Donato Ndongo and the Literary Exile

Abstract

The writer Donato Ndongo portrays the situation in Equatorial Guinea, his country, in which a dictatorship has become a political, social and cultural structure, and where fear dominates society and prevents intellectuals to express freely their thinking. In order to understand Ndongo’s work one must understand the problem underlying the artistic production in his native country and the conditions of reception in the country where he writes and of the audiences that might reach his work. Such audiences gain a singular significance as the author is forced to publish from exile, in the country that was once the colonizer, Spain, and to work for wide ranging audiences, from cultural systems too far from that of Equatorial Guinea, and thus, with no knowledge of the specificities there existent.