Culture shock: Conguitos (Golpe de culturas: conguitos)

Living somewhere you didn’t grow up, or even just visiting for that matter, you often notice little cultural differences: the way that people greet each other or speak on the phone, what you have to do to get a drink in a bar (in Spain this generally means yelling your order at the barman without waiting for eye contact – you’ll go thirsty otherwise) or even the hour to go out for a meal.

But sometimes a cultural difference will smack you in the face and leave you a little speechless - in "culture-shock". My little friend here is of this category (at least for me). He’s a conguito, or more precisely he’s the conguitos mascot.

Conguitos are a chocolate-coated peanut sweet that have been part of Spain’s confectionary culture since the 1960s.

If you hail from a land with anglosaxjón (Anglo-Saxon) roots and you’re of my generation (let’s just say that I remember the late 1970s quite well) you probably don’t need an explanation as to why I was a bit gob-smacked when I first laid eyes on a packet of conguitos.

For those of you who do need an explanation, a little of their history might help. Conguito bascally means “little Congolese” and they appeared on the market in Spain right around the time that The Congo got it’s independence from Belgium.

Need more? Well just remember that they’re little chocolate-coated sweets and their mascot has fat red lips, big white eyes and shiny dark skin… Bingo?

Can you imagine seeing a kids’ treat with branding like that on the shelves in Australia, the UK or the US? I can’t. They would have surely gone the way of Golliwogs and Black & White Mistrals long ago.

A conguitos stand in a local super (supermarket)

The interesting thing is that I don’t find Spain an overtly racist country – well perhaps with one big exception: the gitanos (Roma Gypsies) who are not treated well at all, like in much of Europe.

But in general there seems very little fear of other peoples here.  As in Australia or the UK, there is a constant flow of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers to Spanish shores. Here they come up from Africa. And despite the government’s best efforts to paint it as an invasion scenario, most Spaniards seem to just see it as a very sad situation, in stark contrast, I’m ashamed to say, to what seems to be the average Australian’s take on the asylum-seeker issue there.

In fact, here in Spain they are not called “illegal immigrants” or “boat people” or “asylum-seekers”, they are simply inmigrantes (immigrants) or inmigrantes en situación irregular (immigrants in an irregular situation) or simply sin papeles (people without papers).

So having said all that, could it be that we anglosaxjónes are simply overly PC? Well, yes we can be at times, but come on; how can anything that reduces a whole people down to a caricature be anything but racist?

Of course it’s racist. And for me, this is the racism inherent in conguitos. It's racism that people don’t think is racist because it’s not really meant to do harm. Like Golliwogs and Black & White Minstrels. And like those terrible scenes repeated over again in Spanish football matches when fans make monkey noises every time a black player from the opposing team touches the ball. To many Spaniards, this is just gamesmanship; friendly teasing of the opposition. 

To be fair, the “possibly” racist nature of the conguitos has been discussed here and the mascot was changed a few years ago to resemble more of a cartoon version of the sweet itself than a caricature of a Congolese (although, if you take a look at the old ad below,  I'm not sure I see a huge amount of difference).

Now if I’m honest, I can’t remember if the first time I noticed conguitos was before or after the packaging change, so I can’t say whether my attitude to the new conguitos brand is coloured by the old, but I’m afraid my anglosaxjón sensibilities just won’t let me get passed those big red lips, big white eyes and shiny dark skin.  

Some versions of the conguitos mascots (the World Cup even gets a look in)

Sorry Conguitos, you might be a tasty treat, but you still leave this extranjero’s jaw on the floor (and not from chewing).