Ruthless rulers have been part of the human story since the beginning of recorded history. Even in recent “civilised” times, numerous dictators have popped up to maintain the tradition. The twentieth century alone gave us a cast of brutal rulers that qualified for seats alongside the legendary Genghis Khan of Mongolia, Ivan the Terrible of Russia, and Belgium’s Leopold II of the Congo Free State. Bloody trophy holders of the twentieth century included Adolph Hitler of Germany, Benito Mussolini of Italy, Joseph Stalin of the USSR (Russia), Nikolai Ceausescu of Romania, Mao Zedong of China, Kim Il Sung of North Korea, Pol Pot of Cambodia, Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti, and Augusto Pinochet of Chile.
Africa contributed its own to this hall of horror, a long list of men that helped cement the racist description of Africa as “The Dark Continent.” That we did not have a monopoly on this darkness was conveniently overlooked. It continues to be so even as the world has watched horrifying images in the last fifty years from places like Viet Nam, North Korea, East Timor, East Pakistan (Bangladesh), Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, Grenada, Haiti, Colombia, USA, and Ecuador.
Truth be told though, Africa has had some truly awful rulers, most of them well chronicled, but mercifully off the scene. Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendo wa za Banga, Malawi’s Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Uganda’s Idi Amin Dada, Central Africa’s Jean Bedel Bokassa, Ethiopia’s Mengistu Haile Mariam, Liberia’s Samuel Kenyon Doe and Charles Taylor, Zimbabwe’s Robert Gabriel Mugabe, Nigeria’s Sani Abacha, and Gambia’s Muhammed Yahya Jammeh were some of our continent’s most ruthless rulers.
However, there is one whose instructive story may not be well-known to younger generations. We summarize his story, whose details the interested reader will find in two well written books: Psychoses of Power: African Personal Dictatorships by Samuel Decalo (Routledge, 1989), and Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa, by Paul Kenyon (Head of Zeus, 2019). Contemporaneous accounts of his rule, preserved in online newspaper archives, will reward one who seeks to understand how one man held his countrymen hostage for more than a decade.
When Spanish Guinea gained independence on October 12, 1968, and became the Republic of Equatorial Guinea, its leadership was handed to Francisco Macias Nguema Biyogo Negue Ndong, a primary school dropout who had worked his way up to the colonial house of assembly. It had not been an easy journey, for he had failed a civil service examination three times, an experience that would shape his attitude towards educated Equatoguineans.
President Nguema quickly set to work, turning the small country into a personal estate, dismantling colonial efforts in education, healthcare and other modernization programs, and imposing a reign of terror that still reads like fiction.
Brutality was Nguema’s trademark. He killed political opponents, ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands of his mistresses, and anyone else whose death he desired. Bizarre decisions, and erratic pronouncements and actions were his governing style. The national constitution was changed to consolidate all legislative, judicial and executive power in his hands, a measure that was approved by 99 percent of the voters in a referendum. Then, with the overwhelming support of his citizens in 1972, he become the life president of both his country and of the only political party in the land.
A personality cult was quickly born, not unusual at the time, but more extreme than the variety in many state capitals. His photographs were mandatory ornaments in all public places, including church buildings. Nguema acquired various titles, including “The Unique Miracle”, and “Grand Master of Education, Science, and Culture.” However, the grand Master of Education hated education. He banned private education, and officially prohibited the use of the word “intellectual.” He also banned eyeglasses which he considered to be a sign of being educated, a high-risk status that was usually resolved with the wearer’s death.
He banned wearing of western clothes, eating western food, fishing and the use of western medicine. He closed hospitals and directed his subjects to seek the more reliable ministrations of traditional African healers. He banned Christianity, and encouraged the recitation of the statement” “There is no other God than Macias.” He encouraged those who retained their belief in God to declare: “God created Equatorial Guinea thanks to Macias.”
The Grand Master’s insecurities compelled him to pass a law that prohibited insulting the president or a cabinet minister, with a thirty-year-prison sentence for anyone who did so. Threatening the president was punishable with death by execution. He reportedly killed his minister of foreign affairs in 1969 by throwing him out of a window. The president himself took photographs of the dying man. He then showed them to John Barnes, a Newsweek journalist.
Among Nguema’s most bizarre rituals was mandatorily turning off electricity whenever he was out of town. The reason for this loadshedding was that electricity was “not necessary” during his absence.
There was general agreement that Nguema was mentally unwell. He reportedly spent many hours alone, talking to himself. Some reported that he was addicted to drugs. His actions suggested severe paranoia, perhaps part of untreated schizophrenia. He trusted nobody, and simplified government by doing away with planning, public accounting, and budgeting.
After killing the Central Bank Governor, Nguema took the country’s treasury to his house in his ancestral mainland village of Mongomo, 455 kilometres from the capital Malabo. This became the new centre of his one-man government, complete with a prison where he reportedly executed some inmates himself. He was said to have abandoned sleeping at the presidential palace in 1974. Cabinet ministers, based in the capital Malabo, on Bioko Island, were required to drop by his village on the mainland to request funds for their departments. A few never left alive.
It was this that led to his rather messy end in 1979. When his 37-year-old nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who was the commander of the National Guard, sent six of his men to request money for his unit’s salaries, the president had them shot. Teodoro organised a coup d’état, overthrew his uncle on August 3, 1979. After reportedly setting $100 million dollars on fire, Macias fled his village but was quickly captured after a village woman found him in the bush, resting in the shadow of a tree, eating a sugarcane. He had US $4 million in his car. The “Unique Miracle” of Equatorial Guinea was put on trial, found guilty on multiple charges, including the murder of 500 people. He was executed on September 29, 1979, ending one of the cruellest and most bizarre tenures on a modern throne. He was only 55 years old.
Forty-five years later, his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, now 82 years old, is still ruling the country. Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, the current president’s son, is the vice-president, and ready to inherit the throne. Equatorial Guinea, a relatively wealthy Spanish colony, which Macias Nguema had turned into one of the poorest countries on Earth, is now one of the richest in Africa. Oil has turned the little country of 1.8 million people, into one of the wealthiest in the world. In 2023, it had a GDP of $28 billion and a per capita income of $18,362. It is just the people who are poor. The country ranked 145 out 191 countries on the Human Development Index in 2021.
As Equatorial Guinea celebrates 58 years of independence this coming weekend, the ghost of Macias Nguema hovers over the country. Where Macias democratized poverty and deprivation during his tumultuous eleven years in power, his successor enriched a small segment of the population, mostly in the urban areas. His son will inherit a very delicate throne, whose maintenance will still require repressive measures, the curse that afflicts lands where socio-economic disparity is the dominant ideology.
© Muniini K. Mulera