Equatorial Guinea's history: an island and a mainland in one state

Who lived on Bioko and in Río Muni first

Pygmies probably lived on the mainland before anyone else, and they survive only in isolated pockets of Río Muni. Bantu migrations, which likely began around 2000 BC between south-east Nigeria and north-west Cameroon, reached the continental territory by 500 BC at the latest. The Fang came later; Thomas Wikle, writing in Focus on Geography in 2019, dates their arrival to the mid-1600s.

The island had its own people, the Bubi, who speak a Bantu language and call it Ëtulá a Ëri. The sources disagree widely on when they came. The main Wikipedia article dates the earliest settlements on Bioko to AD 530, the article on the island puts Bantu settlers there by the middle of the first millennium BC, and Wikle gives about 10,000 years ago. Annobón, far to the south-west, was settled by people the Portuguese brought from Angola by way of São Tomé.

The Portuguese navigator Fernão do Pó sighted Bioko in about 1472 by Britannica's date, or in 1471 by Wikle's and the BBC's, and the island took his name, written on Spanish maps as Fernando Po. Portugal colonised it and Annobón in 1474. A sugar plantation and town begun on Fernando Po in 1507 failed in the face of Bubi hostility and fever. Under chiefs such as Molambo, from about 1700 to 1760, the Bubi clans left the coast for the safer interior and began to build a kingdom there, and while exports of captives from the Bight of Biafra rose through the eighteenth century, Fernando Po was at most a stopping point for slavers.

Why Spain took an island it could not hold

Queen Maria I of Portugal and King Charles III of Spain signed the Treaty of El Pardo in 1778. Portugal ceded Fernando Po, Annobón and commercial rights on the mainland coast between the Niger and the Ogooué, and Spain in return confirmed Portuguese rights west of the 50th meridian in what is now Brazil. Britannica gives the purpose: a source of enslaved people for Spanish America of Spain's own.

The first expedition fell apart. The Count of Arjelejos took possession of Bioko on 21 October 1778, caught a tropical disease there and died while sailing on to Annobón. His crew, having lost over 80% of its men to sickness, mutinied, landed on São Tomé instead and was imprisoned by the Portuguese. Britannica dates the Spanish withdrawal from Fernando Po to 1781 and the Wikipedia article on Bioko to 1780, and no European occupation was made on the mainland. From 1778 to 1810 the territory was administered by the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, from Buenos Aires.

The reason for holding it then went away. Under British pressure Spain signed a treaty in 1817 ending the slave trade to its American possessions. Contraband carried on, and Adriana Chira, in an essay for EuropeNow in 2018, describes the Bight of Biafra as the main ground on which the illegal trade to the Spanish Caribbean grew, with Fernando Po as a hiding place for slavers.

How the British came to run Fernando Po

In 1827 Spain leased two bases on the island to the Royal Navy for its patrols against the slave trade: Port Clarence, a deepwater harbour on the north coast that later became Santa Isabel and is now Malabo, and San Carlos Bay on the west coast. The settlement was built under William Fitzwilliam Owen, whose forces detained 20 ships and freed 2,500 captives in his three-year command. With Spain largely absent, the British administered the island themselves and settled freed captives there, along with people from Sierra Leone and Jamaica. Britain made several offers to buy Fernando Po, particularly from 1839 to 1841.

The sources do not agree on when the lease ended. Britannica and Wikipedia close it in 1843, when the patrol moved to Freetown and its buildings were sold to a Baptist mission. Chira has Spain retaking possession in 1836, and Wikle dates the reassertion of Spanish control to 1855, the year the Bioko article gives for the formal revocation of the lease.

What the British left was a population. The descendants of the settlers, the Fernandinos, were the island's elite into the twentieth century. On the eve of the First World War about nine tenths of them were Protestant and English-speaking, and pidgin English was the island's common language. A freed slave from the West Indies who had come by way of Sierra Leone, William Pratt, established the cocoa crop.

Spain sent its first governor, Carlos Chacón, in 1858 and used the island as a place to send people it did not want. Free people of colour were forcibly moved from Cuba in 1844, about 560 more arrivals in the 1860s were mostly emancipados and convicts, and close to 600 political deportees came during the Cuban war of independence. Chira writes that mortality was so high that deportation amounted to a death sentence.

How Spain lost most of the mainland

Spain first explored the mainland in the two decades ending in 1877. Explorers such as Manuel Iradier signed treaties in the interior as far as Gabon and Cameroon, but Madrid backed them only in part, and much of the land never came under the "effective occupation" that the Berlin Conference of 1885 required. France moved into the gap. The Treaty of Paris of 1900 left Spain with the enclave of Río Muni, about 26,000 km² of the roughly 300,000 km² stretching east to the Ubangi River that Spain had claimed. The head of the Spanish delegation, Pedro Jover y Tovar, called it "un verdadero despojo a un pais desmoralizado" and killed himself aboard the ship taking him home on 21 October 1901.

