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Abstract
In 1988 plans to dump “toxic waste from Europe” on the island of Annobón were uncovered. This article analyzes the “slow disaster” these plans set into motion, revealing the ways in which it was made possible by the ongoing legacies of Francoist and other colonialisms. It explains how the Annobonese population was put at risk by the scheme and connects it to the 1966 nuclear incident of Palomares. Moreover, it demonstrates how the racist othering of Africa(ns)—which was a presupposition of the plan—was reproduced in some accounts of it published in Spanish and German print media.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to John Howard, Urs Lindner, Iñaki Prádanos, Benita Sampedro, and Kiran Sunar for their helpful comments on the first draft of this article.
Notes
1 An., “Island Awaits Deadly Cargoes,” Africa Analysis. The Fortnightly Bulletin on Financial and Political Trends 48 (May 27, 1988): 1–2, 1.
2 An., Island Awaits, 1.
3 Scott G. Knowles, “Learning from Disaster? The History of Technology and the Future of Disaster Research,” Technology and Culture 55 (2015): 773–84.
4 Robert Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (London: Harvard University Press, 2011).
5 Cécile Stephanie Stehrenberger, “Theorizing the Global Hispanophone as Dynamics of (Dis)entanglement. Suggestions from a History of Science Perspective,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 20, nos. 1–2 (2019): 99–113.
6 Luis I. Prádanos and Mark Anderson, “Transatlantic Iberian, Latin American, and Lusophone African Ecocriticism: An Introduction//Ecocrítica transatlántica ibérica, latinoamericana y lusófono-africana: Una introducción,” Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 8, no. 1 (2017): 1–21.
7 Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, eds, Globalization and the Decolonial Option (New York: Routledge, 2010).
8 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.
9 An., “Anglo-US Waste Rivals,” Africa Analysis 51 (August 8, 1988): 1–2; Obinna Anyadike, “Toxic Terrorism,” West Africa 3697 (June 20, 1988): 1108–9, 1144.
10 Andreas Bernstorff and Kevin Stairs, POP’s in Africa. Hazardous Waste Trade 1980–2000. Obsolete Pesticide Stockpiles. A Greenpeace Inventory. Prepared for the Fifth Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for an International Legally Binding Instrument for Implementing International Action on Certain Persistent Organic Pollutants (Johannesburg: Greenpeace, 2000), 42. Entire paragraph see Bernstorff/Stairs, POP’s in Africa, 41–2.
11 Nixon, Slow Violence, 2.
12 Ben Anderson et al., “Slow emergencies: Temporality and the Racialized Biopolitics of Emergency Governance,” Progress in Human Geography (Spring 2019): 1–19.
13 Thom Davies, “Slow Violence and Toxic Geographies: ‘Out of Sight’ to Whom?” EPC: Politics and Space (Spring 2019): 1–19. DOI 2399654419841063, 3.
14 I am taking my cue here from the recent debates regarding the restitution of African cultural objects currently held in European and US-American collections. In their report on the issue, commissioned by French President Emanuel Macron, Benédict Savoy and Felwine Sarr advocated a reversal of the burden of proof, in the sense that it should not be up to claimants to prove that the artifacts in question were appropriated wrongfully but for European institutions to provide evidence that they came into their possession by fair transaction. Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics, trans. Drew S. Burk (Paris: Ministère de la Culture, 2018), http://restitutionreport2018.com/sarr_savoy_en.pdf
15 Willy Lützenkirchen, “Das tödliche Geschäft wird von Genf aus gesteuert,” Weltwoche 32 (August 11, 1994): 18–19.
16 In the history of disaster research, the term “secondary disaster” has been used to refer to disaster phenomena of a physical kind (e.g. a landslide) but also of a social (e.g. displacement) or psychological kind (e.g. mental health problems of first responders) occurring after and as a consequence of a primary disaster phenomena. In this article, I employ it to describe disastrous social and ecological dynamics that were set into motion already as a consequence of the planning of actions implying a primary disaster.
17 Lützenkirchen, Geschäft, 18–19.
18 For more information on the structural and political violence against the Annobonese people see e.g. Baltasar Fra-Molinero, “Estado, religion, trabajo y hambre,” Debats 123 (2014): 92–105. For a further (theoretical) reflection of the relationship between “slow violence” and “structural violence” see Davies, Out of Sight, 5–6.
19 Marco Armiero and Anna Fava, “Of Humans, Sheep, and Dioxin: A History of Contamination and Transformation in Acerra, Italy,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 27, no. 2 (2016): 67–82.
