Abstract
This chapter explores the archaeological record left by the coloniality of power on the islands of the Muni estuary in Equatorial Guinea between the late eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. From 1777, this tiny country in west-central Africa was nominally a Spanish colony, but it was not truly colonized until the 1880s. However, colonial interactions developed between different European agents and Africans since the late fifteenth century. The region provides, therefore, a good example of both the work of coloniality before colonies and the irruption of colonial capitalism in Africa. Between 2009 and 2012, we explored the rich archaeological record of the Muni, covering a period between the late first century BC and the present. Here we focus on the material evidence of coloniality, for which we focus on five categories of things: bodies, houses, wares, social drugs, and the construction of the Spanish colonial landscape. Through these material elements we will examine two main issues: (1) the transformation of the Benga under a regime of coloniality that implied a downward trajectory from an African bourgeois class to colonial pariahs and (2) the nature of the second wave of Spanish colonialism, oscillating between a faulty modernity and a failed iteration of the imperial spirit of the sixteenth century.
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Acknowledgements
We would especially like to thank Sonia García Martínez for the architectural drawings and her invaluable collaboration during fieldwork. Thanks are also due to Gustau Nerín, our historian, for providing relevant data to understand the historical context of the Muni. We are grateful to Sergio Escribano Ruiz for his help with ceramics and Enrique Martínez Glera and Alasdair Brooks for some identifications. The Muni project was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture through its Archaeological Projects Abroad Program (Proyectos Arqueológicos en el Exterior) and the Spanish Agency for Development Cooperation (AECID).
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González-Ruibal, A., Picornell Gelabert, L., Sánchez-Elipe, M. (2016). Colonial Encounters in Spanish Equatorial Africa (Eighteenth–Twentieth Centuries). In: Montón-Subías, S., Cruz Berrocal, M., Ruiz Martínez, A. (eds) Archaeologies of Early Modern Spanish Colonialism. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21885-4_8
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