The first compilations of oral texts in Equatorial Guinea, 1890-1913

Abstract

If we must point out any characteristic of the African colonization of the first period, it could be the substitution of the objective ignorance with the interested prejudice of the all kind of European observers. If the Occidental culture is understood as the “natural” way of thought, of social organization and social reproduction, the supposed discovery of certain nearer traits in the African cultures reaffirmed them as object of colonization. The transcriptions of this oral literature obeyed to this plan, just like other ethnographic and literary productions. In the case of the ancient Spanish colony, the first compilations were published in Catalan by Josep Masferrer (3 articles in 1890) and they hold those assumptions; whereas that, shortly after, the Navarrese León García presented new compilations that appeared in the Claretian review La Guinea Española (six narrations given between 1908 and 1912), with an ideology also colonial but more actualized: thus were founded the ideological basis and the moral, philosophic and ethnographic treatment of the next collections.