “white” people living in Spanish Guinea, of whom only 635 were women (see tables 6 and 7). Ten years later, in 1952, the number of women was 1,216, while the total “white” inhabitants numbered 3,937[11].

Once there, few Spanish settlers contemplated bringing their families, preferring instead to return to the peninsula for long periods, taking advantage of contracts that allowed them six months of holiday for each year and a half worked, as was the case for Ramon Reig[12]. In contrast to Al-Hoceima, where the Spanish sources do not mention the Moroccans, in Spanish Guinea constant references are made to African populations due to their dependence on them for the success of their plantations. For example, Ramon’s wife, Irmina, who was living in Oveng, explained in one letter that the crisis was especially hard for Equatorial Guineans after Spanish Civil War, referring to them as “Morenos”, the politically “correct” Spanish way to refer to them until the 1960s. She wrote in 1943 that, “Upon returning … things are very changed, there is little food … Morenos do not want money but goods …”[13].

To a certain degree, many colonial locations were mirrors of Spanish society. In Al-Hoceima this was notable in structural issues such as the rigidity between social classes visible in certain leisure spaces but not others. The prevailing Spanish gender construction in both Spanish Guinea and the Spanish Protectorate also encouraged Spanish women to be housewives and wives (Nash 1991), prioritising the study of their labours. In Spanish Guinea Francoist political pressure was also felt – albeit less strongly – from the female arm of the Falange in particular (Stucki, 2016, p. 344; 2019, p. 169). The accounts also reveal that in the Spanish Protectorate the postwar famine did not make much of a dent because foodstuffs such as butter and sugar that became scarce on the peninsula had little trouble arriving. There were also greater freedoms – carnival, for example, which was banned in Spain, could be regularly celebrated. But the Spanish sense of superiority was always there. As Pepe explained, without empathy, “Spaniards did not do precarious work. We were carpenters, masons, plumbers … But living together was inconceivable given our cultural differences. Our preparation … [and] standard of living was far superior to theirs”. Their refusal to be classed as Moroccans was a clear sign of contempt. For Pepe, “In my days, you were Moor just for having been being born there. My brother-in-law in Alicante was called “el moro” (the Moor)! … These people know nothing … Being born there isn’t enough to make you a Moor”.

Spanish Guinea was more relaxed, although cities like Santa Isabel and to a lesser degree Bata had neither the same number of Spaniards nor the same social life as Al-Hoceima, meaning that their density and representativeness were not comparable. In fact, the first casino in the capital of Fernando Póo was opened by the African elite group, the Fernandinos, as the Spanish population had always been relatively small and was scattered across the plantations, complicating their leisure activities. The construction of gender among the Spanish middle classes in Spanish Guinea also became blurred when, facing the crisis caused by provincialisation (1959) and later by regional autonomy (1963), some Spanish women had to start working at the same time as Equatorial Guineans began their slow socio-political empowerment in the colony. Irmina Margenat was one such case. She went from being the wife of a manager and partner on the Hacienda Vírgen de Montserrat plantation in 1927 to opening a modest grocery store providing service and sales to Equatorial Guineans in 1964[14]. On the other hand, Spanish Guinea’s abundance and wealth kept their hopes of success and enrichment alive. This was visible when the Spanish returned to the peninsula for holidays with luxurious imported cars, unseen there, that they had bought in the Canary Islands. The image was of victorious colonisers, as they confirmed with stories of their adventures and lives. Their example might have encouraged the young if the colonial splendour had not burned out on the mainland in barely three decades with mixed benefits. Eduard[15], son of one of the owners of Hacienda Virgen de Montserrat, explained that his parents always imagined sending him to Spanish Guinea: “My brother, like me, forgot [the idea] after independence”. In Al-Hoceima the situation was different because the wealth was not acquired from exploiting the land, but from providing services to the Spanish troops, officials and eventually people. This explains why the enrichment of the Spanish was also unequal and greater profits were guaranteed in Spanish Guinea than in the Spanish Protectorate. In fact, Aziza (2003, p. 258) categorises it as colonisation by the poor, referring to the Spanish who migrated to the region. But it is significant that the income disparities did not stop all the settlers, in either the Protectorate or the Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea, from seeing their social class rise, including officials who moved in exchange for lucrative salary supplements that could be saved thanks to the low cost of life in the colonies.

