Equatorial Guinea: Alejandra Salmerón Ntutumu: ‘The Mangue Sisters’ and other African tales in Spanish so racially marginalized children have references | Future Planet

Rédaction Africa Links 24 with Virginia Vadillo

Alejandra Salmerón grew up listening to stories about fantastic places, imposing queens, and magical animals that her mother told her. However, in the books she had access to in her native Murcia, she couldn’t find any of those characters. In reality, she couldn’t find anyone who was like her.

In the nineties, Salmerón was the only black girl —besides her sister— in her entire school, and her only positive references were those stories from the African oral tradition. Three decades later, this telecommunications engineer has launched the Potopoto project, through which she has just published “Las hermanas Mangue”. The book includes eight of those stories so that other racialized children do not feel the emptiness that she remembers from her childhood, and realize that the protagonists of the stories can also be like them.

Salmerón was born in Murcia, to a Spanish father and a mother from Equatorial Guinea. Her second name, Evui, does not appear on her ID, but her second surname, Ntutumu, does. Officially, she has always had a Spanish surname: her mother arrived on the peninsula in the sixties, when the small Central African country was still a Spanish colony. Both have dealt with the constant question throughout their lives: “Where are you from?”. “When I answer that I am from Murcia, they automatically ask where I was born. It doesn’t matter if I have a Murcian accent and say ‘acho’ or ‘bonico’”, she explains.

As an adult, Salmerón Ntutumu realized that she lived “in a predominantly white world” in all senses: in movies, books, events, news, jobs. “No one had ever told me that a black woman could be an engineer, writer… Only my mother, through her stories. I began to feel the need to value what she had taught me, to strengthen my identity, to heal wounds that I was not even aware of having”, she explains.

With this awareness of the racism she had endured, Salmerón Ntutumu founded the Afromurcia en Movimiento Association in 2017 with her sister Belinda. This was the first association in the Murcia region to bring together people of African descent and organize activities to raise awareness and empower African culture through workshops and seminars on education in diversity. That same year she published her first book, “El viaje de Ilombe”, an illustrated story about an eight-year-old Equatoguinean girl, the protagonist and heroine of a great adventure.

Now, seven years later, “Las hermanas Mangue and other African children’s stories” is published, a collection of eight stories, mostly from Equatorial Guinea, illustrated by another Afro-Murcian, Adaora Onwuasoanya. In her case, the absence of references in childhood and adolescence was total: her mother was from Murcia and her father, Nigerian, barely spoke to her about his country or traditions. Like Salmerón, she did not find black characters or protagonists in her stories.

Salmerón Ntutumu’s decision to publish her two books through her own publishing project, Potopoto (which means “mud” in the Fang language of Equatorial Guinea) is because she did not find any other editorial in Africa Links 24 “driven by Afros for Afros”. Afro-Spanish literature is scarce, as confirmed by Deborah Ekoka, who coordinated the United Minds bookstore in Valencia for eight years, currently with a catalog of 2,000 titles, all linked to the Afro world, but mostly translations from other languages. For children’s literature, production is particularly scarce.

Camila Monasterio also realized this lack of references when she started reading stories to her daughter. With a Senegalese father, the girl has had to listen to comments about her skin color and hair “since she was born”, she says. And with a total absence of black protagonists in children’s stories. A biologist by profession and very involved in creating scientific educational content for children, Monasterio decided to make a book tailored to her daughter, self-published under the title “La historia de Awa”, which was reviewed by members of the Afro community, including Salmerón Ntutumu.

“I didn’t want to fall into stereotypes myself,” Monasterio explains, as she believes that there is a lack of “a lot of training” at all levels to address racism correctly. This is an idea shared by Helena Grande, who has a 10-year-old racialized son, for whom she even colored all the characters that appeared in his textbooks, because they were all white. “When I was a child, I read stories about white people and could see myself reflected in those characters, think that I could be that protagonist. But my son finds it harder to see himself reflected, to empathize”, she says. Grande is one of the members of the Ukujai Association of Mothers of African Descendants, based in Madrid. One of the many projects of the organization is the creation of a library with “Afro protagonists and characters” to offer a vision closer to the “real world”.

However, that diversity is not always so clear, as exposed by Diarry Goloko, a French woman of Senegalese origin who has been living in

Ntutumu will focus her efforts through Potopoto on a training program for secondary school teachers and trainers this year. The involvement of teachers, she believes, is essential to tackle situations of racism, but also to “empower” Afro minors, to delve deeper into the positive aspects of diversity, African culture, as tools against rootlessness or lack of self-esteem. She is convinced that the path has begun to be paved and will bear fruit: “It happened a few years ago with feminism and now the gender perspective is beginning to be noticed in all areas. Now it is time to take steps to include another perspective, that of diversity.”

Read the original article(Spanish) on EL Pais