Donato Ndongo is the most prominent literary voice from Equatorial Guinea. Born in Niefang in 1950, he has spent almost his entire adult life exiled in Spain. His first novel, Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra (Shadows of Your Black Memory [1987]), has become essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Spanish colonialism in the country. His second novel, Los poderes de la tempestad (The Powers of the Tempest [1997]), examines the effects of Francisco Macías’s dictatorial regime (1968–1979), the first government after independence, on Equatorial Guinea. His third and fourth novels, El metro (The Metro [2007]) and ¿Qué mató al joven Abdoulaye Cissé? (What Killed Young Abdoulaye Cissé? [2023]), focus on African migration towards Spain.
¿Qué mató al joven Abdoulaye Cissé? was initially conceived as a short story to be included in the book La siembra estéril (A Barren Sowing [2025]). In the end, Ndongo published it as a standalone novel, leaving La siembra estéril as a collection of four stories: “Mikue,” “Premonición” (“Premonition”), “La siembra estéril” (“A Barren Sowing”) and “Regreso a Mengong” (“Return to Mengong”). The final piece, which engages with both the diaspora and the return to Africa, resonates with the themes present in Ndongo’s two most recent novels. “Premonición” and “La siembra estéril,” which focus on the Equatorial Guinean generation exiled in Spain in the 1970s, are in dialogue with his Macías novel. “Mikue” reflects its author’s interest in women as a literary subject.
At just about 370 words, “Mikue” is more of a micro-story than a short story. Written in lyrical prose, it features a woman turning fifty. Long gone are the innocence and dreams of her youth. She has endured the challenges of life—orphaned at an early age, several of her own children die—alongside the burdens of patriarchal tradition, which allows men to make the key decisions in women’s lives. As the story opens, the protagonist approaches old age in solitude. In a collection of short stories with such a brief opening piece, one might expect “Mikue” to serve as a kind of prologue. If that were the case here, its connection to the rest of the book is subtle, elliptical. And yet, perhaps this woman’s life is the first instance of sowing a barren land evoked by the book’s title.
Set in 1979, “Premonición” recounts another kind of sowing: that of the Equatorial Guinean exiles in Spain at the end of the Macías regime. News arrives that the dictator has been overthrown in a coup, but there is widespread confusion about its consequences. The protagonist, Aurelio Atebá, is eager to contribute to the changes needed to make Equatorial Guinea a viable country. Still, he doubts whether the new strongman will bring freedom and democracy. The story captures the hopes and uncertainties of a lost Equatorial Guinean generation, caught between the rejection of their homeland—Macías’ regime had aggressively persecuted intellectuals—and the racism they faced in Spain during the late Franco and early post-Franco years.
“La siembra estéril” returns to the character of Aurelio Atebá and introduces his friend Ananías Esono, another fictional Equatorial Guinean exile in Spain. The character of Esono is one of the book’s highlights. Ndongo offers a rich intellectual portrait (complete with readings and ideological affinities) of a postcolonial African Marxist in the 1970s. The portrayal of this idealist’s disillusionment as he watches socialist regimes such as the USSR, Cuba, China, and North Korea offer support to Macías is devastating. The same can be said about the scenes in which he pleads in vain with Cuban and Chinese diplomats, hoping to sway their governments’ positions. The story’s ending—describing the exiled Equatorial Guinean intellectuals who rush to return to serve the new strongman—is both sobering and revealing. For readers interested in the challenges faced by postcolonial African nations, this is the story that offers the most insight.
Ndongo’s Pan-Africanist vision emerges in “Regreso a Mengong,” the story that closes the book. After twenty-one years in France, Thibaut returns to Cameroon, eager to reintegrate into his native country and to hear the ancestral stories of his homeland after a long silence. Thibaut flies on a plane but, simultaneously, recalls the reasons he left Cameroon, his two decades in France, his marriage and children, and the interactions and frustrations both in his European life and in Africa. The protagonist is carried away by his memories, inhabiting three or four different temporal and spatial planes while in the air. At 84 pages, “Regreso a Mengong” is more of a novella than a short story, with a structure that reflects Ndongo’s storytelling style, reminiscent of Fang oral traditions. Like the mbom nvet (troubadour), Ndongo does not simply recount events in linear order, but conveys the motives, thoughts, and memories of his characters. The result is a multilayered narrative of intricately interwoven planes.
None of these stories quite attain the brilliance of Ndongo’s first three novels, which represent the pinnacle of contemporary African literature in the Spanish language. Yet they remain the work of a highly skilled craftsman whose style is as rich and polished as ever. Compared to his novels, La siembra estéril offers a less subjective and more sociological and political perspective on the postcolonial debacle in Equatorial Guinea and other African countries. That perspective alone makes the book worth reading. Besides, the central metaphor running through La siembra estéril is highly relevant in the broader Pan-African context today, given the emigration forced upon so many young Africans. At the same time, in the case of Equatorial Guinea, the soil is particularly barren, as the efforts of Ndongo’s fictional exiled intellectuals fail in the aftermath of Macías’s fall from power.
One of the intellectuals who returned to the country in 1979 was Leandro Mbomío (1938–2012), a well-known Equatorial Guinean sculptor. Ndongo dedicates this book to Mbomío’s memory: “Sembrador en tierra baldía, no fue profeta en su tierra” (“Sower on a waste land, he was not a prophet in his homeland”). Read predominantly abroad, where his oeuvre is garnering growing recognition, Ndongo is even less of a prophet in his homeland than Mbomío. The sculptor’s masterpiece Elat Ayong (Union of the Tribes) now welcomes visitors to the National Library of Equatorial Guinea, an institution that, tellingly, does not hold a single one of Ndongo’s books.
