Equatoguinean Literature in Spanish

Equatoguinean Literature In Spanish

Equatorial Guinea was the only Spanish colony in Sub-Saharan Africa. During its colonial history between 1778 and 1968, it developed a tradition of literature in Spanish, unique among the countries in Africa, that persists until the present day.

The literature of Equatorial Guinea in Spanish is relatively unknown, unlike African literature in English, French, and Portuguese. For example, M'bare N'gom, a professor at Morgan State University, searched 30 anthologies of literature in Spanish published between 1979 and 1991 and did not find a single reference to Equatoguinean writers. The same thing occurs in anthologies of African literature in European languages published in the 1980s and in specialized journals such as Research in African Literatures, African Literature Today, Présence Africaine or Canadian Journal of African Studies. This began to change in the late 1990s with the publication of a monograph in the journal Afro-Hispanic Review, and with the conferences Spain in Africa and Latin America: The Other Face of Literary Hispanism at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri in May 1999 and Primer Encuentro de Escritores africanos en Lengua Española (First Encounter with African Writers in the Spanish Language) in Murcia, Spain in November 2000.