Leoncio Evita Enoy

Who is Leoncio Evita Enoy?

Leoncio Evita Enoy was an Equatoguinean writer, painter, and educator, widely credited as the author of the first known novel written by a Guinean, "Cuando los combes luchaban" ("When the Combes Fought"), published in Madrid in 1953 during the Spanish colonial period. Trained as a teacher, he worked at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios (School of Arts and Trades) in Bata on the Río Muni mainland, where he also practiced and taught painting. He was a regular contributor to Poto-Poto, a Spanish colonial-era literary magazine that gave some of the earliest Guinean writers a platform, helping open one of the first written outlets for indigenous Equatoguinean voices under Spanish rule. His novel, drawing on Fang village life and colonial-era social change, is now studied as the founding text of Equatoguinean literature in Spanish, a body of work that stayed small for decades because of the country's tiny population, colonial-era restrictions, and later the isolation imposed by the Macías Nguema dictatorship after independence in 1968. Evita Enoy died in 1996, having spent his working life as both a visual artist and a pioneering literary figure whose single novel opened a space that later writers, including María Nsué Angüe and Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, would go on to fill.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Leoncio Evita Enoy" · Marvin A. Lewis, An Introduction to the Literature of Equatorial Guinea: Between Colonialism and Dictatorship (University of Missouri Press, 2007)