The Deportation of Political Prisoners to Fernando Po and the Spanish State (1866–68)

Abstract

The Deportation of Political Prisoners to Fernando Po and the Spanish State (1866–68) Dan Royle In the summer of 1866, nineteen radical leaders were sentenced to deportation to Fernando Po—now Bioko in Equatorial Guinea, then a Spanish imperial possession—for fomenting popular revolution. In February 1867, two of these men managed to escape but, by the time they returned to the Peninsula, a competing elite revolution had already been set in motion. Their deportation ensured that the nineteen played no part in organising the popular response to the initial coup d'état in September 1868, although some did participate in the extemporaneous barricade fighting that followed. The character of this popular response meant that the elites were able to impose a postrevolutionary settlement which excluded more radical elements. Those deported in the years before 1868—including the nineteen—came to have prominent roles in local and national government in the years that followed. Had they remained in Spain and continued to organise, the balance of power immediately after revolution might have been different. As it was, the nineteen men and their experience have largely been forgotten in favour of the military leaders of the coup d'état and the elite government that was installed thereafter. Deportation had long been a feature of the Spanish imperial experience, but relatively few political prisoners were ever sent from the metropolis: several thousand before 1868, primarily to North Africa and the Philippines. Only 1,600 political prisoners were sent to Fernando Po in the entire period between 1861 and 1895.1 The majority of Spanish deportations were between two colonies, often for non-political reasons.2 Nevertheless, it had formed an important part of the government's reaction to unsuccessful popular revolutionary attempts in both 1848 and 1861. And in the years before 1868, the tool was wielded with unprecedented reach and frequency in an attempt to remove the threat of popular revolution altogether. The deportation of the nineteen to Fernando Po in 1866 was a continuation of this tradition, but also a radical departure. Transporting deportees to an isolated, tropical island required a more sophisticated state apparatus than previous waves, a challenge that was not only practical but also conceptual. It demonstrated the aspirations of the state not just in terms of counter-revolutionary politics, but also its colonial project and its justice system. These aspirations proved largely irreconcilable. Deportation is an amorphous form of punishment, the reality of which depends on the individual experience of the deportee and the way his or her story is told.3 Yet it is inherently violent, dually so, both in process and result. In the Spanish case, it was also a reflection of the structural violence of the state in this period. Consistently powerless to broaden citizenship beyond a narrow elite, its only recourse was to violence. The deportation of the nineteen to Fernando Po was an example of its failure to convert victory over political opponents into hegemonic legitimacy.4 Weber's theory that the state has the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence has limits in the imperial context, but it remains true that state violence need not be callous and indiscriminate.5 Indeed it could even have been legitimated; the nineteen deportees, for example, were convicted as part of a constitutional judicial process and sentenced to a legal punishment by state functionaries. Nevertheless, this relied on a legitimacy which the Spanish state lacked; "only a legitimate entity can punish, all others abuse."6 A Precarious Colonisation Approached as the sun sets over the Bight of Biafra, Fernando Po could appear to be a tropical island paradise; the first European to visit called it Formosa Flora (beautiful flower). But such first impressions belie the difficulties the early colonists faced. Richard Burton, the British consul in the 1860s, recalled feeling "uncommonly suicidal" through his first night on the island.7 Around the same time, the captain of a US anti-slaving ship wrote that it possessed "as many of the requisites for forming an uncomfortable disagreeable place, as any other locality in the world."8 And yet, to many Spaniards, who increasingly mythologised the lost American colonies, Fernando Po represented something of...