2023
A light rain was falling in the courtyard of the palace. Moisture gradually fogged the bulletproof window of an African dictator’s personal study. Droplets spattered the fronds of palm trees and slowly ran off the long leaves, falling noiselessly to the tiles below.
Above this courtyard rose a pale blue dome topped with a spire, which was itself dwarfed by two towering buildings to the north and south; administrative facilities and the presidential quarters, respectively. This sprawling palatial compound dwarfed most other buildings in Equatorial Guinea’s capital of Malabo, and was defended by a robust force of Israeli-trained Moroccan guards, armed heavily with Soviet small arms but with only a few mortars and armored vehicles between them, loyal to the coffers of the president but isolated within the tribal politics of the republic.
Malabo sits on the north coast of the island of Bioko, a mid-sized volcanic isle in the Biafran Bight of the Gulf of Guinea, closer to Cameroon than to the Equatoguinean continental region of Río Muni. It is in fact the only national capital of any non-island state to be entirely insular, excluding Copenhagen, which is situated on a continental island only a bridge away from Sweden and the rest of Denmark. It is also one of the only capitals that is, due to a fluke of colonial history, situated in a region mainly populated by a persecuted people who are severely underrepresented in the government and the military. This ethnic group, the Bubi, had been decimated by various massacres and purges since independence, in part due to their high status within Spanish colonial society and relative intellectual bent compared to the native people of what Equatoguineans termed as “the continent”, the Fang, who were the dominant group in all aspects of Equatoguinean life.
The aged president of Equatorial Guinea spent most of his time locked in the south building these days, hardly daring to walk the short distance to the offices or leave the presidential palace, let alone board an aircraft to travel to his native region of Río Muni. His study, reserved for personal use, was where he took all his phone calls and issued his executive decrees.
Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo was almost eighty-six years old, and was history’s longest-ruling leader who bothered to maintain the illusion of being democratically elected. The nephew of Equatorial Guinea’s first dictator, a man who had for about ten years rivaled only Pol Pot in the sheer extent of his psychopathic butchery of his own people, Obiang had usurped his uncle and ultimately condemned the founder of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea, who had made possible Obiang’s own political career through a series of nepotistic appointments, to face a firing squad. Inheriting a nation used to totalitarian abuses, Obiang ruled with impunity, and though he had mellowed throughout the years, he still took any threat to his sovereignty extremely seriously.
Comfortably reclined in a chair by the study window, Obiang took his arthritic hand and leisurely wiped away the mist from the polymer-lined pane. As he surveyed the empty courtyard, he contemplated the most recent attempt at revolt by his “eternal enemies”. Three would-be revolutionary leaders of Equatorial Guinea, having been implicated in the scheme through various means and captured abroad at great expense and great risk to Equatorial Guinea’s international relations, were currently suspended by their feet at Black Beach Prison. Obiang planned to add another populist worm to the gibbet before the sun went down.
The first of the three prisoners to be captured, the exiled leader of the Progress Party of Equatorial Guinea, had been located with the help of a Korean private investigator and kidnapped from his apartment in Seville.
The opposition leader was relaxing with his wife and children when the machete-wielding thugs quietly broke the lock and rushed into his apartment. Unarmed and with no other way to prevent his family from being stabbed to death and then hacked to pieces, the man agreed to come back to Equatorial Guinea. He was taken to the port of Cádiz in a civilian car, where he was transferred to the government-owned yacht Blue Glacier and forced into the brig.
The kidnapped man was given two buckets. One of these was empty. The other contained water. These were his accommodations for the entire weeklong trip.
The other two prisoners, one of whom was a foreigner, had been charged with espionage. The Equatoguinean, a native of Obiang’s mainland territory hometown Mongomo and a distant relative of the presidential dynasty, had attempted to arrange a meeting with Obiang on several occasions, whenever the president was at the palace in Malabo. Having been rejected every time, the man had made a dash across the presidential plaza for the front of the palace.
Obiang turned from the window, walked to his desk, and picked up the receiver of his antique landline. He slowly dialed the number of the warden at Black Beach. A vestige of another era much like himself, the landline took several seconds to register each digit of input, but eventually it went through.
The warden, ethnically Bubi, did not speak a word of Fang, the native language of the eponymous people to which Obiang and over 80% of Equatoguineans belonged. Thus, the president addressed him in Spanish, the official language of the country.
“Cristobál, I would like it very much if you took Colonel Nsue from his home and hung him upside down with the other traicioneros.”
“Claro, presidente. It will be done.”
The president hung up without ceremony and crashed down into his Spanish-made office chair. He folded his hands over his desk, empty aside from the phone and a few pieces of paper that were written on sparsely with a messy hand. With his right foot, he sought a certain tile in the floor under his desk. Finding the correct piece of flooring on the second sweep of the space beneath his legs, he firmly planted his heel in the space between that panel and the one in front of it, and drove his foot forward. The tile yielded slowly, and a CZ automatic fell into Obiang’s lap.
Just at that moment, there was a knock at the study door. Obiang froze.
“Tará?”
The voice was that of his son and successor, also named Teodoro. He bore his genocidal great uncle’s surname, Nguema, and was nicknamed Teodorín or hermano mayor (big brother) by the people of the nation. On Instagram he went by the English name Teddy.
Obiang hastily shoved the pistol back into the secret drawer it had come from, moved his foot back, and wiped the sweat from his brow. He bade his son come into his study, and greeted him with a hearty “mbólân!”, the Fang equivalent of the Spanish word hola.
