What is the Leyenda Negra ?

The leyenda negra or the Black Legend is a term invented by Spanish intellectuals in the early 20th century to give a name to what they saw as the continuous anti-Spanish propaganda which, since the conquest of the Americas, had slowly but surely been causing an unwarranted deterioration in the country’s image, and this, in turn, had infected national self-esteem, created doubts that undermined trust in the State and corroded public morale.

Julián Juderías (1877-1918) via Wikimedia Commons

Although the notion of a leyenda negra already existed in the works of several well-known Spanish writers around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the idea was formally formulated in 1913 by Julián Juderías, an official in Spain’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in his prize-winning essay on Spain’s image abroad which was published in the journal, La Ilustración Europea y Americana.

In other words, the original concept of the black legend dates back to a period in Spanish history when Spain had just lost the last vestiges of its great American empire.

Throughout the 19th century Spain was losing its colonial possessions. From Mexico to Chile, the former Spanish colonies rebelled and took their independence. The final blow came in what became known as the Disaster of 1898, when Spain was humiliated in war by the US armed forces, to whom the empire was forced to surrender all remnants of its foreign possessions. Thus it was that the US took control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam. After 500 years, one of the first modern European empires had come to an end. Spain sank into depression and succumbed to a long period of low national esteem. Not only had an empire been lost, but also its reputation had suffered a severe blow..

This is the moment when the idea of the Black Legend was born. It arose as a mechanism to blame all the ills afflicting the country on the malevolent meddling of foreign powers. So it was that an excuse for the loss of Spanish greatness was formulated. Thus, the sense of being defeated was somewhat mitigated. It was more comfortable to consider that a colony had been fooled by an English conspiracy or American propaganda than to think that the people of the colonies really wanted independence from Spain.

In this way, the development of a national inferiority complex was prevented and, over time, the legend came to form a protective psychological shield that deflected further offence to national pride.

From the beginning, the expression has been very well received by historians and the politicians and ideologues of Spanish nationalism and populism; it has always served them as an instrument to combat the introverted tendency of national self-criticism.

The reason the concept went viral overnight is that it became a political tool. ‘The wolf is at the door’ is a simple trick that is as old as the hills, but it is still very effective. If you are a politician or military man and you want the population of a country to stop arguing with each other, to show solidarity and make common cause, one of the tried and tested techniques you can take advantage of is to identify an external enemy, one that would serve to refocus public attention outside the country, blaming rival nations for the particular failure of the moment.

In this case, the creation of the black legend offered the opportunity to lay the blame for the disintegration of the empire on Spain’s European rivals who had painted a false image of a backward, superstitious and violent nation at the head of a destructive empire. It was a conspiracy of hispanophobes, protestants, communists, jews, freemasons and all the liars of Perfidious Albion: all the scum of the earth.

It was they who, over the centuries, had been fomenting discontent throughout the empire, and they who had been stoking the Creole political anger that eventually led to the various uprisings against Spanish sovereignty and culminated in the Disaster of 1898.

This 16th century drawing by the Belgian Theodor de Bry was inspired by the «*Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias*» published in 1552, a famous denunciation of the cruelty of the conquest written by Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Spanish Dominican friar who accompanied the conquistadors. Such illustrations characterise the *leyenda negra*.

One of the major central themes of the leyenda negra is that Spain’s enemies have been trying for centuries to tarnish the country’s image through negative propaganda that invents, exaggerates and lies about the events that took place in the acquisition of the American colonies. Especially exaggerated are the mortal sins committed by the conquistadors: the atrocities they carried out in order to enrich themselves, the looting and plundering of gold and silver and the crimes they committed against humanity.

Fernando Cervantes, the respected Mexican historian, in his recently published book Conquistadores eloquently details the origins of the legend and argues in favour of it. He asserts that the world of the Conquistadors «was not the cruel, backward, obscurantist and fanatical myth that the legend claims, but the world of the crusades of the late Middle Ages that witnessed the eradication of the last vestiges of Muslim rule in continental Europe».

(Let us overlook the internal contradiction implicit in the sentence in which Cervantes denies that the expulsion of the Muslims was not «cruel, backward, obscurantist and fanatical». Moreover, we will not conclude by extrapolation that «the eradication of the last vestiges of Muslim rule in continental Europe» was any heroic, noble and civilising feat).

There are a number of reasons traditionally adduced to justify or condone the actions of the conquistadors, some of which are echoed by Cervantes.

