The history of Equatorial Guinea

Equatorial Guinea is made up of a mainland territory, Río Muni, between Cameroon and Gabon, the volcanic island of Bioko in the Bight of Biafra, and the small, distant island of Annobón. Its peoples include the Bubi of Bioko, the Fang, who are the majority on the mainland, the coastal Ndowe and the Annobonese, whose ancestors were brought from Angola and São Tomé. Portugal claimed the islands in the 1470s and traded them to Spain in 1778; Spain only occupied the mainland firmly in the 20th century, building a plantation economy on cocoa grown with migrant labour. Independent since 1968, the country has had only two presidents, Francisco Macías Nguema, whose rule was one of the most murderous in postcolonial Africa, and his nephew Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who has ruled since 1979 and presided over an oil boom from the 1990s.

The earliest known inhabitants of the mainland forests were hunter-gatherers, ancestors of the Baka and other groups often called Pygmies, small numbers of whom still live in northern Río Muni. Bantu-speaking farmers spread through the Central African forests over the last three thousand years in the Bantu expansion, and from them descend the coastal peoples of Río Muni, such as the Ndowe (Kombe, Benga and others), and the Bujeba.

The Fang, who now form the large majority of the population, arrived in a later movement. Moving south-westward from the interior of what is now Cameroon and Gabon, they reached Río Muni largely between the 17th and 19th centuries, displacing or absorbing earlier communities. Fang society was organised into clans and villages without a central state, with strong traditions of ancestor veneration expressed in the carved reliquary figures known as byeri.

Bioko, the largest island in the Gulf of Guinea, was settled by the Bubi, Bantu-speaking peoples who crossed from the mainland coast in several waves. Their own traditions and the work of historians place their arrival anywhere from about three thousand years ago to the early second millennium CE, and they replaced earlier Neolithic inhabitants of the island. The Bubi lived in scattered villages, growing yams and palm oil, and for a long time had no single ruler; rival districts frequently fought each other.

Bubi communities resisted European intruders for centuries, fighting off slave raiders and early settlers, and in the 19th century parts of the island were united under paramount chiefs. The best remembered is Moka, who ruled from the highland town that now bears his name between about 1875 and 1899 and kept his people at a distance from the Spanish. The Bubi were not fully brought under colonial control until the early 20th century.

The Portuguese navigator Fernão do Pó sighted Bioko in 1472 and called it Formosa, "beautiful"; it became known by his name as Fernando Pó. Portugal claimed it and Annobón in 1474, but the Bubi prevented any lasting settlement, and the islands mainly served the Portuguese Empire as provisioning points. Annobón, by contrast, was populated with enslaved Africans, many from Angola, brought by the Portuguese via São Tomé; their descendants speak a Portuguese-based creole, Fá d'Ambô, to this day.

The coast of the Bight of Biafra was one of the major regions of the Atlantic slave trade. Captives from the mainland and the Niger delta region were sold to European ships, and slave traders of the Igbo Aro network from what is now Nigeria established outposts on Bioko and in Río Muni in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Under the Treaty of El Pardo of 1778, Portugal ceded Fernando Pó, Annobón and trading rights on the mainland coast to Spain, in exchange for Spanish recognition of Portuguese claims in South America. A Spanish expedition that tried to occupy Fernando Pó soon afterwards was devastated by fever, and for decades Spain was absent. The Annobonese, meanwhile, rejected Spanish rule and governed themselves for a long period.

Britain filled the gap. From 1827 to 1843 the Royal Navy, then campaigning against the slave trade, used a base at Clarence (today's Malabo) on Fernando Pó, where liberated Africans were landed. With traders and freed people from Sierra Leone and elsewhere, they formed the community of the Fernandinos, an English-speaking Creole elite that for much of the century dominated the island's commerce. In 1843 the base moved to Sierra Leone, and Spain sent an expedition to raise its flag again, renaming the island's territories the Spanish Territories of the Gulf of Guinea.

Spanish rule over Fernando Pó took hold slowly through the second half of the 19th century, aided by Claretian and Jesuit missionaries who made most of the Bubi Catholic. Spain also deported Cuban political prisoners and other exiles to the island. On the mainland Spain claimed a large area, but in the Scramble for Africa France and Germany took most of it. The Treaty of Paris in 1900 left Spain the Río Muni enclave of about 26,000 square kilometres, a fraction of the 300,000 it had claimed.

From the late 19th century Fernando Pó's volcanic soils became a centre of cocoa production, first on Fernandino and then on Spanish-owned plantations. The Bubi, who rose against Spanish authority in 1898 and 1910, were disarmed in 1917, and their lands were increasingly taken for estates. Because few Bubi would work on the plantations, labour was brought in under contract, first from Liberia under a treaty of 1914, until an international inquiry in 1930 found conditions there close to slavery and recruitment stopped. Labourers were later recruited, often by force or deception, from Río Muni and above all from Nigeria; by the 1960s tens of thousands of Nigerians worked on the island. During World War I, neutral Spain sheltered German troops and refugees who fled from Kamerun.

