ISSN 1653-2244 INSTITUTIONEN FÖR KULTURANTROPOLOGI OCH ETNOLOGI DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY The Rebellion of The Chicken Self‐making, reality (re)writing and lateral struggles in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea By Adelaida Caballero 2015 MASTERUPPSATSER I KULTURANTROPOLOGI Nr 56 ABSTRACT. Historical sources suggest that the bad reputation of Bioko island ―a product of mixed exoticism, fear of death and allure for profit— might have started as early as the first European explorations of sub-Saharan Africa. Today, the same elements seem to have been reconfigured, producing a similar result in the Western imagination: cultural exoticization, fear of state-sponsored violence and allure for profit are as actual as ever in popular conceptions of Equatorial Guinea. A notion of ongoing terror keeps conditioning the study of the tiny African nation, resulting in media trends and academic discourses polarized by the grand themes of oil/money/corruption and human rights violations —which are highly counterproductive when trying to account for Equatoguineans’ everyday practices, mainly because the violence exerted by the state has shifted in nature. Deploying a triple theoretical framework made up by Michel de Certeau’s (1984) concepts of readers/writers/texts and strategies, Michael Jackson’s (2005) work on being, agency and intersubjectivity, as well as Bayart’s (1993) ‘politics of the belly’, this thesis explores some of the complex cultural and social-psychological strategies that urban populations in Malabo have developed in order to create, sustain and protect the integrity of their social selves while living in inherently oppressive environments. People’s means of personhood negotiation are observed through contemporary systems of beliefs, narratives and practices. I suggest that negotiations are products of, but also preconditions for, the existence of a social apparatus and the integrity of the selves moving within its discursive boundaries. Consequently, Equatoguineans’ strategies for self-making are seen as potentially responsible for reproducing a destructive status quo. This idea is further developed through the concept of lateral struggle, a form of social violence alternative to top-down flows which builds on sociality as culturally calibrated forms of symbolic interaction between selves constructed in a zero sum fashion. The dynamics of lateral struggles are illustrated through ethnographic data on what people phrase as el Guineano’s innate ‘rebelliousness’, which in turn visibilizes processes of collective self-making and the verbalization of negative national stereotypes. Possibilities for the rise of more positive types of personhood based on a habitual splitting of individual self from negative national other are explored. Finally, a brief assessment of how such splitting could be hindering people from collectively writing a ‘homeland’ is made. KEYWORDS: self-making, lateral struggles, Equatorial Guinea, politics of the belly, the practice of everyday life, existential anthropology, creativity, agency, narrativity, display, enunciative procedures, Obiang Nguema, Macías Nguema, postcolonial states, suicides, Mamí Watá Adelaida Caballero / [email protected] to my chicken family Acknowledgements The research for this study was funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency through a Minor Field Studies grant, for which I’m grateful. My debts are with the people who showed me patience and support throughout its realization. I thank lovely Mattias Stålmark for feeding me and taking care of the dog during the many weeks I’ve been ‘somewhere else’, helplessly fused to my desk/bed. I thank Caitlin McEvoy and Jenna García for coercing me every so often into leaving my apartment to join them at some pub: I owe you girls my sanity. Andrés Gómez, for having been an ear when I needed to be heard. I thank Tutu Alicante and Benita Sampedro for their invaluable help at the early stages of this project. Gustau Nerín, for his interest throughout. My infinite gratitude goes to Hannah Appel for her unwavering support from the start ―when every step I took towards Guinea was a step that Guinea took away from me―, and during my time as Visiting Graduate Researcher at UCLA’s Department of Anthropology. Finally, my most sincere acknowledgement to Sverker Finnström, the best supervisor I could ever have gotten, for his time, comments and wise warnings, and for granting me the freedom to do what I love most. Any excesses, misreadings and flaws in content and/or structure are my own. Contents CHAPTER 1: Introduction 1 Objectives 2 Pre-fieldwork assumptions 3 Means and methods 4 Re-orientations 4 Self-making through display, narrativization and practice 5 CHAPTER 2: A little white spot 7 Overview 7 Locating Equatorial Guinea on the map and elsewhere 8 An Equatoguinean, a Mexican and a Spaniard walk into a bar 8 The peninsula, rightfully represented 9 