1 Since the inauguration of the concept of the black legend every enthusiastic supporter of the Spanish empire feels obliged to preface his account of events during the conquest with the observation that we should not judge the behaviour of the conquistadors by today’s standards. They say that the morality of our modern society is new and more sophisticated. They hold that people then did not think the same way as we do today. They were Christians but Christianity was a different thing – no less dedicated to the Lord, but more muscular and visceral. This is also what I was taught at uni, including by Fernando Cervantes himself.

In other words, we have to accept the violence of past centuries, dismiss it as inevitable and say to ourselves, «That was in the past” or «Just close your eyes and ignore it”.

I have never accepted this rationalisation. The conquerors knew what they were doing. They simply chose their own interests over the welfare of the indigenous people.

The crews of the ships that sailed to the Indies were not chosen for their eagerness to preach the gospel. Most of the volunteers who signed up for the adventure of discovering new continents were people who risked everything because they had nothing to lose. Many were poor people, criminals and scoundrels. Many were fleeing from justice. When they signed up for the adventure of discovering the Americas they had been promised gold and the crews of the ships went for it. Of course, the officers in charge of the expeditions were more professional. They had been chosen by the Crown’s agents and represented the king’s interests. So they were in a difficult position; they had to mediate between the conflicting desires of the men on board (to get rich as quickly as possible) and the dictates of the monarch (to find gold and bring it back to the royal coffers as soon as possible, and at the same time to convert the natives to Christianity and make them subjects of the throne).

2 No conquest took place because the tribes did not possess a country to conquer.

3 The so-called conquerors only formed alliances with tribes already disaffected from the other ruling tribes.

4 It was the imported European diseases that decimated the indigenous people. The alleged Spanish violence had little to do with it.

5 Chiefs, commanders and leaders like Cortés did the indigenous people a favour with their annihilation of the Aztecs, an extremely cruel empire with its frequent ritual sacrifices of men, women and children.

It should be added that Cervantes does not defend the cause of the black legend with great conviction. After repeating the obligatory tropes intended to pardon the conquistadors, Cervantes goes on to write the most complete account of the conquistadors’ aggression that I have ever read: the lethal destructuring of the Taino family order, the annihilation of the Aztec army, the razing of the entire city of Tenochtitlan; the many massacres they inflicted all over the continent; the cruelty they handed out to any indigenous tribe that did not wish to accept Christianity, inflicting upon them, torture, slavery and the needless execution of their leaders.

It is a well-written and very detailed chronicle based upon hitherto unexplored primary sources. Indeed, Cervantes has collated many ancient documents. As he says, «From diaries, letters, chronicles, biographies, instructions, histories, epics, encomiums and treatises written by the conquerors, their defenders and detractors, I have tried to weave a story that often reveals surprising and unknown threads.”

There is also another reason commonly used to downplay the seriousness of the behaviour of the conquistadors:

6 There were excesses but the English would have done worse.

For me, this last observation is the most valid of all. The British Empire reigned for a long time over many populous regions of the world and committed countless crimes against humanity. However, to a large extent, we have now come to terms with our violent past and we do not deny the veracity of the crimes our forefathers perpetrated in the name of king and country.

Indeed, several members of the current British royal family accept their country’s responsibility for the empire’s many crimes. For example, next week the king will visit Kenya, the former British colony that gained its independence in 1963 after a decade-long liberation war led by the armed Mau Mau movement. Ten years ago, on the occasion of Kenya’s 50th anniversary of independence, the British government made a historic statement of regret for the «torture and other forms of ill-treatment» perpetrated by the colonial administration during the emergency period and paid compensation of £19.9 million to some 5,200 people.

(Although, it should be noted that, in total, an estimated 90,000 people were executed, tortured or mutilated during the war).

In addition, Prince William said in March 2022, during a speech to the Jamaican Prime Minister and other dignitaries, that «Slavery was abhorrent and should never have happened. I agree wholeheartedly with my father……..who said in Barbados last year that the appalling atrocity of slavery forever stains our history».

So, I ask myself, why can’t so many Spanish historians also accept their nation’s own past crimes, even if they believe that they were committed on a smaller scale? Why do they insist, ad nauseam, that the conquistadors behaved well towards the native peoples during the conquest and that the country’s bad image is only the result of an international conspiracy to tarnish its reputation?

What is remarkable is that all the other European empires of the last 500 years never acquired such notoriety as the Spanish, although they may have have deserved it even more. Significantly, these empires never complained about their own leyenda negra. One is tempted to suspect that the invention of the term became a self-fulfilling prophecy and that Spain’s reputation would have been less tarnished if the authors of the expression had not themselves drawn further attention to the events which occurred during the acquisition of the South American colonies.

