Infrastructural Time

HANNAH APPEL

Malabo es la metáfora más limpia de los desafíos y oportunidades de Guinea Ecuatorial. Pero Malabo no es una magdalena, en Malabo hoy no se busca el tiempo perdido, se construye un nuevo tiempo, un tiempo que será o no será rotundo, un tiempo que pueda que esté sujeto aquí y allá y pueda también que no, un tiempo que basculará entre un ayer inventado o aclarado y una mañana deseado o merecido. En estos momentos, ahora mismo, Malabo, la ciudad remordida, está viviendo un sueño de progresos y retrocesos, de redenciones y corrupciones, un sueño de buenas esperanzas, un sueño de edificios de vidrio y azulejos, un sueño de rotondas para dar la vuelta al mundo en ochenta días y la vuelta al día en ochenta mundos, un sueño de lenguas de alquitrán que hacen vibrar a árboles milenarios, un sueño de móviles para todos, agua para todos, electricidad para todos, un sueño que todos quieren soñar para que sea un sueño para todos y por todos, para que no haya desalojos sin esperanzas, para que el estado no sea Goliat pues no todos los ciudadanos pueden ser David ...

Malabo is the clearest metaphor of Equatorial Guinea's challenges and opportunities. But Malabo is not a madeleine. Today Malabo is not in search of things past, but building a new time, a time that may or may not be decisive, a time that might be held here and there, or that might not, a time that will oscillate between a made-up or made-clear yesterday and a wished-for or well-deserved tomorrow. At this moment, right now, Malabo, the regretful city, is living a dream of progresses and relapses, of redemptions and corruptions, a dream of good hopes, a dream of glass and tile buildings, a dream of roundabouts to go around the world in eighty days and around the day in eighty worlds, a dream of tar tongues that make ancient trees vibrate, a dream of mobile phones for everybody, water for everybody, electricity for everybody, a dream that everybody wants to dream so that it might become a dream to everybody and for everybody, so that there won't be evictions without hope, so that the state won't be Goliath, for not all citizens can be David ...

— CÉSAR A. MBA ABOGO (2011)

The first months of 2008 were dark in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea's capital. The city went for days on end without electricity, stretching at one point to two weeks. Those who could afford it used private generators in the days sin luz (literally, without light) to keep businesses running, to keep food cool, or to allow electric light, recorded music, or television. The city filled with the clattering roar of generator motors fighting their flimsy steel containers and the stench of diesel exhaust. My neighbors — a Lebanese-owned restaurant and nightclub complex — had a powerful generator, the noise and fumes from which, on occasion, filled my small apartment so completely that staying inside became unbearable. Unable to sleep on one such generator-filled night, I opened my door to look for air and to share water and complaints with Moussa, the Senegalese watchman who spent every night on the sidewalk outside the Lebanese complex. We chatted about the blackout. He said that Senegal provides electricity for many of its neighbors — for Guinea Bissau, for as far away as the Ivory Coast. We laughed and said that Senegal should consider providing electricity to Equatorial Guinea as well. But for all Senegal's apparent success in the realm of electricity provision, Moussa spent every night sleeping on cardboard laid over broken concrete on Malabo's sidewalk, inhaling generator fumes, covered head to toe in clothing and plastic sheeting to fend off malarial mosquitoes in the eighty-plus-degree heat. Even without electricity, sleeping on the sidewalk in Equatorial Guinea, he seemed to think, provided better prospects than his native Senegal.

The oil and gas business had come to Equatorial Guinea roughly ten years before Moussa's 2007 arrival, and with it came a series of ambiguous distinctions: Equatorial Guinea has been the world's fastest growing economy; it is now the wealthiest country per capita in Africa; and in 2013 Equatorial Guinea saw more investment as a percentage of GDP than any other country in the world, at 61.3 percent (Harrison 2013). It is eminently reasonable to assume, as Moussa did, that even sleeping on the sidewalk where the streets are paved with gold might get you a little closer to it.

"Investment as a percentage of GDP" is the statistical reflection of infrastructure projects in the national economy form. The statistic accounts for any investment in construction of roads, railways, electric and water grids, schools, hospitals, commercial and industrial buildings, and beyond. That Equatorial Guinea had the highest investment percentage in the world in 2013 reflects the extraordinary intensity of infrastructure development there. In a country the size of Delaware with roughly 750,000 inhabitants, new infrastructure saturated daily life. For Malabo's residents, the experience of these projects was visceral, sensory (Mrázek 2002; Larkin 2013) — the endless thrum of jackhammers, bulldozers, and trucks too big for old colonial roads; the air full of cement dust that settles on skin and in mouths. Close your eyes, and there is a new skyscraper when you open them. Construction projects set up haphazardly in the middle of everything buzzed with day laborers — often new immigrants like Moussa from Senegal, Cameroon, or Benin — welding, swinging metal beams, digging ditches that drop into the bowels of the old colonial undercity. Central Malabo is small enough that all pedestrians must walk directly through these sites on their way here or there, hoping not to get sprayed by welding spatter or fall into a ditch.

The infrastructure frenzy stretched unevenly outside Malabo into Luba, Riaba, and Moka; into the continental region in Bata, Mongomo, and Oyala; and even to the long-neglected island of Annobón, where the Moroccan company SOMAGEC has built a new airport, hotel, and road system. Chinese construction workers lingered, smoking on the edges of worksites across the country. Thousands of workers from China Dalian, China Communications Construction Company, and others paved roads and built bridges and dams. Arab...