79. Quoted in: Davies, Out of Sight, 10.
20 Davies, Out of Sight, 10.
21 Luis Ada, Elias Edu, Plácido Mba, Samuel Mba Mombe, Manuel Edu, and José Bochita, “Equatorial Guinea Accepts Toxic Waste,” New African 256 (January 1989): 55.
22 Samuel Mba Mombe, “Annobón, paraíso olvidado” (January 2001), www.angelfire.com/sk2/guineaecuatorial/annobon.htm (accessed June 14, 2020).
23 Bernstorff/Stairs, POP’s in Africa, 2.
24 In my use of the concepts of “necropolitics” and “precarious life”, I largely follow Achille Mbembe and Judith Butler. Judith Butler, Precarious Life. The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). Mbembe, Necropolitics.
25 Phil O’Keefe, “Toxic Terrorism,” Review of African Political Economy 15, no. 42 (1988): 84–90, 86. See also: Roland Richter, “Giftmüllexporte nach Afrika: Bestandsaufnahme eines Beispiels der Zusammenhänge zwischen Ökosystem, Ökonomie und Politik im Rahmen der Nord-Süd-Beziehungen,” Africa Spectrum 23, no. 3 (1988): 315–50.
26 As Max Liboiron explains, the term „waste colonialism“was coined precisely in the context of the protest against the 1980’s waste dumping schemes. Max Liboiron, “Waste Colonialism,” Discard Studies. Social Studies of Waste, Pollution & Externalities (January 11, 2018), https://discardstudies.com/2018/11/01/waste-colonialism last accessed 10/16/2019. For a current day use of the concept see also Liboiron, Waste Colonialism.
27 Myra J. Hird and Alexander Zahara, A. “The Arctic Wastes,” in Anthropocene Feminism, ed. R. Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 121–45.
It is against the backdrop of this historical association that e.g. Nigerian literature scholar, poet and journalist Sam Omatseye’s writings on the issue must be interpreted. In his words, the trade in toxic waste “re-echoes what Europe has always thought of Africa: A wasteland. And the people who live there, waste beings.” O’Keefe, Toxic Terrorism, 87.
28 An., Waste Rivals, 2.
29 Rebecca Altman, “Time-bombing the Future,” Aeon 2 (2019): https://aeon.co/essays/how-20th-century-synthetics-altered-the-very-fabric-of-us-all last (accessed October 18, 2019).
30 Anyadike, Toxic Terrorism, 1108.
31 Pedro Bodipo Lisso, Annobón: su tradición, usos y costumbres (Paris: co-édition association France-Guinée Équatoriale et l'Harmattan, 2015).
Arlindo Manuel Caldeira, “Organizing freedom: de facto independence on the island of Ano Bom (Annobón) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” Afro-Hispanic Review 28, no. 2 (2009): 293–310. Felix Schürmann, Der graue Unterstrom. Walfänger und Küstengesellschaften an den tiefen Stränden Afrikas (1770–1920) (Campus: Frankfurt am Main, 2017), 485–536.
32 Gustau Nerín, “Socialismo utópico y tiranía: La isla de Annobón bajo el cabo Restituto Castilla (1931–1932),” Afro-Hispanic Review 28, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 311–30.
33 “Las diferencias étnicas del nuevo país independiente fueron explotadas por el electo presidente Francisco Macías Nguema para instituir un régimen económico muy similar al de las plantaciones del régimen colonial español.” Fra-Molinero, Estado, 93.
34 Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, Áwala cu sangui (Malabo: Ediciones Pángola, 2000).
35 “Las agresiones de la familia Macías-Obiang contra Annobón y sus sufridos habitantes han sido una constante histórica y se han ejecutado al más puro y brutal estilo colonial. O sea, manu militari, sin contemplaciones.” Francisco Zamora Loboch, “Annobón no es un estercolero,” Guinea-Ecuatorial.net (July 13, 2012), http://ecuatorial-guinea.net/inicio.asp?cd=ni8446 (last accessed October 15, 2019).
36 Gonzalo Álvarez-Chillida and Gustau Nerín, “La formación de elites guineo-ecuatorianas durante el régimen colonial,” Ayer 109, no. 1 (2018): 33–58. Cécile Stephanie Stehrenberger, “La ciencia colonial del Instituto de Estudios Africanos,” in Guinea Ecuatorial (des)conocida. Lo que sabemos, ignoramos, inventamos y deformamos acerca de su pasado y presente, ed. J. Aranzadi and G. Alvarez Chillida (Madrid: Editorial UNED, 2020), 433–53, Forthcoming.