However, after more than a century of reification of the black legend, it is too late to cancel or to withdraw the expression. Besides, even the most thoughtful of historians such as Fernando Cervantes still believe in it. Indeed, if you look on YouTube it has some very vociferous defenders. You can watch them now as they rant resentfully against allegations of genocide, fulminate against critics of the Spanish empire and beg you to believe the equanimity with which the conquistadors treated the indigenous peoples with whom they chanced to meet.

As for owning up about the misdeeds of the past, perhaps Spanish regal pride is so strong that no one in the royal family wishes to acknowledge that the «plot» to discredit Spain was nothing more than the reification of a concept adopted by intellectuals in an attempt to preserve the country’s dignity in the face of the defeats of the 19th century.

Abdulrazak Gurnah, East African Novelist and Historian

Abdulrzak Gurnah. Photo by PalFest. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

I used to have a psychiatrist friend who said that he had learnt more psychology from the pages of good literature than he had from any of the dried up text books in the medical library, however long he had scrutinised the taxonomies and clasifications described therein. I think that you could say something similar about the study of history. If you want history to come alive, I recommend you read a good novel.

Although it might not be his primary intention, Abdulrazak Gurnah relates the history of East Africa, from the carve-up of the continent by the Conference of Berlin between 1884 and 1885 until the achievement of independence in the sixties and the terror that ensued. But Gurnah doesn’t stop there. He deals also with the post colonial relations between the decolonised nations and their “mother country”. The latter he does through the pictures he paints of the immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers and the cold and hostile welcome that they experience when they turn up, voluntarily or out of necessity, on the doorstep of the United Kingdom. (See for example On the Beach)

I started to read his books, just as many others did, because he had just been named the winner of the Nobel prize for literature 2021. And I was enchanted by his colourful and laberinthine novels, books that reflected the complex range of emotions, beliefs, customs, feelings and reservations of the ordinary everyday people of a muslim african culture under the occupation of an imperial power.

But not only that. His books have put into context some of my childhood experiences in England.

Towards the end of the 1950s the British economy began to shake off the enormous debt that it had been obliged to assume in order to pay the cost of the Second World War (rationing didn’t end until the summer of 1954). Until then we had to be financially very careful. Above all, our diet was very limited. We were still eating wartime recipes, we wasted nothing, we finished every meal, we cleaned our plates. But the quality of what we ate was very poor. I remember that the sausages were particularly crap, they didn’t contain a shred of meat, just a mixture of minced gristle, stale bread and unidentifiable lumps: even now when I see them on the plate they still make me gag. We were ignorant of the exotic food of our neighbours on what we called “the continent”; we didn’t know what lemons, olives, figs or mushrooms were. But we didn’t go hungry and in comparison with the privaciones that the Spanish people suffered during the post civil war period we survived tolerably well. Even so, many people here decided that life in England had become somewhat boring and monotonous: they said their lives had turned into a black and white B film and that they deserved something better, something in technicolour, something set in a climate warmer than ours.

It was no surprise that many people decided to emigrate to the Empire. We still had an empire and everyone knew that life was better in the colonies. The downstairs neighbours emigrated to Australia, others went to Canada and the most adventurous set sail for South Africa.

So it was that my uncle Edward announced one day that he had obtained a job in Dar-es-Salaam running a dealership for a well known make of car. Uncle Edward, auntie Esme and my cousins Carol and Jane spent 7 years there in Tanganyika. During their stay there the family adopted all the characteristics of expats. In their house they employed a black maid and a black houseboy and paid them both a pittance. The family changed their clothes three times a day and their sheets every morning, they criticised the food that was placed before them and had no hesitation in expressing their opinions about the psychology of the black man.

However, my uncle and aunt became very nervous when the country obtained its independence under the supervision of the British Monarchy in 1961 and they left in a hurry when finally, in 1963 the country renounced the Queen and the British Governor returned home. When they came back hurriedly to England they no longer had a house to come home to and they came to stay with us. So we had to squeeze up to let them in. During the six months we had the pleasure of living together Edward did what he could to open our eyes to the faults and defects of the black man.

He used to say things like, “The black man is a lazy man. There is only one thing he understands”, “The black man is like a child – you have to be firm but fair with him”, “The blacks are not ready for independence. Nothing good will come of it. The communists will take advantage of their gullibility. It won’t work”, and “When it’s all said and done, the blacks prefer to work for a white man.”

