Writer, historian, and journalist Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo will be evicted today from his home in Murcia of the past 30 years.

The 75-year-old Equatorial Guinean writer, journalist, and historian Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, who has lived in Spain since the mid-1990s and is considered one of the most important voices in African literature and history in Spanish, is about to be evicted. The order to uprising, which began to take shape three years ago, has been set for this Monday, July 7, unleashing a wave of indignation among the Afro-Spanish community, but also of solidarity with this living legend of criticism against the dictatorship of Teodoro Obiang , President of Equatorial Guinea. Ndongo-Bidyogo receives EL PAÍS a couple of days early in the house where he has spent the last 30 years, a semi-detached house in the north of Murcia , near the Juan Carlos I business complex. A small entrance garden with enormous cacti and large plants leads to a living room with walls covered with African masks, paintings and statuettes, many of which are awards he has received throughout his long career.

Ndongo-Bidyogo's story is extensive. He was born in Niefang almost 75 years ago, when Equatorial Guinea was still a Spanish province, and moved to Madrid in 1965 at the age of 14. He studied History and Journalism because, even as a teenager, "it was clear to me that I wanted to tell the story of Africa from the reality of an African, not from the European point of view, as it has always been told." He began his professional career at the magazine Índice, where he debuted reporting on the Carnation Revolution . He later worked for other media outlets such as Diario 16, Mundo Negro, and also EL PAÍS, until in 1981 he was hired by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to direct the Nuestra Señora de África residence hall, affiliated with the Complutense University of Madrid. The college, he explains, became a center for Africanist studies and cultural activities.

Affable and calm, Ndongo recounts his life story in a profusion of detail, stringing together dates, places, and names without ever consulting any documentation, displaying an astonishing memory. After his time at the Complutense School of Foreign Affairs, in 1985 the Ministry of Foreign Affairs invited him to return to his native Guinea as deputy director of the Spanish-Guinean Cultural Center in Malabo. Teodoro Obiang's dictatorship had begun six years earlier, and the writer saw this as a good opportunity to return to his country, but without having to be tied to the regime, to work independently. In addition to his position as deputy director of the cultural center, Ndongo began working as a correspondent for the EFE Agency and was appointed its delegate in 1992.

“In those years, it wasn't publicly known, but it was known, that the Americans were conducting oil exploration and that the Obiang regime was committing abuses and torture. I saw it with my own eyes, and as a journalist, but also as an Equatorial Guinean, I couldn't remain silent. Being an EFE delegate multiplied the regime's hostility toward me. They never tortured me, but I was continually threatened and insulted. Then they switched to a strategy of offering me positions in ministries. I didn't reject them, but the offer fell through when I asked if they would let me work or if it would be a mere window dressing to keep me quiet,” he explains.

In early 1994, he says, a high-ranking official in the Guinean regime threatened to kill him, even pointing a gun at his face, which prompted his return to Spain. Before that, he tried to establish himself in Gabon and set up an EFE delegation there, but it never came to fruition. He claims that former minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos, then Director General of African Affairs, called him weekly to ask him to tone down the critical tone of his reporting, which he refused to do.

Back in Spain, unemployed, he settled into a house he had bought in the Murcia municipality of Los Alcázares during his stay in Guinea. He spent the following years publishing novels and giving lectures on the African continent until, in 1999, he won a competition held by the University of Murcia to create a Center for African Studies. That contract, and the birth of his eldest son, motivated him to move to the house in Murcia, which is now subject to an eviction order, and where he currently lives alone. His two children are studying at university, in Madrid and Granada respectively, and his wife is temporarily in France caring for her mother.

His contract with the University of Murcia ended in 2004, and between 2005 and 2008, Ndongo moved to the United States as a visiting professor at the University of Missouri. The American administration's constant refusal to grant his family permission to settle with him led him back to Spain, where he no longer had stable contracts, beyond collaborations with media outlets and speaking engagements and conferences.

A pension of a thousand euros

This, coupled with the fact that Social Security doesn't recognize the years he worked in Equatorial Guinea as contributions, meant that when he reached retirement, his pension wasn't what he expected: he barely receives 1,000 euros a month. "That's when the financial problems began. In addition, in recent years, we've prioritized funding our children's education. Our eldest just graduated in Business Administration in Madrid, and our youngest is studying her third year of Politics in Granada."

The bank, CaixaBank, has been warning for three years that eviction was imminent. Ndongo remortgaged his house in Los Alcázares, which he had already paid for, to try to get things back on track, and ended up losing it, but it didn't settle his debt. "I've always followed the law. I've worked, I've paid contributions, I've paid my taxes, and in the end, they didn't recognize the contributions for part of my work. The bank isn't offering me any alternative, because all it asks for is money, and I don't have any money," he points out.

The interview is interrupted numerous times by visits from friends at home and calls and texts on his cell phone. Ndongo's response is friendly, but forceful, as he rejects offers from family, friends, and acquaintances to take him into their homes. "This is my house, and I'm not leaving it. Not voluntarily. They'll have to take me out, tied up or dead. And they'll have to take out everything inside. Except for these walls, everything in here is mine. My records, my books, my furniture. Even my plants," he insists.

It "comforts" him, he says, to know that he is "appreciated." The African community in Murcia, through the Afromurcia en Movimiento association, has launched a support campaign on social media and called on the public to gather at Ndongo's home this Monday to prevent the eviction from taking place. "I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic. I'll just wait calmly, the same calm I've always tried to maintain, even when they put a gun in front of my face," he maintains.