Even the date of union is reported three ways. Wikipedia unites Bioko and Río Muni as the colony of Spanish Guinea from 1926; the BBC dates the union to 1904, the year a royal decree named the colony the Spanish Territories on the Gulf of Guinea; and Barrie Wharton describes a decree of the Nationalist government at Burgos in August 1938 as unifying the two legally for the first time.

After 1898 the colony was Spain's last significant tropical possession, and the money went to the richer and healthier island. The mainland was occupied only from 1926, when the army was sent to "pacify" the Fang. Chira calls the war brutal and the investment that followed it low, and ties the campaign to the island's need for workers: many Fang were forced onto the plantations of Fernando Po. The colony was considered pacified by 1929. Río Muni had an official population of a little over 100,000 in the 1930s, and its people could cross easily into Cameroon or Gabon.

Who worked the cocoa on Fernando Po

Why the Bubi stayed off the plantations

The Bubi population fell from perhaps 30,000 in the 1820s to 10,000 counted in a census of 1911, figures Chira takes from the historian Ibrahim Sundiata. Disease did much of the damage, sleeping sickness among it, brought over from Río Muni. The survivors withdrew into the interior and would not work for the planters, and their own small cocoa farms kept them independent: in 1910 the governor general Ángel Barrera estimated that smallholding Bubis grew about a third of the island's crop.

The colonial government tried force and met revolts. A rule of 1904 required every "unemancipated African" to work two years on a European plantation. The Bubi leader Sas Ebuera refused to supply men, was arrested, went on hunger strike and died in custody, and a further revolt in 1906 was put down. In 1917 the government in Madrid ruled forced Bubi labour for private companies illegal, by which time most Bubis had been disarmed. Spanish Claretian missionaries then organised them into small mission theocracies modelled on the Jesuit reductions of Paraguay.

Where the contract labour came from

Planters looked off the island, and each source of workers ended in scandal. In 1899 about 400 workers, most from the Gold Coast, struck after an overseer whipped a young man to death, and Britain stopped labour migration from its West African colonies. A labour treaty with Liberia followed in 1914, with up to 15,000 workers shipped by the German Woermann-Linie; Wikipedia estimates that some 10,000 Liberians went between 1914 and 1930. In 1930 a commission found that they had "been recruited under conditions of criminal compulsion scarcely distinguishable from slave raiding and slave trading", and the Christy Report brought down the Liberian president Charles D. B. King that year.

Nigeria filled the gap by canoe. Igbo and Ibibio workers were smuggled across from Calabar and Oron, and clandestine contract workers on Fernando Po numbered 20,000 in 1942, the year Spain and Britain signed a labour agreement that made the traffic legal. By independence in 1968 almost 100,000 Nigerians lived and worked in Spanish Guinea.

The land changed hands at the same time. Regulations of 1904 and 1905 favoured Spanish settlers, and by 1940 only an estimated 20% of the colony's cocoa was still grown by Africans, nearly all of it by Fernandinos. Through the 1940s the cocoa and coffee of Spanish Guinea supplied 11% of all imports reaching Spain, by Chira's account.

Why the Civil War split the island from Bata

In 1936 the colony had a Governor General on the island and a Vice Governor in Bata, and when the Spanish Civil War reached it the two went different ways. Wharton, writing in the GEFAME Journal of African Studies in 2006, describes it in detail. On 19 September 1936 Lieutenant Colonel Serrano, chief of the Colonial Guard, rose against the Republican Governor General on Fernando Po and declared a state of war on the orders of Franco's government in Burgos. In Bata the Vice Governor, Miguel Hernández Porcel, refused to recognise him, and the island and the mainland were cut off from each other.

Franco's supporters on the mainland marched on Bata, and the two forces met at Comandachina, near the River Ekuku. Both were led by white officers and both were made up entirely of Black colonial soldiers, two of whom were killed before the Republicans won. Wharton dates the march to 23 September and Wikipedia the clash to 22 September. In October the merchant ship Ciudad de Mahón came from Fernando Po with a rebel force and took Bata, and the last Republicans fled to Gabon or were deported to the Canary Islands in November 1936.

The victors then bound the colony closer to Spain. By 1937 the mainland town of Kogo had become Puerto Iradier and Bimbiles had become Valladolid. A decree of 30 September 1944 divided the colonised into emancipados and no emancipados: a man who was 21, held a secondary qualification and had worked two years for a Spanish concern could become a Spanish citizen, testify in court and drink in public in the same bars as white Europeans. Wharton traces the fathers of independence, among them Acacio Mañé, Bonifacio Ondó Edú and Francisco Macías Nguema, to this first generation of emancipados.

How independence was argued between two halves

In 1959 Spain made the colony two provinces of Spain, Fernando Poo and Río Muni, and gave their inhabitants the same rights as citizens of Spain. Nationalism grew mainly among exiles in Cameroon and Gabon, and a referendum on 15 December 1963 approved limited autonomy for the two provinces under the name Equatorial Guinea, with the odd result that Guineans could choose among several parties while Spaniards in Spain lived under one.