The colonial process also had a direct impact on Riffian and Equatorial Guinean families, although in a different way. As I will show, while Riffian men and women were able to maintain their family unity even when working every day in Al-Hoceima, many Equatorial Guineans worked on plantations a long way from their villages and families, often against their will. As a result, many escaped, fleeing low pay, strenuous work, abuse and living conditions that were totally different from those in their villages. In both contexts, racialisation processes endorsed the exploitation of African populations and unequal salaries between Spaniards and Moroccans and Equatorial Guineans.

SPANISH COLONISATION VERSUS AFRICAN EXPERIENCESTop

Although the settlement of Spanish civilians in Santa Isabel and Bata had similar effects on their regions to Al-Hoceima’s growth in the Rif, the Spanish colonisation of the Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea was markedly rural in nature. The land use was based on a system of cocoa and coffee plantations and logging that led, on the one hand, to the Spanish population being dispersed and having limited urban life and, on the other, to the separation of the Equatorial Guinean population from their original settlements, as they were interned in facilities alongside Africans of other nationalities, and did not have permission to leave them or to visit family members. The majority of Spanish civilians did not appreciate that the work the Equatorial Guinean population carried out came close to forced labour, was poorly paid – if at all – and that it was performed alongside Nigerians and Liberians who, hired as labourers, had better wages and binding clauses that the landowners respected until the end of their contracts (see Table 8). Eduard says that “the Equatorial Guineans escaped at the first opportunity” because “they did not want to work”. In her letters, Irmina seemed exhausted: “Every day, one is more disgusted with the conflicts that happen. The braceros (workers) are unbearable, looking for reasons not to work”[16].

The colony’s social organisation reflected a racial logic that ended up blurring the power differences between the settlers and in which the status of the white population was always higher than that of the black. In fact, the Equatorial Guineans, as a black African population, were down at the bottom of the social pyramid, divided between the non-emancipated and the partially emancipated[17], with the notable exception of the Fernandinos who,[18] being such a small group based only in Fernando Póo, did not cause the racial boundaries to change for the rest of the country’s black African population. The majority of Equatorial Guineans were therefore not emancipated and could not even sell goods, receive credit or appear as witnesses in court. Their rights regarding their capacity to own land (and here I am not referring to the emancipated, who already had special status) crucially changed after historical events as the provincialisation process of 1959, the repeal of the emancipation law of 1960 and the autonomic period of 1963, following nationalist opposition and international pressure on Spain[19]. These changes are notable in the NO-DO, where the empowerment of Equatorial Guineans at political level is visible in the invitation to visit a Spanish cruise liner of some “españoles de color”[20]; in the Spanish Resúmenes Estadísticos del Gobierno General de los Territorios Españoles del Golfo de Guinea, which detail the increased production of the Equatorial Guinean cooperatives and the type of products they specialised in, despite the overall figures showing that the Africans could never compete with the Spanish plantations[21] and that the colonial regime placed limits on their potential economic profits.

