Equatorial Guinea

From the Bubi of Bioko and the Fang of Río Muni, through the Portuguese sighting of Fernando Pó, Spain's cocoa colony and a British anti-slavery base, to independence in 1968, the terror of Macías Nguema, the long rule of his nephew Obiang, and the oil wealth of the 1990s.

Equatorial Guinea is the only sovereign state in mainland Africa with Spanish as an official language, made up of the volcanic island of Bioko (long called Fernando Pó), the small island of Annobón, several islets, and the mainland enclave of Río Muni between Cameroon and Gabon. Bioko is the homeland of the Bantu-speaking Bubi; Río Muni is dominated by the Fang, with Ndowe and related "Playero" peoples on the coast, while the Annobonese descend from people brought by the Portuguese from Angola and São Tomé. Portuguese navigators sighted Bioko in 1472, naming it for the explorer Fernão do Pó, and held the islands until ceding them, with commercial rights on the adjacent coast, to Spain by the Treaty of El Pardo in 1778. Britain ran an anti-slave-trade base on the island from 1827 to 1843; Spain established effective administration only from 1858 and built a cocoa-plantation economy on Fernando Pó worked by contract labourers from Liberia and Nigeria. United from 1926 as the colony of Spanish Guinea, the territory became independent on 12 October 1968. Its first president, Francisco Macías Nguema, imposed an eleven-year reign of terror in which tens of thousands were killed and a large share of the population fled into exile, until his nephew Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo overthrew and executed him in 1979. Obiang has ruled ever since, his tenure transformed by the discovery of major offshore oil from the mid-1990s, which produced soaring wealth alongside deep inequality.