The construction of subjects in the colonial political economy of the Spanish Guinea

The categorisation of people into ‘tribes’ and other clusters in order to assign them different rights was the main instrument of the colonial government throughout Africa. However, the distinction between ‘citizens’ and ‘subjects’ was the result of extended and differentiated historical trajectories. This paper inquires into the historical process that engendered the category of indígena in Spanish Guinea and maintains that the radical separation between colonists and colonisers emerged only gradually as the small African peasants fully participated in the colonial economy of cocoa and became serious competitors of the settled planter