In 1926 Fernando Pó and Río Muni were united as Spanish Guinea. When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, the colony at first stayed loyal to the Republic, but forces supporting Francisco Franco took Fernando Pó in September and the mainland in October. Under Franco's regime the colony grew rich on cocoa, coffee and timber, while Africans lived under a segregated legal system; only a small number of educated men, the emancipados, gained legal equality with Europeans.

After the Second World War African nationalist groups formed, among them the National Liberation Movement of Equatorial Guinea (MONALIGE) and the Popular Idea of Equatorial Guinea (IPGE), many of whose leaders went into exile in Cameroon and Gabon. Spain, under pressure at the United Nations during the wider decolonisation of Africa, declared the colony two Spanish provinces in 1959 and in December 1963 granted limited autonomy under the name Equatorial Guinea.

A constitutional conference in Madrid led to a referendum in 1968 that approved independence. Many Bubi, fearing domination by the far larger Fang population of the mainland, had campaigned for Fernando Pó to be separated or to remain under Spain, but the territory became independent as a single state on 12 October 1968. In the presidential election, held in September, Francisco Macías Nguema, a Fang official from Río Muni who had served in the colonial administration, defeated the former head of the autonomous government, Bonifacio Ondó Edú. It is generally regarded as the only free and fair election the country has ever held.

Macías's rule turned to terror within months. In early 1969 a crisis with Spain, and an alleged coup attempt by the foreign minister Atanasio Ndongo, who was killed, led to violence against Spaniards and the flight of almost the entire Spanish population. Ondó Edú was also killed. In 1970 Macías made his United National Workers' Party the only legal party, and in 1972 he declared himself president for life.

His regime targeted anyone seen as a rival or as educated, as well as the Bubi of Bioko, who were associated with relative wealth and education. Prisons such as Black Beach in Malabo became places of torture and mass killing, and at Christmas 1969 political prisoners were publicly executed in a football stadium. Christianity was suppressed, churches were forced to display the president's portrait, private schooling was banned and places were renamed in a campaign of Africanisation, with Fernando Pó itself renamed after the president. Estimates of the people killed range from about 20,000 to 80,000, and perhaps a third of the population fled abroad, so many that the country was called the "Dachau of Africa". In 1976 tens of thousands of Nigerian labourers were evacuated after abuses, and the cocoa economy collapsed.

On 3 August 1979 Lieutenant Colonel Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, Macías's nephew and the commander of the National Guard, who had run Black Beach prison, overthrew his uncle. Macías was tried by a military tribunal and executed by firing squad on 29 September 1979. Obiang took the presidency, released many prisoners and restored relations with Spain, but rule remained concentrated in the president's family and his Esangui clan of Mongomo. A single party, the Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea, was created in 1987, and multi-party politics, permitted in the early 1990s, never threatened its dominance.

The country was one of the poorest in Africa until 1995, when Mobil discovered the Zafiro field offshore. Oil production rose rapidly from the late 1990s, giving Equatorial Guinea one of the highest incomes per person in Africa. International investigations and rights organisations have repeatedly documented that most of this wealth went to the ruling family and its circle, while much of the population continued to lack basic services. In 2004 a plot by foreign mercenaries to overthrow Obiang and install the exiled opposition leader Severo Moto failed when Simon Mann, a former British officer, and his men were arrested at Harare airport in Zimbabwe on 7 March; their associates were arrested in Malabo, and Mark Thatcher, son of the former British prime minister, later admitted in South Africa to helping fund it. The men convicted in Malabo were pardoned in 2009.

Obiang's son Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, known as Teodorín, became vice-president and is widely seen as his father's chosen successor; he has faced corruption cases in France and other countries over luxury property and cars. The government announced plans in 2011 for a new capital in the mainland forest at Oyala, later named Ciudad de la Paz. The country served on the UN Security Council in 2018 and 2019.

In March 2021 explosions at a military barracks in Bata killed around a hundred people and injured hundreds more. Obiang was declared re-elected in November 2022 with 99.7 percent of the vote, amid opposition accusations of fraud, extending a rule that had already lasted more than four decades. On 19 May 2025 the International Court of Justice ruled for Equatorial Guinea in its long dispute with Gabon over Mbanie and two smaller islands in Corisco Bay. In January 2026 the government formally made Ciudad de la Paz the capital in place of Malabo. The population was estimated at about 1.8 million in 2025, and Spanish remains the main official language, alongside French and Portuguese.