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chapter four The Turn to Africa: Daniel Jones Mathama’s Una lanza por el Boabí (1962) Antonio Pigafetta never saw Magellan again. The European survivors of the battle on Mactan Island proposed a trade for the body of the captain but Lapu Lapu refused. The victorious indigenous king declared that “they would not give him up for the greatest riches in the world, but that they intended to keep him as a perpetual memorial” (Pigafetta, 89). The ‹rst circumnavigator would be nothing of the sort. Meanwhile, wounded by a poisoned arrow in the forehead, Pigafetta recuperated shipboard while two dozen of his peers were tricked into going ashore on Cebu island (90). Most were slaughtered in an ambush.1 The remainder of the ›eet then had further adventures in Southeast Asian waters and lands, including the Spice Islands , before committing to the radical decision, as Pigafetta understatedly puts it, of “laying course between west and southwest” and entering the Indian Ocean (147). Pigafetta dispatches the long trip back to Spain in just a few bits of prose. Upon reaching Africa, he seems to ‹nd little worth narrating . His entire account of the voyage from the Cape of Good Hope to the Cape Verde islands comprises the laconic comment, “we sailed northwest for two months continually without taking any refreshment or repose” and an acknowledgment of the deaths along the way of another twenty-one shipmates (147). He makes no mention of the West African island of Fernando Poo, named for a Portuguese mariner who preceded to the seas his compatriot Magellan. But the turn inward that Pigafetta never makes toward that island, either in prose or water, corresponds inversely to the turns outward that the denizens of Fernando Poo would initiate centuries later in launching a globalized literary tradition in Spanish. Neither Pigafetta on sighting Spanish sands anew nor the empire that launched the ›eet of Magellan in the ‹rst place would have foreseen that, in the wake of 154 the circumnavigation, Africans would appear one day on Spanish shores as well. By bypassing in silence western Africa and, in particular, Fernando Poo, Pigafetta left out of the story of the voyage the disparate lands that eventually would form the nation of Equatorial Guinea. Yet just as Pedro Paterno and José Rizal, the ‹rst Filipino novelists, would follow Pigafetta to Spain in a twinned trajectory, so too would Guinean intellectuals many decades thereafter. Once again, the arrivals in Madrid and Barcelona of subjects from virtually ignored faraway colonies would create a cartographic conundrum . After all, a nowhere on one map is a somewhere to those whose lives mark it, and when they head to a metropole they never do leave the periphery behind. Colonies and capitals result so intertwined as to become unresolvable to either. Similarly, the life of Pigafetta resounds with the death of Magellan, whose corpse stayed on Mactan Island even as its ghost sailed onward around the world. That circumnavigation continues still, coming to completions now and then but never to conclusions. The twentieth -century Guinean writers who joined the macrohistorical journey to Spain of Pigafetta, Paterno, and Rizal would demonstrate the Magellan fallacy again. The consequences of globalization are uncontrollable, regardless the powers of those who presume to put the whirls of the world in order by pen or by sword. The turn to Africa arrives however the continent is claimed to be constrained and contained, with words or without. As a transoceanic phenomenon, African literature in Spanish emerges from a discontinuous series of Western absences. These include the Magellanic voyage no longer led by Magellan; the Pigafetta narrative that elides the return route northward toward Spain; the possession on paper by Spain of sub-Saharan lands that was not immediately matched by substantive Iberian presences there; and the persistent African invisibility in the story of 1898 that is still taught throughout the Spanish-speaking world and its corresponding academic departments. In that year, Spain lost in a war to the United States and consequently, by nearly all accounts, its ‹nal remaining colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. The fact that colonies did remain thereafter in imperial control, most notably Spanish Guinea and Spanish Sahara, tends to go unrecognized, as does the protectorate that Spain ran over much of northern Morocco from 1912 to 1956. Redoubled Spanish efforts in the twentieth century at consolidating colonialism in western Africa did little to place on international maps the geopolitical spaces known today as Equatorial Guinea...

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