The well-known expression “Africa begins at the Pyrenees,” by which Spain is placed outside of Europeanness and civilization, summarizes Spain’s “orientalist and orientalized history” (Epps 2010: 156; Ugarte and Vilaros 2006). Moreover, the expression delineates the southern borders of the diverse nationalist positions inside the Spanish state: for numerous Catalan nationalists the turn of phrase becomes “Africa begins at the Ebro River,” while for scores of Spanish nationalists the expression establishes that “Africa begins at the Atlas Mountains” (Epps 2010: 156). Ironically, Europe, as in the European Union, nowadays begins in northern Africa, at Ceuta and Melilla, Spain's southernmost cities and two of the gateways to Fortress Europe (Bermudez 2018: 4–5). The fluid and symbolic nature of the geographic borders—the Pyrenees, the Ebro River, the Atlas Mountains—that conflate the Spanish nation with the African continent in the above-mentioned set of phrases points to the complexity of establishing where identity begins—and where it ends. And, as I argue here, this can be read as a manifestation of the double consciousness central to Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (1993) and to the experience of exile and cultural displacement in the writings of Equatoguinean authors, Francisco Zamora Loboch (1948–) and Donato Ndongo Bidyogo (1950–).

Within the myriad debates on the loss of Empire, on modernity and the urgency of Europeanization, Spain's own Africanness was an obsessive political, intellectual, and literary topic of discussion by the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century (see Ángel Ganivet (1987) and Joaquín Costa (1900), among others). Spain's own colonial history intertwines the nation closely with Morocco and the Maghreb, but also with sub-Saharan Africa, specifically with Equatorial Guinea—situated in the Bight of Biafra, in the Gulf of Guinea, the nation comprises the mainland area known as Río Muni and the islands of Bioko, Annobón, Corisco, and Elobey. This territorial demarcation inherited from colonial times fails to respect and acknowledge the country's actual ethnic, social, political, or geographical realities (Sampedro Vizcaya 2008).