Chema Caballero (Castuera, Badajoz, 1961) has written The Beer Drinker (Books of Bad Companies, 2025) based on something he has observed over more than three decades traveling the continent: “The encounter with Europe was a trauma from which the continent has not yet recovered.” Regarding the present and the future, the author unmasks the urban, youthful and feminine character of Africa. These impacts and perspectives justify the reflection of the author of this article on Caballero’s work.
“If you don’t have a first wife in a European Union (EU) country and at least a second in a black African country, start questioning your masculinity.” With this speech and laughing, a group of black and white Europeans who travel and reside on the black continent, a territory that for centuries they have chosen to live and become rich in money and/or in “women,” spend their time. This “diversified” economic exploitation has been outlined since the colonial enterprise and globalization connected the two continents. Chema Caballero escapes from this villainous profile and after “30 years traveling the roads of Africa” publishes The Beer Drinker, a book that does not include the recommendations that some European ambassadors are forced to disseminate among officials arriving on the continent: “Remember that you are married in Europe. (…) they are not necessarily handsome, just white (…) they respect the bodies of girls and women based on EU regulations. No case.
The fact is that Caballero, a columnist for this magazine and for El País, knows Africa. This work, the best of his career, tells of the deep contrast that exists on the continent between the agenda of the countries of the Persian Gulf, NATO, Russia and China, compared to the push of youth, women and urbanization. The beer drinker emerges successfully from this amalgamation of discord thanks to his careful narrative with certain sensitivities. It is published at a time when it is difficult to write about Africa without fighting with the “African” people who defend it, sometimes without knowing it, and because it has died. When the French philosopher Michel Foucault announces “the death of man”, he refers to the devastating power of institutions and social norms to the detriment of the human being in his subjectivity. Gentleman is not a philosopher, and thank goodness. That is why he boldly recommends that “Africa cannot live off the past, it must look to the future and move towards it.” My question, to dialogue with him, is oriented towards how a continent that does not review its past with wisdom or assume its own errors with its head held high, looks to the future.
Africa could not undergo this harsh test if it was dead. The drinker has not killed her, a work that skillfully unmasks the cruelties of the colonial enterprise, globalization and the stereotypes that the continent has in the West. Africa is dead. Not because it was born after a succession of traumas – its distribution at the Berlin Conference, among others – nor because it is inhabited by an empowered youth that is “increasingly demanding of its leaders” – Caballero describes –. Its death lies in the supremacy of the community and the castration of the individual, without having the luxury of seeking a balance. In fact, a good part of today’s African youth – which includes black Europeans linked to the continent – does not hesitate to use ancient traditional practices, hiding behind anti-racism and black supremacy, in the face of a Europe that has bowed its head as a consequence of the moral debt rooted in slave slavery.
The Beer Drinker describes a continent whose precolonial and modern institutions maintain a very strong link with religions. Hopefully these will reach the hearts and minds of black and white Europeans who travel and live there, and who have become allies of capitalism in a bad sense. They know that European States are dragging birth rates into the red and are concerned about their impact on the pension system. The solution, in principle, erroneously focuses on migrant women, officially recipients of economic aid. However, these resources usually rest in the pockets of their spouses, who capitalize on them to acquire more wives in Africa and manufacture more descendants for the benefit of capitalism.
With this strategy, “our men” intertwine the errors of the EU legal framework with an ancient practice in force on the continent: the buying and selling of women. And they do it young European men, beneficiaries of the opportunities that Europe offers them as citizens or as a migrant population. Perhaps these men should read The Beer Drinker in one sitting. They would discover that a writer like Caballero believes in African youth. Me, certainly not, until Africa is resurrected.
