The setting of Hemingway’s story “The Old Man at the Bridge” is a temporary pontoon crossing on the Ebro River in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway’s narrative documents an encounter between an unnamed soldier and an elderly refugee from San Carlos during the chaos of 1938. Africa is only mentioned when the narrator describes the Ebro River Delta as “African looking.” Outside of this context, Africa is unmentioned and otherwise irrelevant to the plot, characters, and themes of the story.

Perhaps the tentative “African connection” you seek lies not in the story itself but in an enriched biographical understanding of Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s adventures led him around the world, including lengthy safaris in East Africa in the early 1930s. He also served as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War and witnessed the 1938 Battle of the Ebro. The explanation of Hemingway’s description of the Ebro Delta as “African looking” is likely as simple as the fact that Hemingway noticed marked similarities in the landscape between East Africa and Northern Spain and chose to make that connection explicit as he described the setting of his story.