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Daniel Macías Fernández. El africanismo castrense, 1909-1927: una cultura de guerra en la España del primer tercio del siglo XX. Trabajo presentado para su aprobación como tesis doctoral dentro del programa Doctorado en Historia Contemporánea de la Universidad de Cantabria. Santander, marzo de 2013. 1 Agradecimientos. El presente trabajo, desde su génesis a su cierre, ha caminado en la dirección adecuada gracias a la inestimable orientación académica del Doctor Fidel Ángel Gómez Ochoa, quien desde sus rigurosas aportaciones y correcciones, ha impulsado constantemente mi trabajo. A él expreso mi agradecimiento por su excepcional interés y dedicación. A este agradecimiento sumo, por sus consejos y apoyo en mi labor investigadora al Doctor José Manuel Goñi y a mi antiguo Jefe de Departamento en el IES Ricardo Bernardo Bernard Mañanes. Agradezco, asimismo, todas las ayudas recibidas en los diferentes archivos y bibliotecas consultados para la búsqueda de los datos necesarios para confeccionar la urdimbre de este estudio. Y quisiera expresar mi especial agradecimiento a Luís, quien desde la Sala de Consultas del Archivo General Militar de Madrid apoyó todo mi proceso de búsqueda documental. Por último, quiero expresar mi gratitud a todas las personas que han estado cerca de mí y me han ayudado de distintas formas a seguir adelante con la presente tesis doctoral. Aunque son demasiado numerosas para que pueda nombrarlas a todas, no obstante, quiero expresar mi reconocimiento a todas ellas. Y a Beatriz por animarme a dar un último impulso. Mención aparte merecen mis padres María Esther y Manuel Mariano y mi hermano Guillermo, quienes han ejercido de diques contra las olas del desánimo y sin los cuales no hubiera podido alumbrar esta investigación. 2 Introduction. My personal interest in military subject matter is a result of my profound admiration for my father. The time he spent in the Spanish air force endowed him with a vast amount of adventures and anecdotal accounts which aroused my deep interest in the institution. Much to my mother’s torment, a home viewing of military cinema whenever the opportunity presented itself made an interest in wars and their history each time greater. The next important milestone was on reading General Erwin Rommel’s biography which was an account of his time spent in the North African desert. From this moment on Africa and war became one for me. A growing curiosity for all that was military gradually aroused and led me to read all types of publications dealing with wars and the history of mankind. This passion was almost the cause of my losing interest in the same as some of the works I came across were truly monotonous. Historical studies allowed me to understand how past knowledge should be dealt with. The Spanish American Stanley Payne represents my first academic reference in my tendency towards the subject matter in which I already had an interest. The works of Gabriel Cardona and Fernando Puell uncovered the possibility of elaborating a complete history of the Spanish army. However it was An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to- Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (1999), by the New Zealander Joanna Bourke, the work which later on made its greatest impact as it provides a wide range of psychological, sociological, anthropological communicative, literary and cinematic references which alongside history create a complete and complex account of the war phenomenon. Bourke’s book represents a literary sensation with respect to my idea of military history. On finishing my history degree and armed with the historical works already outlined and an analytical perspective derived from the Anglo Saxon world I set about investigating the Moroccan Wars. My choosing this episode in particular of Spanish contemporary is due on the one hand to the fact that it deals with a subject which to my knowledge was practically unknown and went unnoticed; on the other hand it was the principal manifestation of colonialism which took place in the Arabic- Islamic world which I was already interested in. Spanish historians have hardly fostered military excepting “Praetorianism” initially studied by Payne and his outstanding pupil Caroline Boyd. The Moroccan Wars were not an exception to this general rule. These colonial wars, similar to what happened with many other contemporary military conflicts in Spain have been studied mainly by military personnel, many of which 3 motivated by a duty to highlight patriotic glories. The intention was never purely scientific. Furthermore, many of these studies are lacking in an adequate preparation to investigate history, something which caused many analytical errors in the historical field. Making the situation even graver was the fact that military personnel were elaborating military history centered exclusively on military questions. All of the above contributed to the fact that history overwhelmingly descriptive at the best of times was very far from scientific history. Therefore on becoming familiar with the Moroccan Wars I came up against