President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has led Equatorial Guinea for 42 years
Abdelhak Senna · AFP · Getty
In Might this yr the Ignasi Iglésias-Can Fabra Library in Barcelona hosted a screening of the documentary El Escritor de un País Sin Librerías (The Author from a Nation With out Bookstores) by Spanish director Marc Serena. The screening was a part of a programme of ‘postcolonial reflections’ on Spain’s former African colonies, Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea.
The movie is a portrait of Equatoguinean author Juan Tomas Ávila Laurel, who has lived in Catalonia since 2011. Laurel, 55, whose two novels have been translated into English (1), is (together with Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo) one of many authors who’s finest recognized on the small Equatoguinean literary scene and amongst its diaspora of round 13,000 nationals resident in Spain.
Equatorial Guinea was a ‘key a part of Franco’s regime and its aspirations for greatness, however economically it was a marginal colony,’ says Catalan anthropologist Gustau Nerín, who teaches African research on the College of Barcelona. The 2 former autonomous Spanish provinces of Río Muni (on the mainland) and Fernando Pó (an island 30km off the coast, now referred to as Bioko, from which Equatorial Guinea will get its oil) had been united as a single unbiased nation in October 1968.
They handed from Franco’s management to the brutal authoritarian presidency of Francisco Macías Nguema, who was ultimately overthrown by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, now 79. Obiang is presently Africa’s longest-serving chief; his dictatorship marked its forty second anniversary this August. Anthropologist Gustau Nerín says, ‘For my part, there are three kinds of political regimes worldwide: neoliberalism, which maintains that the state shouldn’t intervene within the economic system; socialism, which says the state ought to shield the poor; and the Equatoguinean regime, through which the state protects, subsidises and defends the wealthy.’
Getting Spain’s consideration
In February 2011, on the time of the Tunisian rebellion, Laurel attracted worldwide consideration by happening starvation strike in Equatorial Guinea’s capital, Malabo, throughout an official go to from the president of Spain’s parliament, José Bono Martínez, of the Spanish Socialist Staff’ Occasion (PSOE). Laurel mentioned, ‘I needed to attract the Spanish authorities’s consideration to Equatorial Guinea’s human rights scenario and urge them to press for transitional establishments that didn’t embrace any members of the regime.’
For Spaniards, the colonial interval ended after they left Cuba in 1898. We’re extra conscious of and indignant about what’s occurring in Western Sahara than about occasions within the Gulf of Guinea
Michael Ugarte
On the time, Madrid was primarily all in favour of strengthening financial ties with its former Central African colony, which had change into the third-largest oil producer in Sub-Saharan Africa (2). Solely the involvement of the Catalan regional parliament and western intellectuals resembling Noam Chomsky (3) facilitated Laurel’s escape to Spain, whereas the Equatoguinean authorities spokesman performed down its significance.
Laurel has since lived in Barcelona. On 7 March, just a few weeks earlier than we met, 4 explosions had brought about devastation in Nkoantoma, a district of the nation’s business capital, Bata, the place a big navy barracks is located. This catastrophe, formally attributable to a ‘poorly managed brushwood hearth close to a stockpile of explosives’, left some 107 useless and 600 injured (the figures are possible underestimated). ‘I believed Equatorial Guinea would revolt after this tragedy,’ Laurel advised me. ‘Sadly, nothing occurred. Since Franco, we’ve at all times had dictatorships and lived in a system constructed on worry.’
Obiang’s Democratic Occasion of Equatorial Guinea (PDGE) holds 99 of the 100 seats within the Chamber of Deputies and all of the Senate seats. The opposition, exiled in Spain, is cut up into a number of political teams; essentially the most distinguished is the social democratic Convergence for Social Democracy, the one occasion that also has a presence at dwelling, though it has no affect in such a rigidly managed political system.
Activists admit to feeling discouraged: barring a palace coup, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, aka Teodorín, 53, the dictator’s eldest son and present vice-president, seems sure to take over. ‘The truth that Equatorial Guineans are divided between island and mainland areas, and proceed to establish in keeping with their ethnic group doesn’t facilitate a nationwide consciousness,’ Laurel mentioned.
Laurel nonetheless holds an Equatorial Guinean passport; he determined to not search formal political exile in Spain, demonstrating ‘braveness and fidelity’ in keeping with the essayist and Afro-feminist activist Remei Sipi. Sipi, who comes from the island of Bioko and is of Bubie ethnicity (4), additionally lives in Barcelona. She is among the many Equatoguineans who obtained Spanish nationality after independence as a part of the naturalisation coverage Spain then adopted. She based the primary Spanish affiliation for the defence of Equatoguinean migrants’ rights and campaigns for the rule of regulation in her native nation.
Communication a state monopoly
Like Laurel, she returns dwelling usually. Their fame protects them from retaliation by the federal government, which, by permitting them to return and go, can show a level of tolerance in the direction of dissident voices. However those that return to the nation need to maintain a low profile since arbitrary arrest and curbs on freedom of affiliation and meeting are widespread. All technique of communication and broadcasting are nonetheless a state monopoly (the one non-public channels belong to Teodorín Obiang’s Asonga group).
