Tinned Sardines and Putrified Yellow-Fin in Equatorial Guinea: Regimes of Food in the Novels of Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo

In his semi-autobiographical novels, Las tinieblas de su memoria negra (Shadows of your black memory) and Los poderes de la tempestad (Power of the storm), the Equatoguinean writer Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo describes a boy’s, and then the man’s, life in colonial and postcolonial Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only sub-Saharan colony. This paper argues that the numerous descriptions of the food encountered by the protagonist immerse the reader in four different worlds: that of his Fang ethnic group in the Hispanic colony; that of the colonial priests and emancipados of the protagonist’s youth; then the horrors encountered under the cruel postcolonial tyrant, Macías Nguema and finally his recollections of life in exile in Spain. A taxonomy on how food and meals are used in fiction is presented in order to evaluate how Ndongo-Bidyogo’s use of food in his novels might fit into such a scheme. Finally, it is suggested that food may make a more regular appearance in the semi-autobiographical novel than in other fiction.