They were all brave. The Africanist soldier in the fictional cinema of the 1940´s.

Keywords: Africanism, Spanish-Moroccan Campaigns, cinema, ¡Harka!, Alhucemas

Abstract

The Spanish-Moroccan Campaigns were the environment in which the Africanist military identity appeared and grew. Its imperialism, warmongering values and exclusionary nationalism, laid the foundations of a worldview that ended up justifying a coup d'état and the development of an atrocious civil war. This article studies, from a visual history perspective, exactly the legacy of this ideology and its imaginaries (from an updated historiographical viewpoint) as it was reflected in the films Harka! (1941) and Alhucemas (1948), which deal with the war experience in the Protectorate. Both productions are, without a doubt, an unavoidable reference point, as will be shown in their analysis, when it comes to understanding the self-perception that the Africanists held of themselves, after the end of the colonial wars, and the need to reaffirm their military values as an immaterial inheritance, from a medium as relevant as cinema, after the victory in the fratricidal conflict.

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Published
2025-09-15
How to Cite
Macías Fernández D. . y Barrenetxea Marañón I. (2025). They were all brave. The Africanist soldier in the fictional cinema of the 1940´s. Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea, 47(2), 415-434. https://doi.org/10.5209/chco.94048