Ekomo's Interventions

María Nsue Angüe’s Ekomo (1985) has been termed the first novel published by a woman in Equatorial Guinea, the only Spanish-speaking nation-state in Sub-Saharan Africa; indeed, by some criteria of genre, it may be considered the first by any Guinean author after the country’s independence. ¹ Recounted through the voice of a female character who comes to denounce many of her traditional society’s taboos and norms, and set at the height of the European colonization of Africa, at an indeterminate moment of the 1950s or 1960s, the novel condemns alike the insufficiency of both Western medical and religious systems and values, on the one hand, and their ancestral counterparts on the other, destabilized by colonial intervention. ² As critics have remarked, Nsue Angüe—a writer and storyteller of traditional oral narratives ³ —fears and deplores above all the progressive and irremediable occidentalization of Africa, endowing her novel with a transcendent dimension in which the fate of its principal characters epitomizes the tragedy of African peoples, civilizations, and cultures. ⁴