Theatre
El hombre y la costumbre
Not translated into English
Pancracio Esono Mitogo Obono · 1990
Synopsis
In the village of Medzap, Andrés comes to ask for Jesusa's hand and brings, for the nsua, the dowry that Fang custom demands, the sum of six hundred thousand francs. Before the chief Miguel and the assembled village, the girl's father, Pedro, presents the money, and the audience cries scandal. The comedy, studded with proverbs, pits those who make a trade of the dowry against those who remind us that a woman cannot be bought.
Context
The play appeared five years after María Nsué Angüe's book, from the same university publisher, who presented it as the first comedy of Equatorial Guinea, written in the Spanish of the country and faithful to the Bantu proverb according to which custom is man. Critics read in it the drama of the African caught between tradition and modernity, and the gentle dictatorship that tradition exercises over women; Ivorian academics studied it in 2022.
Who it is for
A short comedy in Spanish, for those who want to laugh at the haggling over the dowry and to hear the Spanish of Guinea.
Prizes and reception
Applauded in Equatorial Guinea, it is cited by literary histories as the birth certificate of the country's theatre.
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