Deconstructing the figure of the dictator in Ramón Esono Ebalé’s La pesadilla de Obi

Abstract As a country which, since gaining independence from Spain in 1968, has only known two autocratic regimes and is currently headed by Africa’s longest-serving dictator, the question of freedom weighs heavily on the literature of Equatorial Guinea. Although the Hispanophone tradition is little explored within African literary criticism, writers from the Hispanophone literary tradition of Equatorial Guinea, much like their Anglophone and Francophone counterparts, address the question of dictatorship and its repercussions in varied ways. Joaquim Mbomio Bacheng’s description of Hispanophone literature as “a song of freedom in its eternal quest for a new world” is very telling of Equatoguinean writers’ response to the stranglehold that dictatorship has over the country. One contemporary Hispanophone author whose life and works exemplify Bacheng’s observation, and arguably confront the subject of dictatorship most forcefully, is Ramón Esono Ebalé, renowned for his activism and visually arresting texts. This paper undertakes a close reading of Ebalé’s graphic novel La pesadilla de Obi [Obi’s nightmare], which employs the power of both visual and written texts to fashion a new status for Obi, its dictator-turned-ordinary-citizen protagonist. I argue that the deconstruction of the image of the dictator serves as a solid basis for compelling its target audience to formulate a counter-discourse to destabilize established notions about Obiang.