My uncle’s opinions were identical to those of Frederick Turnah, a Victorian character in Desertion, one of the best novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah. The book begins in 1899. The British have just taken control of Zanzibar, Kenya and Uganda, the latter two being new countries invented by the Conference of Berlin, the conference that sanctioned the allocation of the regions of Africa which had not as yet been appropriated formally by any of the European powers. On assuming the administration of its new colonies, the British abolished slavery, the activity which had made a fortune for the previous owners of the coastal region, the arab sultans of Zanzibar. However, abolition brought with it a big problem: the freed people were reluctant to work for the British. In the words of Frederick Turner, the colonial government’s local administrator: “In slavery they learned idleness and evasion, and now cannot conceive of working with any kind of endeavour or responsibility, even for payment”. Burton, a friend of Turner and manager of a British estate, is of much the same opinion: “You can only make them work by coercion and manipulation, not by making them understand that there is something moral in working and achieving”. In addition, Burton liked to predict the slow disappearance of the lazy, savage negro and his replacement by the energetic european colonist. He was convinced that “the blacks” were a race on the road to extinction. For Burton, and many others who shared his dream, the future of Africa would be like that of the USA, a whole continent peopled by European immigrants.

At the same time that the Conference of Berlin granted the countries of Uganda, Kenya and Zanzibar to Great Britain, it assigned Tanganyika to the Germans as their own “sphere of influence”, one of the more notable euphemisms of the 20th century. The tribes in the interior of the country didn’t have the slightest intention of allowing anyone to dominate them and in his novel, After Lives, Gurnah describes the German reaction to the intransigence of the autochthonous people. Instead of carrying out a policy of ingratiating themselves with them, for example, installing supplies of clean water, opening schools for the children o assisting them with agriculture, the Germans treated them worse than stubborn animals: they carried out a policy of selective extermination: a strategy of mass killings, public executions and the elimination of entire native peoples by the use of a scorched earth campaign.

After Lives also shows us the pathetic spectacle of how, during the First World War, native troops were tricked or forced into fighting a foreign war by distant European countries that didn’t give a shit whether they lived or died.

Kriegssafari (Marching to War) 1914 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

During the 1950s, in neighbouring Kenya, the British army suppressed the nationalist insurrection with great brutality, employing much of the strategy that the Germans had previously used in Tanganyika. The British government approved the practice of torture. At least 11,000 indigenous people died, a figure that includes the hanging of 1,090 rebels at the end of the war in 1960.

As a result of the defeat of the Germans in the First World War, Tanganyika became a further British possession. My uncle and aunt arrived there in the fifties, just four decades after the expulsion of the Germans, but it never occurred to them that the violent behaviour of the Aryan master race might have been a determining factor in the antipathy of the black population towards Europeans. In the same way, my uncle and aunt despised the ambitions of the Kenyan pro-independence supporters. How could such a childish people ever hope to govern themselves? They got what they deserved.

My uncle and aunt believed that, with independence, the native population of Tanganyika had turned openly ungrateful towards its British benefactors and this was surely the result of the influence of the communists.

All their opinions were widespread in the UK during the decades which followed the Second World War. It is not surprising that the africans and the afro caribbeans that arrived here during this time felt themselves to be personae non gratae.

Finally, my uncle and his family also left our house, giving us back our independence. Throughout the six months that they had been with us, my uncomplaining mother had worked very hard to meet their colonial standards. After six months of cooking, doing the washing and ironing for everybody, she began to refer to her brother as “the black man’s burden”.

Only three of Gurnah’s novels have been translated into Spanish and they are not always easy to get hold of. Paradise (Paraiso), On the Beach (En la orilla) and Admiring Silence (Precario Silencio).

If you fancy reading Paradise in Spanish, a Kindle version has just been published at a very reasonable price. The novel is an attempt to recreate the East Africa of the years between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the First World War, the period in which the region was being split between Great Britain and Germany, the age in which names were given to the great expanses of Africa “granted” to every western european power represented at the Conference of Berlin. Gurnah recreates this period by telling the story of an epic trading expedition on foot to the interior of the continent. The novel is set in Kenya, Tanganyika and what is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is almost an imagined documentary of a lost time.

Throughout Gurnah’s work the reader must familiarise themself with the Swahili words that pepper the page. Gurnah rejects the idea of a glossary, believing that a translation to another language would impoverish his linguistic portrait.