Guinea

Equatorial Guinea is a small African state perched above the Gulf of Guinea and only 40 years back an unknown Spanish colony. Presently, apart from having one of the largest oil deposits in the continent, as well as plenty of natural resources in the form of virgin forests and wild game, the country suffers one of the most brutal, repressive, corrupt dictatorships on the planet. We could probably state without fear of being mistaken that today Equatorial Guinea is Africa’s authentic heart of darkness. On stage, Blanca Idoia, a Basque anthropologist who traveled to the continent led by an NGO, is arbitrarily detained in a road-check, brutally tortured and finally condemned to death in a parody of a trial by the Guinean military. Miraculously escaping, she will be forced to initiate a desperate flee across the jungle with the help of the natives, but especially with the help of Gabriel Biné, a Guinean fugitive like herself, who will become her guardian angel, her friend, her lover… and her nemesis. Seeing through Blanca’s eyes, feeling the beatings of her heart, the reader will find stunned in each page the most extreme forms of horror and beauty, till the point when he will come to look upon Africa as he had never done before. With “Guinea” you will enter into an African jail, you will cross the jungle trying to survive its numberless dangers, diseases, and wild animals; you will bump into one the most mysterious races in the world, you will be face to face with death, and you will fight for a people and a man, until crossing all the limits of sanity till reaching an unforgettable end.

But “Guinea” is not only and disquieting adventure novel. Since it takes place in a country known to its author and one in which he experienced first hand its marvels and its miseries, Fernando Gamboa also shows us real and troubling aspects of a place indescribably beautiful, but despotically governed by criminals and tyrants. So that this novel is not “simply” a novel, it is also a testimony in the first person of an unknown reality for the great majority; one which thrives to capture in the retina and in the consciousness of the readers and unimaginable reality, that without a doubt, we should all keep in mind.