Spain Just Won the World Cup With a Teenager Whose African Homelands It Colonized and Erased
Spain Just Won the World Cup With a Teenager Whose African Homelands It Colonized and ErasedSpain beat Argentina on Sunday to win the World Cup, with the teenager Lamine Yamal as its star. His parents come from Spanish Guinea and Spanish Morocco, two colonies Spain left out of his history.
Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in the World Cup final on Sunday, winning the tournament for the second time. The match went to extra time, and Ferran Torres scored the only goal in the 106th minute. Much of the attention went to Lamine Yamal, the 18-year-old Barcelona forward who ran Spain’s attack and became the first teenager to win both a European Championship and a World Cup. Reporters described the night as a handover from Lionel Messi, the 38-year-old Argentine, to the teenager who is now the face of the sport.
Yamal grew up in Rocafonda, a working-class neighborhood in Mataró, near Barcelona. His mother, Sheila Ebana, grew up in Bata, a city on the coast of Equatorial Guinea. His father, Mounir Nasraoui, grew up in Larache, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Spain once colonized both places. It ruled Spanish Guinea and the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco for decades and now rarely mentions them in its account of itself. I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help! With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers. If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today! A Colony in West AfricaBata is on the mainland coast of Equatorial Guinea, a country that Spain held as a colony until 1968. Spanish is still the official language there. Spain took the first piece of the territory, the island of Fernando Po, from Portugal in 1778, hoping to use it as a base in the Atlantic slave trade. That plan failed for more than a century. The Bubi people who lived on the island used its forests to keep Spanish and Portuguese traders out, and Spain invested little. Cocoa changed that at the start of the twentieth century. Spanish planters built plantations on the island and needed workers. The Bubis often fled inland rather than cut cocoa, so planters and colonial officials turned to force. In 1904, a Bubi leader named Sas Ebuera refused a labor draft. The police arrested him, and he died in custody after a hunger strike. When local labor ran short, Spanish planters brought in workers from Liberia and later Nigeria under contracts the workers often could not leave. By the 1940s, cocoa and coffee grown in Spanish Guinea accounted for about a tenth of Spain's imports.
An institution called the Patronato de Indígenas treated the Bubis and the Fang, the two main groups, as legal minors under Spanish guardianship. A 1944 decree under Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain from the end of the Civil War in 1939 until 1975, sorted the colonized population into emancipated and unemancipated people. Full emancipation gave a person Spanish citizenship and ordinary legal rights, including the right to buy bread and alcohol in the same shops as Europeans. The men who later led Equatorial Guinea to independence came out of that first emancipated generation. Bata, where Yamal’s mother grew up, sat in the region that pushed hardest for independence, and Spain granted it in 1968. War in the NorthLarache, where Yamal’s father grew up, was located within the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco, the northern strip of the country that Spain controlled from 1912 until Moroccan independence in 1956. Spain moved into Morocco after losing Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, hoping to hold its place among the European powers. Spanish companies wanted the iron in the Rif mountains, and the army followed. The people of the Rif fought back for decades. In 1921, Riffian militias under a leader named Abd el-Krim overran the Spanish positions near the town of Annual and killed thousands of Spanish soldiers. Spanish accounts put the death toll between eight and thirteen thousand. Abd el-Krim set up a Riffian state of his own. The scale of the defeat caused a political crisis in Spain, and the war minister ordered an investigation. The general who led it, Juan Picasso González, found that Spanish troops had abused Riffian civilians and that Spanish commanders had been incompetent. King Alfonso XIII later signed an amnesty that ended the inquiry before it reached the men most responsible.
Spain retook the Rif with French help. In 1925, Spanish and French forces landed at Al Hoceima, the first combined air and naval landing of its kind, and defeated Abd el-Krim’s state. A wider campaign through 1927 disarmed the Riffian fighters. The officers who ran these Moroccan wars, known in Spain as the africanistas, gained power and prestige from them. Francisco Franco was one of them, and the Army of Africa became the core of the force he used to win the Spanish Civil War a decade later. Spain held the northern zone until Morocco won its independence in 1956. Out of the StoryMost Spaniards picture their country’s empire in the Americas and the Philippines. West Africa rarely enters the story, even though Spain ran colonies there into the 1960s. Deborah Ekoka, a cultural organizer in Valencia whose father came from Equatorial Guinea, runs walking tours that trace the Black history of the city. She grew up in Valencia and spent her life answering where she was “really” from. Her father reached mainland Spain carrying a Spanish identity document, because Equatorial Guinea was Spanish territory at the time, and people still treated his daughter as foreign because of her skin.
The history Ekoka points to is documented and large. José Antonio Piqueras, a historian who holds a UNESCO chair on slavery at a university in Castellón, says that between 1490 and 1520 more enslaved Africans arrived in Valencia than in all of the Americas over those same years. He argues that the gap in the national memory is not an accident. Spanish writers and officials, he says, chose to leave Black people out in order to present the country as part of a white Europe. In one example of this, Valencia renamed the street once called Carrer dels Negres, the Street of the Black People, and left no marker of what had stood there. The Player Spain ClaimsSpain now claims Yamal without hesitation. He was eligible to play for Morocco through his father, and the Moroccan federation and government pushed hard for him. Albert Luque, then a director of the Spanish national team, said the Moroccan coach came in person and that Yamal told him he wanted to play for Spain. Yamal’s father said the choice carried a cost, and in August 2024 someone stabbed him in a car park in Mataró. The police arrested four people, and the motive for the attack stayed unclear.
The same country that erased the histories of Spanish Guinea and the Rif now celebrates their descendant as a national hero. During Barcelona’s league title parade in May, Yamal took a Palestinian flag from the crowd and raised it over the celebration, a gesture toward another people whose history powerful governments have worked to erase. Spain won the World Cup with a teenager whose family history it has spent decades leaving out. The two colonies that shaped his parents’ lives are still missing from the story Spain tells about itself. 🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support. So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely. This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.
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