A Spaniard pursues a chimera in the jungles of Equatorial Guinea until he almost goes mad.
In the mid-1940s, in the name of progress, but also of the national-Catholic conquest, Manuel Hernández Sanjuán went up a river to its source convinced that a fang legend was real: convinced of the existence of a sanctuary for ten thousand elephants .
The rowers, their faithful porter Ngono Mbá and Alú, a deaf-mute possessed by an evil spirit, sailed in the canoe.
This is the story between reality and fiction that reproduces
Ten thousand elephants
(Reservoir Books), a graphic novel with echoes of
The Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad but with the Spanish colonial past as a setting.
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Guinean heart of darkness
Hernández Sanjuán (Madrid, 1915-Almería, 2008) was a film director from Madrid whom the journalist Pere Ortín rescued from oblivion twenty years ago.
Hernández Sanjuán did not embark in real life in search of an impossible herd of pachyderms.
But says Ortín, co-author of
Ten Thousand Elephants
with the
Equatorial Guinean illustrator Nzé Esono Ebale, that the missions of the Spanish adventurer went even beyond magical realism.
Hernández Sanjuán shot 31 documentary films over two years in Equatorial Guinea, between anthropology and propaganda;
they were received in the metropolis without penalty or glory.
Ortín rediscovered them and in 2006 published
Mbini
(Altaïr), a book with the incredible photographic legacy provided by the field research of Hernández Sanjuán and his team.
What was missing was the testimony of the other side.
That is what
Ten Thousand Elephants does,
show Spanish colonialism from a perspective that is as different as it is fundamental: that of the colonized.
Another vignette from 'Ten Thousand Elephants', by Pere Ortín and Nzé Esono Ebale.
In 2015 it was made into an animated documentary.
Esono now gives shape on paper to the story of the protagonist, the invented character of Ngono Mbá, and to the expeditions of Hernández Sanjuan.
He was imprisoned in 2017 and international pressure made it easier for him to leave Equatorial Guinea in 2018.
Ngono tells in
Ten Thousand Elephants
that his life changed forever the day he saw “iron float” for the first time: “That day, the day I saw iron float, I knew that those strange people on the ship were coming to stay.”
On the steam
domine
, from Cádiz, were Hernández Sanjuán and three colleagues from his production company, Hermic Films.
Ngono helped them disembark at Bata, loading them onto chairs so they wouldn't get wet on shore.
Many details of the novel drink from reality, such as that movement of whites on the shoulders of blacks.
A constant exercise is developed in the book to overcome the limits of non-fiction.
Ngono, in one of the monologues when he was already old, points out that the colonizers despised their huts out of Eurocentric misunderstanding: “They said that we had nothing in our houses.
I wish they had noticed well.
Because they would have realized that there was nothing that did not have a practical use.
This passage of the work, Ortín details, is a reflection that Don Tomás, Esono's father, made to him.
Manuel Hernández Sanjuán (first from the left) and his team during his expedition to Equatorial Guinea.
The photographs of Hernández Sanjuán's expeditions are combined in the novel with the strokes in Bic de Esono pens, some drawings that came out on the first try and that would be impossible to repeat, according to their creator.
His illustrations expose without drama the humiliation that the daily life of colonialism entailed.
"Under the tropical sun or with the light of a forest lamp, with the ambition of some and the sweat of others, a small Spain is built in Africa," Hernández Sanjuán wrote to his friends in a 1945 letter that reproduces the book .
One of Ortín's favorite novels is
El corazón de las tinieblas
, which is why he concedes that the parallels with Conrad's classic are evident.
Captain Marlow's navigation of the Congo River in search of Kurtz becomes
Ten thousand elephants
on a journey down a river that could be the Utamboni, says the author.
There is the same obsession of Conrad to reach a myth, which is different from the greed of El Dorado, because it is an existential myth that seeks to understand the clash of civilization caused by colonialism and also put oneself to the psychological limit.
Hernández Sanjuán ends in the story lost in his dreams, alienated by not finding the elephants.
It is what he defined as "the spell of Africa", he pointed out in a letter from 1946.
Page from 'Ten Thousand Elephants', Pere Ortín Nzé and Esono Ebale.
It is not clear in
Ten thousand elephants
which side is more irrational, the colonial one or the one that gets carried away by the jungle.
Esono adds that in the novel there is an exchange of roles because when he drew, he felt that he was the one who took the cameras from Hernández Sanjuán.
“The book is above all a dialogue between Ramón and me, there are always two voices”, adds Ortín.
ten thousand elephants
It is the story of a relationship, that of the colonizer and his subject, full of nuances and reflections that transcend the pain of oppression.
But the novel gives an opportunity to the society that emerged from that.
“I say this without rancor”, affirms Ngono, “colonization was a painful birth and therefore its fruit should be highly appreciated.
The pain of the arrival of the whites is too great for us not to want now the child that was born to her."
The porter says at the end of the novel that white people understand nothing about life in Africa.
Hernández Sanjuán is treated kindly in the story, as someone who is a product of his time and sensitive to him, who wants to discover and understand, but who does not succeed.
Why don't they laugh in a tribe when they dance?
“Because dancing is something very serious,
masa
(chief),” Ngono replies.
In the book
Mbini
, Hernández Sanjuán defended the Spanish colonial legacy, and lamented its loss after independence in 1968. Ortín emphasizes that the director was a son of the past and argues that memory, like the one offered by
Ten thousand elephants
, “must be recover it through dialogue, not through confrontation”.
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