Contested memories / The Franco years 12 On Hitler and the people from the Moon 14 The talk of town 16 “The most pestiferous land…”: Equatorial Guinea in the global eye past and present 20 Human rights crisis 21 Lord of the minerals 22 Fetishism, kleptocracy and mercenaries 23 Camera ready 24 CHAPTER 3: Relational ways of knowing 25 The risks of being ‘objective’ 25 A mestiza/nepantlera perspective 26 Hanging out 28 Creative talking 30 Cross-referencing narratives 32 In vivo dissections / The art of coding 32 Reflections on method and ethical considerations 33 CHAPTER 4: A creative writing of reality 36 Victim dealerships 38 Writers, readers and texts 44 The rebellion of the chicken 45 Outlining the place of Self in the anthropological project 47 CHAPTER 5: Under “a sky with an aura of pure evil” 49 Politics of the belly 50 The postcolonial struggle 51 Dominant groups 52 A classless society 52 Networks 53 Blood Vs ideological affinity 54 Intersubjectivity and the self in the mesh of networks 55 The true value of the ethnic factor 55 Corruption 56 Practice in the Equatoguinean postcolony 58 CHAPTER 6: From rotten yoghurts to mysterious deaths 59 Earn to show 59 Making discursive ends meet 62 The power of enunciation 63 Suicides: a foreigner’s overview 66 Suicides: political assassinations 66 Suicides: the outcome of depression 67 Suicides: cover-up for family feuds/broken alliances 68 Suicides: blood offerings 69 Creating/maintaining selves through enunciative procedures 70 CHAPTER 7: Narrated means for being 72 off the (c)age of myth-making The new black man 73 The schoolchild, the chairman and the church certificate 74 Invisible writings / On witchcraft and the occult 75 The girl, the man and the cat 76 Mermaids: family pacts then and now 77 Ties of blood 79 Unearthly justice 81 Beyond a zebra crossing 83 CHAPTER 8: Somewhere between having and becoming: 85 strategies to divert madness in the homeland of an I who no one is The liberating world of petty retaliation 86 Escaping 87 Interaction transplants 87 Flying away 88 Re-writing the nature of being 90 “Would you treat me to a Fanta?” 93 Who’s doing what 94 On rebelliousness 95 El Guineano or the I who no one is 96 CONCLUSION When the ship sinks 98 Appendix 102 Bibliography 121 Introduction A suffocating heat crawls down the gray raw concrete walls. Outside, a group of children play with what looks like a broken pipe sprouting a thick stream of water. A bunch of roosters, hens and chicks run around their ankles as the gang voices loudly ¡A-gua po-ta-ble! ¡A-gua be-bi- ble!1 in a tone that makes them sound more like a political demonstration than a playing crowd. Inside, as if breaking his way through the moist hot air, a shirtless young man walks back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, careful not to step on the piles of books and small sculptures he’s carefully placed, following a sharp sense of aesthetics, throughout the floor. “Are you listening?” he asks. “That’s what this is about.” The man rubs his hands on a piece of lively colored cloth he would otherwise use to protect the furniture from paint smudges. “And this, what you’re hearing, is everywhere. This can no longer be stopped.” What the young man meant with “this” was precisely what I had been breathing ever since I arrived in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea’s capital, a few weeks earlier: a restlessness, the frantic rhythm of urban life caught up in the aesthetic vertigo of infrastructural change (see Appel, 2012b) along with its subsequent excitement, shiny façades shining back in pre- pubescent pupils. “This can no longer be stopped” was a motto I often heard among the enthusiasts, this is, the locals who were too young to have experienced la triste memoria,2 or among Bioko island’s newest African (re)settlers, the comebackees.3 In “this can no longer be stopped,” ‘this’ means a wave of renewal, of tangible and intangible change, a kind of hope that can’t be tampered with because it’s already out there, growing roots in children’s bodies, silently and invisibly, slowly and organically, safely away from those who might find the word still disturbing. “This” means ‘change’, the overcoming of social trauma by the invention of a new collective memory divided in a before (“when we had nothing”) and an after still undergoing definition through an existential battle between having and becoming. Enthusiasm might seem endemic among the young and the newcomers, but something is pulling down the faces of a different generation. Some say it’s quite normal for people to go insane after a couple of years living in Malabo. That the adult population is collectively 1 Lit. ‘potable water, drinkable water’. 2 Lit. ‘the sad memory’. A body of collectively narrativized experiences suffered by the Equatoguinean people during the years of president Macías’ rule (1968-1979), which was characterized by social chaos, widespread violence and economic/infrastructural decay.