Macias Nguema's Rule in Equatorial Guinea
Spain's small Gulf of Guinea colony held elections before independence in which Macias, a minor official under colonial rule, defeated the Spanish-preferred candidate. Within months he had assumed emergency powers, and by 1970 had banned all parties but his own. He proscribed the word 'intellectual', closed schools and libraries, ordered the death of anyone wearing spectacles in some accounts, and had a substantial portion of the pre-independence political class killed; perhaps 100,000 people fled from a population of around 300,000. Obiang, Macias's nephew and the commander of the notorious Blackbeach prison, seized power in 1979 and had his uncle shot. Large offshore oil reserves discovered in the mid-1990s made the country one of the highest GDP-per-capita states in Africa on paper, while most of the population remained without reliable water or electricity and the president's family acquired well-documented overseas property portfolios.
- Year: 1968 CE
- Category: Political