37 Juan Carlos Guerra Velasco, “Ciencia forestal, práctica técnica, política de la madera y contexto colonial en Guinea Ecuatorial (1929–1968),” Scripta Nova. Revista Electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales 23, no. 613 (2019): 1–31.
38 On the canal de los presos see: Bono Gonzalo Acosta, El Canal de los Presos (1940–1962): trabajos forzados: de la represión política a la explotación económica (Barcelona: Crítica, 2004).
39 Sebastian Balfour, Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
40 The exponential growth of the tourism industry in the 1950’s not only helped to directly legitimize the dictatorial regime of the friendly, sunny country where Northerners could cheaply obtain all sorts of pleasures, the economic revenue it created furthered its acceptance outside but also inside Spain. At the same time, with its land grabbing politics, it not only implied the further dispossession of impoverished communities, it also contributed to a variety of slow ecological disasters that are typical side products of the Francoist modernization policies (desarollismo) and that still plague current day Spain, including hydric stress, crop failure, draughts, fire and desertification. See Eugenia Afinoguénova, “Andalucía: una comunidad turística sin andaluces,” in: La retórica del sur: Representaciones y discursos sobre Andalucía en el periodo democrático, ed. A. Gómez López-Quiñones and J. M. del Pino (Sevilla: Ediciones Alfar, 2015), 229–63. And Luis I. Prádanos, Postgrowth Imaginaries. New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), 42.
41 For the history of diplomatic relations between the US and Franco Spain see e.g. Ángel Viñas, En las garras del águila: los pactos con Estados Unidos de Francisco Franco a Felipe González, 1945–1995 (Barcelona: Crítica, 2003).
42 For the history of the Francoist media campaign after the Palomares incident, including the role of (televised) images in it see: Clara Florense, “James Bond, Pepsi-Cola y el accidente nuclear de palomares (1966),” in De la guerra fría al calentamiento global: Estados Unidos, España y el nuevo orden científico mundial, ed. Lino Camprubí, Xavier Roqué, and Francisco Sáez de Adana (Madrid: Catarata, 2018), 17–38. For the history of the incident in general see among others: Rafael Moreno Izquierdo, La historia secreta de las bombas de Palomares. La verdad sobre el accidente nuclear silenciada durante 50 años (Barcelona: Crítica, 2016). José Herrera Plaza and Salvador López Arnal, Silencios y deslealtades: El accidente de Palomares: desde la Guerra Fría hasta hoy (Barcelona: Laertes, 2019). José Herrera Plaza, Accidente nuclear de Palomares. Consecuencias (1966–2016) (Mojácar: Arráez Editores, 2015).
43 John Howard, The American Nuclear Cover-Up in Spain. The Thirteenth Annual Eccles Centre for American Studies Plenary Lecture given at the joint conference of the British and Irish Association for American Studies, 2016 (London: The British Library, 2017), 9.
44 Herrera Plaza and López Arnal, Silencios y deslealtades.
45 Shamira A. Meghani: “Seeing the obscured”, in White sepulchers. Palomares disaster semicentennial publication, ed. J. Howard (Valencia: Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 2016), 121–6.124–5.
46 Pedro Martínez Cavero, “A contracorriente. La protesta social y el activismo político de Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo en el accidente nuclear de Palomares,” Revista murciana de antropología 23 (2016): 127–48.
47 On the history of this othering see e.g. Richard L. Kagan, The Spanish Craze: America's Fascination with the Hispanic World, 1779–1939 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019). Dorothy Kelly, “Selling Spanish ‘Otherness’ since the 1960s,” in Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies, ed. B. Jordan and R. Morgan-Tamosunas (London: Arnold, 2000), 29–37.
48 Luisa Isabel Álvarez de Toledo, “Palomares (Memoria),” in La era de Palomares, ed. E. Subirats (Madrid: El Viejo Topo, 2010 (1981)), 15–253, 179.
49 It is worth mentioning here that the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath had in general seen a racialization of political dissidence, most notoriously with Atonio Vallejo Nájera’s search for the “gen rojo”. Esperanza Fiol Bosch, Victoria Aurora Ferrer Pérez, and Capilla Navarro Guzmán, “La psicología de las mujeres republicanas según el Dr. Antonio Vallejo Nájera,” Revista de Historia de la Psicología 29, no. 3 (2008): 35–40.
50 Michelle Murphy, “Afterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations,” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 4 (2018), 494–503, 496.
51 “Sie haben das Paradies in eine Hölle verwandelt. Die Menschen sitzen auf der Insel fest wie Gefangene in einem Konzentrationslager.” Lützenkirchen, Geschäft, 18.
