Vol. 72/No. 35 September 8, 2008
Most Guineans speak Spanish, the language in which education and government business are conducted. Many also speak French, the second official language. For a big majority, the language of daily life is one or another of the indigenous languages.
Various dialects of Fang are spoken throughout the country. On Bioko the major language is Bubi, and pidgin English is spoken there by a minority descended from slaves and contract laborers brought to the island by the British from the region that today is Sierra Leone. Ndowe and other languages are spoken along the continental coast. The inhabitants of Annobón island speak Annobonese, partially derived from Portuguese.
The island of Bioko (long called Fernando Poo after its Portuguese “discoverer”) was a staging post for the world trade in chattel slaves from the 16th to the early 19th century. The ports of what is now Equatorial Guinea came under Portuguese, Spanish, British, and Dutch colonial rule at different times. When the European powers partitioned Africa among themselves in 1885 at the Berlin Conference, the region—designated Spanish Guinea—became the only part of the continent south of the Sahara “owned” by Spain.
The Bubis and Fang put up strong resistance to the European slave traders and to the claims of the colonizers. It was only in 1926 that Madrid took full control of the continental region.
Spanish rule from then on, most of it under the dictatorship of the clerical fascist Francisco Franco, kept the area isolated from the world and brought little economic development beyond the cultivation of cacao and coffee, and logging for export. Guineans were denied elementary rights. Most were designated the legal equivalent of minors—wards of the colonial state—with no right to acquire or sell property or make other decisions, and were subject to forced labor.
Following independence from Spain in 1968, the government of the first president, Francisco Macías Nguema, launched an 11-year reign of terror. Declaring himself a “socialist” and president for life, Macías cloaked his brutal repression in anti-Spanish, anticlerical, and anti-“white” demagogy.
Schools and churches were closed, and any Guinean—especially any non-Fang—with even a few years of education became a special target of repression. In addition to those jailed, tortured, or executed, tens of thousands fled into exile. In a country that, after centuries of colonial and imperialist domination, was already one of the most superexploited in Africa, economic activity collapsed.
“Under the dictatorship, many had lost hope and even thought the colonial past had been better,” President Teodoro Obiang Nguema noted in an August 5 speech here in Bata.
On Aug. 3, 1979, Macías was overthrown in a coup by young military officers led by Obiang. Most Guineans mark that date as the beginning of the work to initiate modern development of the country, although a minority, especially among the older Fang population, still hold Macías, who was also Fang, in esteem as the first president of independent Equatorial Guinea.
Even as recently as three years ago, public discussion of the character and consequences of the Macías regime’s Pol Pot-like reign of terror was still largely taboo. Today, however, the subject is beginning to be openly addressed in everyday conversations, articles in Equatoguinean magazines, and remarks by government officials.
In order to consolidate a nation in Equatorial Guinea—a precondition to national development—steps have been taken to overcome the Macías legacy of exacerbating divisions along tribal lines. In an August 7 interview Obiang said that after the discovery of oil in the mid-1990s, “the government called an economic conference in 1997 that included all political forces, both those in the government and nongovernmental forces—opposition parties, religious institutions—to draw up a plan” for the use of the country’s oil revenues.
“There is no local district that has not been receiving funds through this program,” he said, pointing to the building and upgrading of roads, hospitals, and other infrastructure throughout the country.
—MARTÍN KOPPEL