"Equatorial Guinea's National Cuisine is Simple and Tasty": Cuisine and the Making of National Culture

"Equatorial Guinea's National Cuisine is Simple and Tasty": Cuisine and the Making of National Culture Igor Cusack teaches at the Universities of Bristol and Birmingham (UK). In the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies in Bristol he teaches History, Politics and Literature of Equatorial Guinea, the only such course in the UK. His research focuses on Equatorial Guinea, African national cuisines and masculinities in the novels of the Angolan writer PepeteL·. Introduction The official web page of Equatorial Guinea, under the sub-heading "Culture and Environment," includes a section on the "National Cuisine" and we are told that "Equatorial Guinea's national cuisine is simple and tasty" (Cusack, "African" 217).1 Clearly for those who had written and designed the web page a national cuisine existed. Indeed, for these web masters, alongside the national flag, the national anthem, shield and motto—unidad, paz, justicia—a national cuisine could now be presented to the world. How had this happened? Was this the case fot many African countries? Some further research suggested that in certain parts of Africa, in particular in the Lusophone states, national cuisines were indeed recognised (Cusack, "African" 214-16). This essay therefore revisits the origins of this research and explores the notion of a "national cuisine of Equatorial Guinea." As has been so often pointed out, African states are artificial colonial constructions whose boundaries were delineated on maps in nineteenth-century Europe. They did not evolve slowly like the nation-states of Europe and the colonizers had little regard for local socioeconomic conditions . As a result, the weak states that emerged after independence had tenuous links between the government and their complex multi-ethnic societies. African leaders faced with managing these diverse peoples, trapped within the former colonial boundaries, have tried to foster a common sense of identity amongst their populations. A successful Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 8, 2004 132 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies outcome of such a search for national identity would clearly assist the ruling elites in their quest for legitimate authority. This then would at least act as a counterbalance to the various disintegrative pressures caused by inter-ethnic conflict, religious divisions or tensions between urban and rural populations .2 National unity has been valued above all and it is the common theme of innumerable official state discourses. Certainly national unity has been the dominant theme promulgated by both Nguemist dictators in Equatorial Guinea. When the new rulers of independent Africa inherited the colonial state they embraced the ideology of nationalism, an ideology which maintains that "the political and national unit should be congruent" (Gellner 1). The state was the dominant political unit—the nation had yet to be formed. Nationalism has therefore been the dominant ideology of the African state system so that African socialists, Afro-Marxists and African state-capitalists have also been nationalists. Since the early 1980s, in the West, there has been a great burst of academic interest in theories of nationalism and a number of important works have been published . Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson argued in various ways that the nation is a modern phenomenon, with industrialisation, mass education and communication as well as print-capitalism being important in the tecent emergence of nations. Anderson wrote about the "imagined community," arguing that through various processes of modernization, it was possible for large numbers of people, who had no way of all knowing each orher, to be formed into a single community, the nation . He saw the Creole pioneers of Latin America as being the first to be able to "imagine the nation." On the other hand, Anthony D. Smith has stressed the importance of ethnic roots in the process of nation -formation while Adrian Hastings suggested a role for the Christian idea of the "chosen-people": both see nations as having deeper ethnic roots than the modernists had argued with Hastings, for example, pointing to Saxon England as the prototypical nation (35-36). How might this impinge on the nation -building projects in Africa? Clearly if African elites, trying to rule a complex multi-ethnic society, had to rely on some common ethnic roots to build the nation, the...