52 “Raffgierige Militärs und skrupellose Müll-Makler drohen das Palmenparadies in ein grausiges Menschenlabor zu verwandeln.” Lützenkirchen, Geschäft, 18.
53 “ein drogenvernebelter Psychopath und Menschenfresser, der sich als ‘Messias und Erlöser’ feiern liess, hatte Annobon mit krankhaftem Hass tyrannisiert.” Lützenkirchen, Geschäft, 19.
54 Graham Huggan, “Imagining Disaster in the African Postcolony,” Matatu 36 (2009): 315–29, 315–16.
55 Willy Lützenkirchen, Letzte Tage im Paradies. Der verzweifelte Kampf der Naturvölker (Achen: Missio aktuell Verlag, 1992).
56 “Eine tropische Trauminsel wird zur ökologischen Zeitbombe. Internationale Giftmüllschieber ruinieren eines der letzten Inselparadiese im Atlantischen Ozean. […] Eine weltvergessene Insel, die Naturforscher, Botaniker und Zoologen zum Schwärmen brachte. […] Für die Fischer war der tropische Ozean vor Annobon bisher ein Supermarkt mit einem üppigen Angebot und Meeresgetier. Im offenen Meer und an den Riffen lebt eine erstaunlich artenreiche Tierwelt. […] Spanische Biologen hatten schon vor Jahren gefordert, die Küsten der Insel zum Schutzgebiet für die Meeresfauna zu erklären. […] Das Scharaffenland der frühen Seefahrer steht heute vor dem ökologischen Zusammenbruch. Hinter der trügerischen Tropenkulisse verbirgt sich eine Insel des Schreckens. Lützenkirchen, Geschäft, 18–19.
57 “A pesar de su pobreza, los annoboneses […] consideran el lugar un paraje privilegiado.” Ana Camacho and Tasio Camiñas, “Annobón, un paraíso para el vertido de tóxicos,” El País (September 22, 1988), https://elpais.com/diario/1988/09/22/internacional/590882404_850215.html (last accessed October 14, 2019).
58 “miserable pero tranquila”. “Los habitantes de Annobón […] tienen siempre puesta su mirada en el horizonte […] aún no lo saben, pero está estipulado que los barcos de la muerte […] pongan proa hacia Annobón.” Camacho and Camiñas, Paraíso.
59 Sharae Deckard, Paradise Discourse, Imperialism and Globalization. Exploiting Eden (New York City: Routledge, 2010). Charlotte Hoes, “Die Erfurter ‚Südseesammlung,” Decolonize Erfurt (April 14, 2019), https://decolonizeerfurt.wordpress.com/die-erfurter-suedseesammlung/ (last accessed October 18, 2019).
60 Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
61 George Steinmetz, “The Uncontrollable Afterlives of Ethnography: Lessons from ‘Salvage Colonialism’ in the German Overseas Empire,” Ethnography 5, no. 3 (2004): 251–88.
62 Huggan, Imagining Disaster, 316.
63 “Piensan que su principal enemigo ha sido el abandono histórico que han sufrido.” “Los annoboneses, marginados primero por el dictador Francisco Macías y ahora por el presidente Obiang, expresan abiertamente sus deseos de que Annobón vuelva un día a formar parte del Reino de España.” Camacho and Camiñas, Paraíso.
64 One interesting example is: Fred Geher and Fred Helbig: Der Tod von Palomares (=Tatsachen. Band 150), (Berlin, Militärverlag der DDR, 1974).
65 Howard, Cover Up, 6.
66 For the time of the Franco dictatorship this link can be shown e.g. by the writings and practices of the Sección Femenina of the fascist Falange party and its activities of “saving” and “educating” the women in the “remote” communities of ‘interior’ Spain on the one hand and those in Spain’s African colonies on the other. See Cécile Stephanie Stehrenberger, Francos Tänzerinnen auf Auslandstournee. Gender, Nation und Folklore im “colonial encounter”(Bielefeld: Transcript 2013). On the Sección Femenina’s activities in the Spanish colonies see also Andreas Stucki, Violence and Gender in Africa’s Iberian Colonies: Feminizing the Portuguese and Spanish Empire: 1950s–1970s (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
67 Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 109–41, 112.
68 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). Natasha Myers, “How to Grow Livable Worlds: Ten Not-So-Easy Steps,” in The World to Come. Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, ed. K. Oliver Smith (Gainesville: University of Florida Press 2018), 53–63. Joanna Zylinska, The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
69 “con igual libertad que si se tratase de colonias.” Álvarez de Toledo, Palomares, 63.
70 See Florensa, James Bond, 32.
71 See Prádanos, Post-growth imaginaries, 2018.