The colonisation of the Rif differed from that of Spanish Guinea for being urban rather than rural. The construction of a Spanish city like Al-Hoceima followed a distinct format: the Riffian population lived in small villages (douar) on the outskirts and began to sell their goods. Men and women sold basic products such as eggs, bread, vegetables and fruit and began to take advantage of the labour opportunities that arose[22]. As Merien re-called[23], “[My father] began to work in Alhucemas at 14 years old. It was 1934 or 1935 ... He went there and back every day on foot ... It’s almost 15 km”. Soumaya[24] went a couple of times a week to sell eggs from her hens and often recalls playing in the patio of her house with her cousin Khalima[25]. This was in the early 1930s. In fact, the subtle economic differences between the two families shaped their futures, and show the similarities and differences that existed between Riffian women. Neither studied, and although Khalima’s husband taught her basic notions of grammar so she could read, she forgot that learning and remains illiterate to this day. She never worked and after moving to Al-Hoceima in 1961, she spent many years without leaving home because her husband prohibited it, as her son proudly confirmed. Soumaya’s life was very different. She always worked, first as a girl in the fields, loading wood, cutting wheat, taking care of chickens, cows, donkeys and sheep, work usually done by women in rural settings: “in those days there was neither water nor electricity in the countryside, not like now, with all of this”. Soumaya explains that their poverty led her to work for the Spanish, first in a phosphate mine in 1949: “I dug, I removed earth and looked for phosphate. It was a very hard job! That was too much for me and after two years I quit”[26]. After leaving the job at the mine, Soumaya worked until 1957 in a canning factory in one of the Al-Hoceima’s three salteries: “The Spanish said ‘come on, come on’ to get me to work faster. They didn’t want us to get distracted or to stop too much. We worked long hours, from the night until the afternoon, although we were free at weekends”. Soumaya was in the first group of Moroccan workers who lived in rented houses close to one of the barracks. She worked for six years at the saltery. Khalima’s husband, Abdel[27], studied in a madrasa, but Soumaya’s, Mostapha[28], was illiterate, and worked as a sewing machine mechanic. Abdel had more opportunities, though Mostapha’s job was fairly good compared to far more precarious jobs such as stevedore (see Table 9). Riffian empowerment did not become a reality until independence, with the exception of certain prominent people and those Riffians who had entered the colonial administration in subordinate positions.

Taking advantage of the opportunities in Al-Hoceima, Abdel and Mostapha are good examples of the Riffians who benefitted from the city’s construction. However, they are in no way representative of either all the Riffians who stood firm in the indigenous regiments (meha-las jalifianas), or the majority of Riffians who decided to resist colonial pressure from their villages, a long way from the new urban dynamics (Hart, 1976, p. 94). Abdel would end up working only for Arabs and Riffians. He translated Arabic texts, assisted with legal matters and worked as an Arabic teacher after independence, and managed to amass a number of properties. But Mostapha worked only for the Spanish. When his clientele departed, he had to reinvent himself as a mechanic for all types of motor, and managed to save enough to buy a house close to the old military hospital on the outskirts of Al-Hoceima.

COLONIALITY AND SOCIAL PRACTICES IN SPANISH GUINEA AND THE SPANISH PROTECTORATETop

The overlap between Spanish coloniality and social practices seems fundamental to understanding how Spain usually recalls its Hispano-African colonial past. This brief account of the works and relationships of Equatorial Guineans and Riffians after the Spanish settlement revealed the hierarchy that existed between the Spanish and African populations in terms of labour rights, as in the Spanish Guinea and the Spanish Protectorate the local population constituted a cheap – when not free – workforce.

In Spanish Guinea, the Spanish believed that providing food for the braceros or workers on their land showed a level of appreciation for them, but in reality being fed was a right established by the colony’s legislation, which set different wages according to whether food was provided or not (see Table 10)[29]. Then there were [30]the great differences depending on whether a workforce came from Spanish Guinea or from other African countries. For Eduard, the key problem was that the native population had everything it could need within reach, and that “there was no hunger there, and no need to work”.

