The cultural narrative that emerged around the Spanish colonisation of Morocco in the early twentieth century centred on Spain's racial, cultural, and spiritual ties to North Africa. Colonialist writers invoked this ‘fraternal’ bond in particular to assert that Spain had an imperial claim over Morocco that no other European nation could contest. A history of the colonial campaigns published by the Spanish Ministry of War articulates this distinction aptly: ‘The Northern races will forever be foreign to Africa, but the son of the desert will recognise in the tanned skin and shining dark eyes of the heroic Spanish soldier the features of a brother.’ This chapter explores firstly how discourses of affinity are brought into the service of colonialism as well as Spanish nationalism through racial and cultural theories on the relationship between Spain and Moroccan Muslims and Jews, and secondly how this bond is envisioned in photography of the Spanish protectorate.

‘Brothers by race and by blood’: The Africanist discourse of Brotherhood

During the Rif campaigns, Revista de tropas coloniales (RTC) becomes the key propagator of the discourse of brotherhood, often using the phrase ‘nuestros hermanos de raza y sangre’ (‘our brothers by race and by blood’) to describe the inhabitants of Morocco. This phrase reveals the distinction between purely biological conceptions of racial identity (‘sangre’) and the wider definition of race or ‘raza’ as a transnational and ethnically diverse community bound together by language, history, and cultural values that became integral to the Spanish fascist imperial vision of Africa as well as Latin America. The Africanist narrative of brotherhood envisioned a process of fusion and exchange between the cultures and ‘races’ on both sides of the strait, a celebration of hybridity that is unique among its contemporary European colonialist discourses. In Impurity of Blood (2009), Joshua Goode traces how racial theorists in Spain from the late nineteenth century onwards presented the nation as a racial alloy, the result of centuries of intermixing of different ethnic groups, and saw this hybridity as a source of strength, not weakness. He argues that the purpose of these theories was both to distinguish Spain from other races and to include Spain in the story of European racial dominance. RTC constantly makes reference to the theories of racial hybridity of intellectuals and ethnologists such as Ángel Ganivet, Isaac Ruíz Albéniz, Antonio Sangróniz, and Joaquín Costa.