The Secretary of State for Foreign and Global Affairs Cooperation, Ángeles Moreno Bau, will open the 'II Encuentro de Hispanistas África-España' at 9:30 a.m.

More than 30 Hispanists from Africa and Spain meet at the Cervantes Institute to discuss "the African imprint on Spanish"

photo_camera Institut Cervantes de Madrid

From Tuesday 16 November until Thursday 18 November, the Cervantes Institute is hosting the Second Meeting of Hispanists Africa-Spain 'The African imprint in Spanish', an event that brings together some thirty specialists to reflect on the influence of Spanish and African languages in both directions, especially in literature and Hispanic cultures. 

The Secretary of State for Foreign and Global Affairs Cooperation, Ángeles Moreno Bau, the Secretary General of the Cervantes Institute, Carmen Noguero, and the Director of Casa África, José Segura Clavell, will open this Tuesday (9:30 am) this conference, which is a continuation of the first edition held in 2019 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. 

For three days, experts from different academic, cultural and institutional fields from Senegal, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Spain will address the influence of African languages on Spanish and Spanish-language culture, mainly in Latin America.  

The main theme of this 2nd Meeting will be the African imprint on Spanish, everything that is African in Spanish and Spanish-language culture, and which has influenced and blended into Hispanic cultures: the presence of negritude in Spanish-language literature, literature in Spanish by African authors outside Africa and the role of women in African narrative in Spanish. For its part, the literature of Equatorial Guinea will play an important role as the only Spanish-speaking African country with its own literary creation in Spanish. 

Likewise, the fixed section, already developed in the 2019 meeting, which deals with the teaching of Spanish in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region with a growing number of students that currently has more than 1,840,000 students of Spanish, in a total of 26 countries, will also be maintained. 

Organised by the Cervantes Institute, Casa África, the Spanish International Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation (MAUC), and with the collaboration of the Women for Africa Foundation, it can be followed live on the Cervantes Institute's YouTube channel. 

The conference will feature, among other specialists, the participation of Ndioro Sow, director of the Department of Language and Hispanic Civilisations at the Gaston Berger University of Senegal, Donato Ndongo, writer and journalist from Equatorial Guinea, Maximiliano Nkogo Esono Otugu, from the Equatoguinean Academy of the Spanish Language, Maimouna Sankhé, coordinator of Spanish at the University of Ghana, Ferdulis Odome Angone, researcher in Romance Languages and Civilisations at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar and Amenan Thérèse Yao Doumouya, inspector general at the Ministry of Education and Literacy in Côte d'Ivoire. 

Instituto Cervantes de Madrid

Spanish on the African continent

According to data updated to 10 November 2021, Spanish is studied in 32 countries on the African continent, with a total number of learners of Spanish as a foreign language of 2,024,164. Of these, 1,847,870 are students in sub-Saharan African countries, in a total of 26 countries in the region. 

In Equatorial Guinea, 906,779 people belong to the group of native speakers of Spanish, 318,598 people are part of the group of limited proficiency in the language, and 128,895 students of Spanish make up the group of learners of the language. 

In the African university environment, Spanish is present in 68 Spanish departments in 33 African countries. 

The Instituto Cervantes is present in 21 cities on the African continent, in the following 6 countries: Algeria (3 cities), Egypt (2 cities), Morocco (13 cities), Tunisia (1 city), Senegal (1 city) and Ivory Coast (1 city). 

Live broadcasting through the Cervantes Institute's Canal Directo 1 and YouTube.  

Face-to-face activity. Venue. Instituto Cervantes (assembly hall). From 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. 

Submitted by José Antonio Sierra, Hispanismo advisor. 

More in Culture