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).

Long live the King or the Republic? (¿Viva el Rey o la República?)...

Next Thursday Spain gets a new rey y reina (king and queen). The current king, Juan Carlos I has, after 39 years on the throne, decided to pass the crown onto his son Felipe as, according to him, it’s time for a new generation to take the lead.

The old and the new: King Juan Carlos 1 (l) and the soon to be Felipe VI. 

The unexpected announcement left Spain in quite a bit of shock at first.  There had been calls recently that it was time for don Juan Carlos to go (I’ll get into why that is in a bit), but no one really expected that he would.

But as the shock of the abdication subsided and talk has turned to the Succession, an old debate has re-ignited (to be fair it had never stopped smouldering): the Republic.

The republican debate comes from a whole different place to that in Australia or the UK. You see, before General Franco’s 40-year dictatorship, Spain already was a republic. King Juan Carlos’s grandfather (Alfonso XIII) had been kicked out in 1931 when the Second Republic was proclaimed. Franco’s coup in 1936 was against the Republic, and so for many a return to it is only right.

The flag of Spain during the Second Republic 1931-1939

What’s more, Juan Carlos was actually brought back to Spain by the dictator himself. Franco’s plan was that the young prince be groomed to succeed him as Head of State after he died. This actually did happen in the end, although not quite in the way that Franco was planning: a seamless continuation of the same dictatorial regime that he had maintained with an iron first over the previous 40 years.

Juan Carlos, seeing the writing on the wall, quickly and deftly set about putting the wheels into motion for a parliamentary democracy to take the place of the dictatorship, headed by a constitutional monarchy, of course, with him as king. And he took it to the people to decide in referendum.

It’s for this extremely important role in Spain’s transition to democracy (which even included defusing a military coup in which a group of Guarda Civil – Spain´s militarised police - entered the parliament, guns blazing in 1981) that Juan Carlos is so loved and respected. 

But that all happened 40 years ago, and for many republicans, the very success of the constitutional monarchy in bringing stability to Spain means that now, with Juan Carlos on the way out, the time is right for the people to decide once again on what form of State they should have.

A page from the Spanish Constitution of 1978, on display in Las Cortes (Spanish Parliament).

Also, and probably quite importantly, it really hasn’t been the best few years for the House of Bourbon; it has scored some spectacular own-goals of late (forgive me, the World Cup has just started and already seems to be rubbing off on me).

To start with, the King’s son-in-law has been busted siphoning off public money from his supposedly charitable foundation and it’s still not clear whether his wife, Juan Carlos’s daughter, the Infanta Elena, might end up on trial for the same.

This smell of corruption within the Familia Real (Royal Family) has led to an abrupt end to the unwritten rule amongst Spain’s media not to report on the private life of the monarch. As a result, amongst other things, rumours regarding not only the King’s, but even Queen Sofia’s supposed infidelities have been making headlines.

To add injury to insult (and yes I am deliberately reversing the expression) the King has been falling over a lot lately. Now there is nothing precisely new about that, he is quite prone to a tumble. But he had one too far a couple of years ago in Botswana that caused him a serious injury to his hip and an even worse injury to his image. Some say this episode more than any other was the beginning of the end for the King.

You see, it turned out that he was in the African nation on a rather hush-hush elephant hunting safari. Not only did this seem terribly 19^th century, but the €30 000 price tag for the adventure made him look seriously out of touch at a time when ordinary Spaniards were doing it so tough thanks to the brutal economic crisis.

As a result of this misadventure, and this time adding insult to injury, the King was unceremoniously dumped as patron of the Spanish branch of the World Wildlife Fund and don Juan Carlos made an unprecedented hospital bed apology for his actions.

Personally, this is why I’m quite fond of him (not the hunting of course, but the tumbles and the apology) – to me it makes him human and seemingly approachable. I like that he’s always hugging Spain’s sporting stars when they win on the world stage, that he’s not afraid to let rip with the odd undiplomatic quip when he gets annoyed (like when he told Venezuela’s late Hugo Chavez to “shut up” some years back) and that he talks about heading to the taller (workshop) when he’s off to hospital for one of his numerous hip operations.

I can’t imagine my Head of State, Queen Elizabeth II, doing any of this (the Duke of Edinburgh of course is prone to un-diplomatic outbursts, but always, in my opinion, in a much more pompous and superior manner).

But as an extanjero from the New World, it’s not really my place to get involved in Spain’s republican debate, so I’ll just be an interested bystander next Thursday during the coronation of King Felipe VI.

Having said that, with the republican debate in my own country seemingly stalled, for the foreseeable future I’ll no doubt be taking much enjoyment from watching Spain’s conservatives whip themselves into complete tizzies as the debate here continues, as I’m sure it will.