Spain occupied Equatorial Guinea from 1778 till 1810, and colonised it from 1844. Below Franco it was subjected to a repressive segregation coverage. It’s a rustic few individuals in Spain know a lot about. ‘For Spaniards, the colonial interval ended after they left Cuba in 1898. We’re extra conscious of and indignant about what’s occurring in Western Sahara [former Spanish Sahara] than about occasions within the Gulf of Guinea,’ says Michael Ugarte, professor emeritus of Spanish literature on the College of Missouri (5). Director Carmen Bellas and educational Alberto Berzosa had been shocked by how arduous it was to get entry to non-public colonial-era archives after they had been producing their documentary Memorias De Ultramar (Reminiscences of Abroad, 2020), a fee from Filmoteca Española.
Spanish reminiscences of the previous colony are typically rose-tinted, as demonstrated by the success of the movie adaptation of the romantic novel Palmeras en la Nieve (Palm Bushes within the Snow) by Luz Gabás, the daughter of a colonialist and activist within the conservative Individuals’s Occasion. The movie has been seen by over one million individuals since 2015; set within the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, it depicts a love affair between a Spanish foreman and an exquisite indigenous lady on a espresso plantation on Bioko. With its air of ‘constructive colonialism’, the movie brings to thoughts Franco’s speech to the Equatoguineans just a few months earlier than independence: ‘Spain just isn’t and has by no means been colonialist; it’s a civiliser, which is kind of totally different’ (6).
Palmeras en la Nieve was shot in Colombia and the Canary Islands, and was not too long ago featured on Netflix. It has even had an official screening in Malabo. In the meantime, El Escritor de un País Sin Librerías stays banned in Equatorial Guinea — ‘a rustic the place you’d assume you had been nonetheless within the late Francoist period’, in keeping with its director who was struck by the character cult round Obiang (his birthday is a nationwide vacation). No Spanish public tv channel has proven curiosity within the movie. Its producer Enrique Cerezo, a number one participant within the Spanish movie business and president of Atlético Madrid soccer membership, is on good phrases with Equatorial Guinea’s authorities, which welcomes his productions. In 2016, through the filming of 1898, Our Final Males within the Philippines in Malabo, Cerezo offered Obiang with an Atlético Madrid jersey.
‘Diabolical, schizophrenic relationship’
Spanish has no time period equal to ‘Françafrique’ to explain what Catalan journalist Xavier Montanyà calls the ‘diabolical, schizophrenic relationship’ that unites a small group of rich Spaniards and the household clan in Malabo. Though Equatorial Guinea is now solely Spain’s ninth-largest buying and selling companion in Africa, Montanyà’s investigations have uncovered ‘influential relationships linking Spanish corporations, people, foundations, consultancies and thinktanks with the Obiang household mafia, which in flip controls all of the nation’s assets and initiatives’.
Montanyà’s checklist of economic impropriety consists of senior members of the Individuals’s Occasion and the PSOE, members of the Spanish royal household, media figures, and development barons concerned in infrastructure initiatives which have change into the Equatorial Guinean regime’s white elephants: the airport and tourism undertaking on the island of Corisco, and the brand new capital, Oyala.
Equatoguinean journalist Delfin Mocache Massoko, who lives in Spain, has confirmed Montanyà’s findings. Massoko, the son of Fang opposition determine Avelino Mocache Mehenga, who now helps the Equatorial Guinean authorities, runs the investigative web site Diario Rombe. He contributed to the case in opposition to Teodorín Obiang, who was prosecuted in France for embezzlement and acquired a three-year suspended sentence in July and confiscation of all his belongings seized between 1997 and 2017.
Spain additionally stays a preferred haven for these with hyperlinks to the petro-dictatorship who make investments embezzled public cash there, significantly in property (7). Equatorial Guinea, which derives 97% of its exports from hydrocarbons, ranks 145th out of 189 on the UN’s Human Growth Index. Nonetheless, Obiang’s private fortune could also be as a lot as $600m.
In December 2015 Rita Bosaho Gori, a historical past graduate from Alicante born in Equatorial Guinea, was one in all 71 MPs elected for the Podemos occasion; she was the primary African-born member of the Cortes because the finish of the Franco period in 1975. Her election raised hopes of wider media publicity of Obiang’s dictatorship. In parliament, she helped discovered an intergroup on Equatorial Guinea, which didn’t, nevertheless, survive her defeat within the November 2019 basic election. And Equatorial Guinea reverted to oblivion.
‘In the end,’ says Catalan anthropologist Yolanda Aixelà Cabré, ‘the election of a black member of parliament was primarily about home politics and anti-racist optics.’ Mariano Rajoy (Individuals’s Occasion) was the final Spanish head of presidency to make an official go to to Malabo, in 2014. In April 2021 Socialist prime minister Pedro Sanchez’s African tour — a part of the Foco África 2023 plan for enterprise growth and migration management — conspicuously prevented the previous colony. It went as an alternative to Dakar (Senegal) and Luanda (Angola). Maybe this was supposed as a warning to the regime in Malabo.
