In the 1990s, Africa returned to Spain – in the overlapping forms of mass immigration, ethno-racial diversity, global economic inequality, racism, xenophobia and a potent new variant of the protracted crisis of Spanish national identity. As the memory of past colonial projects, rife with militaristic and missionary zeal, was overshadowed by more secularised and ostensibly multicultural modes of late capitalism, a number of Spanish filmmakers, largely without leaving Spanish territory, set their sights on the stories of people who came from ‘the other side’ of the turbulent waters of the Strait of Gibraltar and the barbed-wire borders of Ceuta and Melilla. Though formally conventional, such thematically innovative and politically charged films as Las cartas de Alou/Letters from Alou (dir. Montxo Armendáriz, 1990), Bwana (dir. Imanol Uribe, 1996) and Poniente/West (dir. Chus Gutiérrez, 2002), all set in Spain, showcased the intolerance, ignorance, indifference, sexual objectification and violence that hound African immigrants as they strive to make a new life for themselves in an overwhelmingly white and historically Christian country. Variously in tune with the dynamics of globalisation, these and other recent films nonetheless remit, almost certainly in spite of themselves, to prior cinematic endeavours such as ¡Harka! (dir. Carlos Arévalo, 1941), ¡A mí la Legión!/Follow the Legion (dir. Juan de Orduna, 1942) and Misión blanca/White Mission (dir. Juan de Orduna, 1946), all set in Africa, in which Spanish filmmakers working within the Francoist regime set their sights on the proverbial ‘dark continent’ in ways that were unabashedly in tune with the paternalistic politics of colonialism. In what follows, I shall examine how these three films, representative of two significant strands of Spanish colonial cinema, mobilise desiring subjects in order to propagate, in the form of entertaining and emotionally manipulative propaganda, imperial projects of power and identity that constitute the forgotten and disavowed prehistory of more contemporary postcolonial returns to the Iberian peninsula. Interestingly, all three Franco-era films, with their jumbled conflux of the exotic and the erotic, allow for alternative or even ‘resistant’ readings (Labanyi 1997: 216) in which identifications are not necessarily ‘straightforward’ (Labanyi 2001: 27) and looks, in the fullest sense of the word, may be otherwise than intended or desired by the regime.

¡Harka! and ¡A mí la Legión! centre on intensely emotional relations between men in a theatre of military conflict in the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco before the Civil War.