In the Rif, the workers who were employed by the Spanish entered the wage economy. Indeed, for Aziza (2003, p. 63) this was one of the clearest effects of the Spanish colonisation. Receiving a wage permitted certain improvements and even the possibility of saving to buy a house in the city, although as the wages were very low and the contracts verbal they did not protect the worker, as evidenced by the jobs in the mines, in the salteries, in the repair of sewing machines and in the services sector. For example, Riffian waiters received a symbolic daily wage because they worked on commission: 20% was divided between the two or three Riffian waiters working in an establishment. Pepe recalled that “the Moors who worked at home all had verbal contracts: I’m not coming, don’t come!”, although one ended up living with them and slept in the attic “on a mattress that was there, because in exchange he enjoyed the advantages of urban housing”. In the douar the living conditions meant no electricity or running water, while the housing in Al-Hoceima provided greater comfort even though it took them away from their traditional means of subsistence (livestock husbandry and harvesting)[31]. They did not have to walk 15–20 kilometres a day or sleep curled up on a landing in order not to lose their job, as they were woken in the morning by icy buckets of water thrown by an unkind Spanish neighbour (Aixelà-Cabré, 2019a, p. 863). Below, in Table 11, which corresponds to the budget of Al-Hoceima, we can see the different services the city provided, as compared to the precariousness of rural life.

As in other colonial contexts, the moral and cultural superiority the metropole conferred on the Spanish was a major obstacle to the respect for the African population and the emergence of egalitarian relations. So much so that the devaluing of the occupied populations in the Spanish imaginary was promoted by the propaganda of the Spanish civilising mission (Stucki, 2019, p. 217), which is easily visible in many of the Spanish government’s NO-DO recordings. The disparagement of the indigenous population took place both in the Spanish Protectorate and in the Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea, although it was worse in the latter. Multiple statements describe the “Spanish superiority over the natives”[32], a significant feature because it justified a status quo that refused to empower the colonies’ inhabitants (Fernández, 2018, p. 71). In the case of Spanish Guinea, the anecdotes ended up confirming people’s incapacity or childishness (Sánchez Gómez, 2006). For example, the Equatorial Guinean José Luís lamented that “the idea was repeated that the blacks did not want to work, without taking into account that many Equatorial Guineans found themselves obliged to engage in forced labour”[33]. Many Spaniards such as Eduard repeated that the Africans needed watching on the plantation “because if not they would sit down and not work”. Among the stories that circulated to ridicule the Equatorial Guineans were those of a bracero breaking a machine because instead of putting oil on the machine “he put it all over his body” and a Spanish foreman’s amazement at continually being asked for his shoes, “because they were not appropriate ... as well as their feet being too small ... Equatorial Guineans put them on ... and they couldn’t walk”. The stock of anecdotes about the eccentric behaviour of the Equatorial Guineans and Riffians confirmed their childishness and above all contributed to the devaluing of their culture and work and encouraged their subordination[34]. Nevertheless, without their unpaid or badly paid work, the colony would have lost its profitability and above all some of the symbolic essence that preserved Spanish superiority in the colonial narrative. In the eyes of José Luís, the indignity was too much when some Equatorial Guinean men were made to join the staff of the recently arrived Spaniards: “Indeed, there was no greater humiliation for a Fang man than dedicating themselves to domestic service”[35]. Soumaya also bore serious grievances towards the Spanish, although she did not express them when asked how she was treated, perhaps because she was being asked by a Spaniard. After a long, meaningful silence, eyes rising and falling with the weight of her advanced age, she said that “there were good Spaniards and bad Spaniards. There were all sorts”. This seems to have been courtesy given the only two words of Spanish she remembered provide evidence of her relationship with her bosses: “Come on, come on” and “work, work”[36]. Her testimony fell a long way short of the rhetoric of Hispano-Moroccan brotherhood.

Ultimately, the Spanish showed a profound lack of knowledge of the peoples in the colonies. In the Rif, Pepe recalled that “we didn’t have the slightest interest in learning; we didn’t pick up more than 20 words in total”. In Spanish Guinea, the few Spaniards who perceived certain differences among the black African population wondered why “the Equatorial Guineans always tried to escape from the plantations, while the African braceros did not”. These examples show the Spanish lived in these places as in a conquered territory, with complete disinterest for the difficulties and injustices that the Riffian and Equatorial Guinean populations suffered.

