Continuity and change in Spanish colonial Africanism, 1875-1975

Abstract

This text traces the history of intellectual and institutional think- ing on Africa that took place in Spain throughout the colonial period. Europeans established a new relationship with Africans, while Spain became a minor power following the loss of the remnants of its empire. In Madrid, Barcelona, Granada and Las Palmas groups and publications advocated intervention in the continent to the south. They constructed images of the African, Arab or Muslim “other” in order to legitimise their submission, and accompanied them with images of the colonising “us”. These discourses became inevitably transformed over a hundred years, given the participation of the diverse groups from liberal intellectuals to Francoist military officials. Still, some of the initial arguments persisted. While conceptualising Africa as a backward and colonisable space, Spanish Africanists often insisted on the geographical, historical, and cultural unity on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar. They thus participated in the construction of a certain idea of a Spanish nation, which was portrayed as both a civiliser of peoples and a product of the fusion of peoples