Francisco Macías Nguema
Francisco Macías Nguema won the independence election of Equatorial Guinea in September 1968 in a run-off Spain had not expected him to win, and in eleven years killed or drove into exile something like a third of the population of a country of three hundred thousand, banned the word intellectual, closed the schools and the churches, let the electricity generator in the capital break and did not replace it, and moved the treasury to a hut in his village; his nephew overthrew him in 1979 and had him shot by Moroccan soldiers because no local ones would. He was born in 1924 in Río Muni, the Fang mainland of the Spanish colony, the son of a witch-doctor, failed the civil service examination three times, and rose as the kind of colonial functionary the Spaniards found useful, a mayor and a deputy in the assembly of the autonomous years, with a grievance against the educated that never left him. Independence came in October 1968 under a constitution Spain had written. Within months he had accused Spain of plotting, expelled the Spaniards and their money, and taken emergency powers, and in 1970 made his party the only one and himself president for life in 1972. The rule that followed is described by the few who survived it. There was the Black Beach prison at Malabo where the beatings were done to music, the Christmas Eve of 1975 when a hundred and fifty opponents were shot in the stadium to Those Were the Days on the loudspeakers, the cocoa plantations of Bioko worked by Nigerian labourers who were eventually evacuated by their own government, the ban on fishing boats to stop escape, and the two-thirds of the assembly of 1968 who were dead by 1979. He declared himself the Unique Miracle, forbade the name Christ, and wore the title Grand Master of Popular Education, Science and Traditional Culture. On 3 August 1979 Teodoro Obiang, his nephew and the commander of Black Beach, took the palace. Macías fled to the forest with the money, was caught in two weeks, tried in a cinema with the world's press present, and executed on 29 September. The nephew has ruled since, the longest-serving head of state in the world, over the oil that was found in the 1990s.
- Lived: 1924 CE – 1979 CE
- Nationality: Equatoguinean
- Roles: president, dictator
