Things Fell Apart Here Too: Reconstructing African Identity in Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo’s Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra

Abstract

Students of African literature are accustomed to discussing it within the context of its developmental stages. For instance, there is the first stage in which the focus is on the clash of cultures that followed the European colonial enterprise in Africa. Whilst this phase is best represented by works like Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir (1954) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), the next stage saw novels like Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) and T.M. Aluko’s Chief, the Honorable Minister (1970) in which the conversation shifts from the cultural clashes to criticisms of African mismanagement of the new nations that were born following the departure of the European colonial masters. Phase 3 would begin in the mid-1980s and focus on the new cultural and political paradigms that the global era has fanned across the planet. The author of the present study chronicles this history and attempts to explain why Ndongo-Bidyogo’s Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra discusses issues similar to the novels of the first phase although it belongs chronologically to the works of the third phase. Published in 1987, the author surmises that this could be the result of Equatorial Guinea’s unique history within the African continent. As the only country to have been colonized by Spain and one of the last to gain her independence, the author believes this combination of factors along with the country’s long history of dictatorships meant it had no choice but to wait until the conditions were ripe to tell their story. This is the story of the brainwashing colonial education that the Spanish put in place. Destructive in and of itself, it also had the added toxicity of fomenting the cultural clashes that occurred throughout Africa during the colonial period. The author concludes that Ndongo-Bidyogo used his novel to tell this story, but more importantly, to explain the root causes of contemporary Guinean problems. Rooted, like elsewhere in Africa, on the racist political education that Spain left behind in 1968 when they conceded independence to the tiny nation of a little over half a million people, Mr. Ndongo-Bidyogo attempted to explain how this happened and how contemporary Guineans should approach the problem if only they are interested in a solution.