Spanish Guinea

Spain's only substantial colony in sub-Saharan Africa, and an odd one: an island and a piece of mainland with little in common but a governor. Fernando Po, now Bioko, was Portuguese until 1778 and leased to Britain as an anti-slavery base for much of the nineteenth century, which is why its creole population, the Fernandinos, spoke an English-based pidgin and worshipped in Protestant chapels. The mainland enclave of Río Muni, home to the Fang, was claimed on paper long before it was entered, and Spain conceded most of its wider claims to France at Paris in 1900, keeping the small rectangle that survives as the borders of Equatorial Guinea. Effective occupation of the interior was not complete until the 1920s. The colony's wealth was cocoa, grown on Fernando Po's volcanic soil on plantations that were among the most productive in the world and worked almost entirely by contract labourers imported from Nigeria and Liberia, under conditions that drew international complaint between the wars. Spain governed the territory as provinces of Spain from 1959 and granted autonomy in 1963, moving faster than its Portuguese neighbour and far later than the British and French. Independence came on 12 October 1968 under Francisco Macías Nguema. What followed was among the worst dictatorships of the century: perhaps a third of the population killed or driven into exile, schools closed, the cocoa economy destroyed, and Macías overthrown and executed by his nephew in 1979.Oil was found offshore in the 1990s and made the country, on paper, one of the richest per head in Africa. Very little of that money reached anyone outside the family that has governed since 1979, and Bioko's cocoa plantations never recovered. Malabo, the capital, still sits on the island rather than the mainland where most of the population lives. It remains the only sovereign state in Africa with Spanish as an official language.

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