Citizenship in Between. Looking for Methods to Visual Studies in Spanish Guinea during the Francoist Dictatorship

Abstract

Citizenship studies have been consolidated as a field of analysis since the 1950s, although debates about the conditions of citizenship status can be traced to earlier times. In this article I discuss how different notions of citizenship may be usefully applied to visual studies for thinking about colonialism and its legacies through the photographic image. Considering the photographic production relating to the final ten years of Spain’s colonial rule of Equatorial Guinea —from its conversion into a province (1958) until its independence (1968)—the article proposes citizenship as a key concept for a political analysis of images in which white Europeans and black Africans interact or which make racial segregation visible.

KEYWORDS:

• Equatorial Guinea
• photography
• citizenship
• Francoism
• colonialism

Notes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my friend and colleague Lidia Mateo Leivas for introducing me to the term “perpetrator”, used in memory studies but no so much in colonial studies, and helping me to find the word “exception”. But especially for her support in my first year as a mother, during which time I wrote this text.

Notes

1 It was the first time Spaniards (a portion of them) were able to vote since the coup d’état of 1936 and the subsequent Civil War, which put an end to the democratic government of the Second Spanish Republic.

2 Juan Aranzadi, “La herencia franquista en las relaciones culturales entre España y Guinea Ecuatorial,” Guinea Ecuatorial. Políticas / Poéticas / Discursividades, Debats, vol. 123, ed. (Benita Sampedro, 2014), 58–71, 59.

The translation is mine. Original quote: “Pues sólo de surrealista cabe calificar el curioso espectáculo de un régimen dictatorial, endurecido a finales de los 60 como reacción a la creciente oposición democrática al franquismo, organizando con puntilloso esmero la transición a la democracia de su penúltima colonia africana y concediendo por ello sin cicatería alguna a los “españoles negros” de Guinea lo que simultáneamente negaba con firmeza, bajo pena de prisión e incluso muerte, a los “españoles blancos” de la metrópoli: la autonomía, la libertad de partidos políticos, el derecho a voto en unas elecciones democráticas, la elaboración de una Constitución por una conferencia de partidos y su aprobación en referéndum, las elecciones presidenciales y legislativas, y finalmente la independencia de lo que hasta ese momento había sido considerado “parte irrenunciable del territorio español.”

3 Referring to the original population of the territories that formed after their independence, the term Equatorial Guinea is anachronistic and to some extent erroneous. In the first place, Equatorial Guinea did not exist as a state and therefore neither as a demonym; secondly, because the children of the population coming from the metropolis that were born between 1958 and 1968 are also Guineans, understanding it as coming from the province. However, in this text I prefer to refer to these original populations as Guineans to underline precisely their colonial status of difference and their postcolonial status as a marginalized collective: after independence, they ceased to be considered Spaniards overnight, many remaining in a limbo considered stateless in Spanish territory.

4 In the Spanish context this issue is still relevant when characterizing the most extreme conservatism. Recently the ultra-right-wing VOX party, which managed to rise as the third political force in the elections of November 10, 2019, brought in its electoral program to end the autonomies.

5 Except for the so-called emancipated, fundamentally Fernandinos, who were getting rid of the tutelage for fulfilling certain requirements such as their level of education. In practice we can say that only Fernandinos reached this status, which was also always provisional.

6 Decree of September 29, 1938, art. 5.

7 See Inés Plasencia Camps, Imagen y ciudadanía en Guinea Ecuatorial (1862–1937): del encuentro fotográfico al orden colonial (Doctoral thesis, unpublished, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2017).

8 See Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960 (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014).

9 See for instance: Alberto Elena, La llamada de África. Estudios sobre el cine colonial español (Barcelona: Ediciones Bellaterra, 2010); and Susan Martin-Márquez, Disorientations. Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

10 Anthony W. Lee, A Shoemaker’s Story. Being Chiefly about French Canadian Immigrants, Enterprising Photographers, Rascal Yankees, and Chinese Cobblers in a Nineteenth-Century Factory Town (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), 8.

11 Plasencia, Imagen y ciudadanía en Guinea Ecuatorial.

12 Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities (London and New York: Verso, 1991), 42.

13 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject. Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 19.

14 Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 17.

15 Mamdani, Citizen and Subject. Plasencia, Imagen y ciudadanía en Guinea Ecuatorial.

16 Alicia Campos Serrano, “Colonia, derecho y territorio en el Golfo de Guinea: Tensiones del colonialismo español en el siglo XX,” Quaderni fiorentini 33 (2005): 865–98, 875.

17 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 27.

18 Jean Beaman, “Citizenship as Cultural: Towards a Theory of Cultural Citizenship,” Sociology Compass 10 (2016): 849–57, 850.

19 Gustau Nerín, “Mito franquista y realidad de la colonización de la Guinea Española,” Estudios de Asia y África XXXII, no. 1 (1997): 9–30, 16.

The translation is mine. Original quote: “Hasta los años sesenta, entre los españoles establecidos en Guinea los comportamientos antidiscriminatorios (como los de Heriberto Ramón Álvarez y otros pocos) fueron más bien excepcionales. Posteriormente, con la provincialización se tendió a reforzar el argumento igualitarista, y se quiso presentar la política asimilacionista como la “tradicionalmente” practicada por los españoles, cuando un estudio superficial contradice de inmediato esta hipótesis. A partir de 1964, cuando la autonomía ya se vislumbraba como el atajo a la independencia, el gobierno se convirtió en el principal motor de la no discriminación. Pero era demasiado tarde: ya habían pasado demasiados años de racismo y vejaciones, y el odio racial estaba en el ánimo de muchos. El trágico proceso de descolonización evidenciaría esta fractura social” (Nerín, 16).

20 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 1.

21 Link: http://www.raimonland.net/cronicas/. The gallery of images is available here (selecting Fotos antiguas): http://bioko.net/galeriaFA/

22 Arjun Appadurai, “Archive and Aspiration” in Information is Alive, eds. Joke Brower and Arjen Mulder (Rotterdam: V2_Publishing/NAI Publishers, 2003), 14–25, 17.

23 Ibid., 23.

24 Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation, 12.

25 Plasencia, Imagen y ciudadanía en Guinea Ecuatorial, 7.

26 Waters 1989, 160 cited in Stephen Ndegwa, “Citizenship and Ethnicity: An Examination of Two Transition Moments in Kenyan Politics,” The American Political Science Review 91, no. 3 (September 1997): 599–616, 600.

27 Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 17.