The island and the mainland wanted different things from the change. When the Patronato de Indígenas, the colonial body that treated Africans as legal wards, was dissolved in 1959, the Bubi received full shares in the cooperatives it had built, and in the mid-1960s those cooperatives grew 20% of the island's cocoa. Chira writes that this success bound the Bubi elite to the Franco regime, and that the anti-colonial drive came from Río Muni. Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, a close associate of Franco, encouraged Bubi nationalism on Fernando Po in the hope of gaining a hold over the Fang leaders of the mainland.

Spain opened a constitutional conference on 27 October 1967 with 41 local delegates and 25 Spaniards. The Fernandinos and the Bubi, who feared losing their privileges and being swamped by the Fang majority, faced the Fang nationalists of Río Muni, and after nine sessions the conference was suspended in deadlock between the "unionists" and the "separatists" who wanted a separate Fernando Po. Macías Nguema, the leading Fang figure, went to the UN in New York, and his speeches there helped push Spain into naming a date for independence and elections. In July 1968 almost every Bubi leader went to New York to argue the other case, and found little interest.

The constitution was approved by referendum on 11 August 1968. Macías Nguema beat Bonifacio Ondó Edú in a presidential run-off in September, and Spain handed over power at noon on 12 October 1968 in Santa Isabel.

What the Macías years did to Bioko

The break with Spain came within months. In March 1969 Macías Nguema arrested his foreign minister, Atanasio Ndongo Miyone, who was killed, and Spain evacuated its citizens, about 7,500 of them. Decree 415 of 7 May 1971 gave the president all the powers of the other branches, a decree of 14 July 1972 merged the parties into one with Macías Nguema president for life, and a plebiscite on 29 July 1973 replaced the constitution with 99% approval by official figures.

The island bore a particular share. Fernando Po was renamed Masie Nguema Biyogo Island in 1973, and Santa Isabel was renamed Malabo. Macías Nguema associated the Bubi with wealth and education: about 160 notables were arrested in August 1971 over a reported "Bubi conspiracy", and Santa Isabel was militarised. Annobón, where most voters had voted against him in 1968, saw mass arrests in 1972 and was cut off from aid during a cholera epidemic in 1973 in which about 100 people died. From around 1974 the president lived in a fortified villa at Mongomo, on the mainland, and refused to go to Malabo unless an urgent situation arose.

The workforce that had carried the island's economy left. Nigeria evacuated 45,000 contract labourers in 1976, citing "brutal ill treatment"; the Wikipedia history of the country puts the Nigerians who left in early 1976 at about 60,000. Income per head fell from about $1,420 in 1968 to about $70 in 1975, by the figures the Macías article cites.

How many people died is disputed. The estimate given at the trial in 1979 was between 20,000 and 50,000, the scholars Scott Straus and Max Liniger-Goumaz put the lower end at around 5,000, and some estimates reach 80,000. Exile is better counted: the researcher Robert af Klinteberg reported in 1978 that at least 101,000 people had fled, out of a population the World Bank put at 215,284.

On 3 August 1979 the president's nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who had been military governor of Bioko and director of Black Beach prison, overthrew him. Macías Nguema was caught in the forest of Río Muni on 18 August and shot at Black Beach by Moroccan troops on 29 September 1979, after Equatoguinean soldiers refused to do it. The island was renamed Bioko, though its namesake is disputed: the Bioko article names the politician Cristino Seriche Bioko, while Chira names Bioko, the subordinate who in 1904 urged Sas Ebuera to refuse the labour draft. The original arms on the flag, a silk-cotton tree under six stars, were restored on 21 August 1979.

Why the capital moved to the mainland

The coup put a Supreme Military Council in charge. A constitution of 1982 gave the president power to make laws by decree, in January 1985 the country entered the Franc Zone and replaced the ekwele with the CFA franc, and a constitution of 1991 led to the first multiparty elections in 1993.

Oil was then found in the sea around Bioko. Spanish government geologists had found the first evidence of oil off Bioko, and Mobil discovered the Zafiro field north-west of the island in 1995, with production from 1996; Chira dates the discovery of rich reserves to 1991. She puts national income at $132 million in 1991 and $19 billion in 2012. At independence in 1968 cocoa had made up 75% of the economy, by the figure Wikle cites.

The seat of government then left the island. In 2011 the government announced a new capital at Oyala, renamed Ciudad de la Paz in 2017. Wikle, writing in 2019, places it in eastern Río Muni 172 km from the Atlantic coast, describes plans for 200,000 residents and reports that its construction took half of all government spending in 2018. By a decree of January 2026, dated 2 January by Britannica and 3 January by Wikipedia, Ciudad de la Paz became the capital, and the offices of state were given a year to move from Malabo. The country's record gives the new capital 2,000 inhabitants in 2022 and Equatorial Guinea a population of 1,847,549 on 1 January 2023.

On 19 May 2025 the International Court of Justice awarded Equatorial Guinea sovereignty over Mbanie, Cocoteros and Conga, three islands that Gabon had claimed since 1972.