POSTCOLONIAL MEMORIES: LOOKING BACK, LOOKING AHEADTop

Reviewing the compensation the Riffian Moroccans and Equatorial Guineans received when independence came is disheartening. For example, co-owner and foreman of the Hacienda Virgen de Montserrat, Ramón Reig, recognised in 1965 that while the only Fang worker who been on the plantation since it opened in 1927 would be dismissed with regret, they would be “issued only with the compensation determined by the law”, which was very little[37]. In fact, the partners kept the property until they regularised it in 1996, hoping to receive compensation for their hasty departure from the country, either from the Spanish government or the Equatorial Guinean, but it did not even occur to them to give a hectare to this elderly Fang man in recompense for so many years of loyalty. For her part, Merien angrily recalled how after so much dedication to his bosses, her father was left without rights: “When he was already elderly, I accompanied my father to Nador, to the Spanish consulate, to see whether having worked all his life for Spaniards he would receive any money. But though he had all the papers, they told him all the companies had closed. He had worked for many years ... he had suffered a lot, a lot, but nothing!”

But one of the most relevant issues is that the majority of former Spanish settlers did not question the colonisation. It is likely that the Spanish population, knowing that its country had overseas territories, did not either. Colonial illegitimacy was not even raised, nor was it on the conscience of many of those who returned to Spain after the independences. Eduard recalled the resistance of Ramón Reig and Irmina Margenat to returning to Spain: he experienced it as emotional blackmail, as they said “we are breaking our backs on the estate. We are not going to close”. Only at the end did Ramón recognise that they should close the plantation and thereby “bring our adventure in Guinea to an end”[38]. Pepe did not even consider that colonialism was illegitimate despite having to flee from Al-Hoceima, and he complained that if they had to leave it was Spain’s fault, which had abandoned the colony and the Spaniards.

On the other hand, the colonial period left Moroccans and Equatorial Guineans with residual identities that not all addressed in the same way. While the majority shared in the rejection of colonisation, after independence there was always a minority that longed for their relationship and status with the Spanish. Merien recalled how her father always said “I am Spanish!! I am not a Moor, I am Spanish”. Or even “I am not an Arab!!! I am Muslim but not Spanish”. In contrast, many Spaniards who were born in the protectorate saw it as a disadvantage that their identity cards stated that they were born in Al-Hoceima or Tétouan. For María, “the Moors have such a bad reputation around here, that we don’t want to have been born there!”[39]. Asked about her opinion of Al-Hoceima, Maria’s answer was that “Alhucemas is no fun now because there are so many Moors!”

After these Spaniards returned, the migration began of Riffians and Equatorial Guineans to Spain, to their metropole, to live in a country that had not cultivated or sought a shared social history of its colonial past in Africa as shown by the episodes of xenophobia and racism to which they have been subjected – and where no attention has been given to common ties or colonial debts. Be-goña’s experience illustrates the Spanish unease: after receiving one particularly rude comment, she retorted that she was “a black Spaniard”[40].

CONCLUSIONTop

This article has reviewed Spain’s colonialities and colonial practices in Spanish Guinea and in the Riffian city of Al-Hoceima through experiences and memories with the aim of verifying their versions of the colonial past to facilitate a more shared Hispano-African colonial history. The contrasting of Spanish oral memories with those of Riffians and Equatorial Guineans with the support of documentary and statistical data has been crucial to establishing their differences, evidencing how coloniality worked. The Spanish voices coincide with the colonial rhetoric, which, it has been noted, survives today in Spain thanks to the state’s silence about its colonial past in Africa.

Decolonising Hispano-African narratives is urgent because the voices that experienced colonial times are dying out and the Riffian and Equatorial Guinean memories have been left out of the contemporary Spanish narrative. Contrasting them with those of the Spanish proves the existence of parallel memories without points of contact between them. This underlines the need to review the shared past from a Postcolonial and Decolonial point of view in order to make way for a more shared social colonial history that is plural and capable of taking on colonial debts and jettisoning racialized discourses constructed to justify inequalities.