The Last Mission: Religion and Colonial Francoism in Spanish Representations of Africa

Abstract

During Francoism, Spanish cultural production on Equatorial Guinea placed missionaries in a central narrative role, exalting their evangelizing labor. This article concentrates on the representation of the colonial mission in works by lay authors who shared an ideological affinity with the regime and received its institutional support: the documentary Una cruz en la selva (1946), the film Misión blanca (1946) and the novel Tierra negra (1957). These works branded a kind of Spanish Catholic colonialism as superior to other European models, but despite their propagandistic intention, they also reveal a series of anxieties and contradictions inherent to the Spanish colonial project.