“Mbóló, tará.” came the muttered reply. The term mbóló has a degree more of deference and formality than the casual mbólân, more like a buenos días than an hola. Tará is a Fang word that means father, but only from the perspective of his own child.
Before the conversation began, Nguema cleared his throat and effortlessly switched into Spanish, a language more suited to matters of international relations than Fang.
“I’m quite tired today, my son. I don’t want to work too much. Next week we will execute the leaders of the plot against me, but until then, we can rest. What’s going on, son?”
“They took our property in Greece, tará.”
“Eláŋ!” swore the president in his native tongue. “All of it?”
The presidential family had recently made investments totaling almost $100 million in mansion properties on the islands of Santorini and Crete, as well as a townhouse in Athens near the Parthenon.
The presidential heir stared at his feet.
“Yes, father, even the yacht.”
Obiang had been looking forward to taking a cruise on their new superyacht. With immensely valuable yachts confiscated by the governments of South Africa, France, and the United States, it was quite likely that the presidential family was the single largest provider of pleasure craft to state governments in history. The old man shook his head. Leaning forward subtly, he whispered an order into his son’s ear.
“Ádzí wǎ, á dzáŋ, tará.”
With this very serious phrase, the younger man vowed to carry out what his father had told him to do.
Despite being almost 60 years old, Teodoro “Teddy” Nguema was immature as a teenager. Unlike Obiang, he had no need to depose his predecessor, or at least he hoped so. All Equatoguineans knew that venerable old Obiang had to pass away at some point. But the president was 85 and still clinging on to power. Who was to say he wouldn’t cling to life the same way? Nguema had a complete lack of fear that he would be thrust suddenly into the role of the most important man in Equatorial Guinea. Subconsciously he believed that either both of them would survive forever, or they would go down together. It turns out he was right.
El hermano mayor was a true man of the people. He spent a grotesque amount of the country’s oil money on Western trappings, and spent more time abroad than at home.
The arbitrary nature and sheer opacity of Equatoguinean spending would disgust anyone with the slightest notion of fairness or economic equality. Close to ninety percent of the population lived in squalid conditions and had barely enough food to keep from starving.
However, Teodorín was so unabashed in his sick mimicry of the fashions of the elite of the developed world that it was almost impossible to hate him. A Westerner looking at his Instagram feed, even after slowly realizing where his wealth really came from (and more importantly, where it should, in a just world, be going), would more likely be bemused than outraged. Even his fellow Equatoguineans celebrated him online, leaving messages of goodwill dispersed across his social media profiles.
Compared to his predecessors, Teodorín was a saint. His father had been the governor of Bioko, the commander of the military, and the commander of Black Beach Prison during his own uncle’s rule, and had thus been complicit in the madness and turmoil of those days. After finally having the sense to take over for himself, Obiang became like any other strongman or caudillo in the postcolonial world. Not a madman, he had provided some relief to the struggling poor of Equatorial Guinea, but was nevertheless a dictator, and his inglorious past still remained.
But Teodorín’s great-uncle, Francisco Macías Nguema, was one of the most vile rulers in modern history, and the details of his administration truly boggle the mind. Rather than revel in the madness and uncertainty—the absurdity of those dark and twisted days—most history books take a clinical approach to the butchery of Nguema’s regime.
But nothing about that time was clinical.
Macías was born into a traditional Fang household in the small border city of Mongomo. His father was a witch doctor, a practitioner of juju (the West African spiritual system that inspired Haitian Vodou), and supposedly a chief of the Esangui clan of the Fang. It was said that this man killed his own brother, and years later, in front of Macías, was brutally beaten to death by a Spanish colonial administrator in an argument over Esangui wages. Shortly after, the story goes, Macías’s mother killed herself.
Macías was a broken man on a broken continent. With the collapse of the great colonial empires of Britain and France, his tiny homeland of Spanish Guinea sought independence as well. The lazy and brutish Spaniards he so detested began to shiver at the prospect of losing their last possession and at last being completely deprived of their ancient and illustrious empire. In order to gain power within this milieu, Macías began to suck up to the Spaniards he secretly hated.
Macías went to Madrid many times, climbing the ranks of the Spanish bureaucracy by being as obsequious as he could stand to the colonialists, and rose quickly from court interpreter to the mayor of Spanish Guinea’s capital of Santa Isabel. Despite his mask of loyalty to the Spanish crown, there were times in his early years as a civil servant that the facade cracked and Macías’ truly unhinged nature shone through. He infamously once declared himself a “Hitlerian-Marxist” and claimed that Hitler had only been trying to liberate Africa from the greedy resource-hungry colonial powers that comprised the Allies of Western Europe. Somehow this was not enough to prevent the Spanish from backing him to become the first president of an independent and democratic Equatorial Guinea.
Macías took the old Spanish capital of Santa Isabel, the town he had under his own personal control, renamed it Malabo to Africanize it, and then made it his own personal hellhole. He ruled by terror, using his Juventud en Marcha con Macías youth organization as a band of glorified political thugs who beat up any citizens opposed to his rule.
He banned any form of weaponry for no other reason than paranoia that he would be targeted in an assassination attempt, even restricting the omnipresent jungle tool, the machete, to rural areas far away from his residences. Multiple hapless farmers were put to death simply because they were caught holding these indispensable tools when Macías’ presidential guard in the area.
The whole situation was sickening. Indisputably, though, one life is not worth millions, and so Teodorín and the entire Esangui clan would have to go if Equatorial Guinea was to be liberated.