vast amounts of data and few profound investigations on the matter. As an exception some authors made reference to a sector of the Spanish colonial army denominated africanists a term which at that time caused widespread polysemy and was used without anyone bothering to define it. It was used to designate different things from Spanish geographical societies in the nineteenth century to the militia involved in the military coup of 1936. Everybody seemed to think they knew what africanism was and who africanists were beginning with the fact that Franco was a distinguished member of this military family. Franco was an africanist and what more “tout court”, but this unquestionable reality is far from providing not even a rough estimate of a phenomenon which was complex and whose adequate comprehension and cataloging calls for a detailed analysis of africanism throughout its formation. This is the leitmotiv of this doctoral thesis. In order to reach its objective the paper has grouped into thematic chapters making up two different groups; one dealing with the background of africanism (chapters III-VI), and the other with the constitution of africanism during the course of the Moroccan Wars (chapters VII-X). Opting for this thematic structure instead of a chronological type has given rise to having to solve quite a few problems such as possible overlapping, repetitions and moving forwards and backwards in time. An adequate reading of the paper requires the reader to keep in mind that each chapter constitutes in itself a separate and complete thematic study whilst at the same time is related to the rest. Chapter II is the state of the question of africanism. This section with the firm intention of carrying out this task adequately deals with a global evaluation of the state of Spanish military history within which it is possible at the same time to understand the scarcity of studies related to africanism. As a result of the conclusion reached once this task has been carried out we have continued on the one hand to follow an historical line 4 where we insert this investigation and the methodology with which sources are treated and the resources available, and on the other hand to establish an hypothesis. In chapter III, “El militarismo español y la pesada herencia de la crisis finisecular”, we try to highlight that the African identity didn’t originate all of a sudden in Morocco but was the result of the Spanish turn of the century crisis, whose effects continued on into the first decades of the twentieth century. The 98 experience became part of the mythology of the Spanish military and furthermore marked the before and after with regard to political and national society conceptions. In chapter IV, titled “El regeneracionismo castrense”, we assert that there was intellectual Spanish militia immersed in Regenerationalism. This section analyses the line of military regeneration which we have denominated “irrationalist-conservatories” due to the fact that it deals with the cultural base upon which the most outstanding africanists constituted a large part of what was their imaginary distinction. It was characterized by spiritualism, warmongering, imperialism and praetorianism traits which were to be found in africanism. In chapter V, “Las influencias del ambiente ideológico finisecular”, we tackle the mark which some trains of thought left on the Spanish army. Biased by the “Disaster” experience and open to alternative ideas other than a liberal universe which fit well with idiosyncrasy, there was a strong attraction to warmongering, irrationality, vitalism or social Darwinism. Our interest in tackling this question is to highlight the European influence in many ideas which shaped the Spanish army’s conduct in the first third of the twentieth century. On the whole, many Spanish militias at the time, more active, to be understood in intellectual terms, participants in the both national and international uprisings of that time, strongly pervaded the anti-liberal ideological magma. Chapter VI, which we have called “Civilización frente a barbarie”, is centered on the characterization and definition of the imperialist speech ever present in the Spanish militia who later on joined the africanism ranks. Our analysis demonstrates that the imperialist ideas of the Spanish army were similar to those of other European armies of the time. They were made up of the same ingredients to be found in French, British or German colonialism, appearing alongside such irregular elements such as philanthropic justification of the colonial task and the use of brutal force to bring it about. The reading the future africanists made of the Moroccan experience cannot be understood exactly if the ideological and cultural substratum with which they arrived in 5 the Protectorates is not taken into account, constituted by the irrational philosophical conceptions and the imperialist ideas pointed out. Not only ideas taken from different disciplines made to measure came from this substratum but also a group of group of traditional stereotypes played a part.

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