Tyranny in cocoa-land
Richard West
Perhaps the most horrible country in the world is the Equatorial Guinea Republic where one foreign minister was kicked to death under the eyes of the President and where one group of dissidents was publicly hanged in a football stadium to the sound from a loud-speaker of 'Those were the days, My Friend.' The horror stories about what has been going on there have now been compiled in a sombre pamphlet Equatorial Guinea: The Forgotten Dictatorship (The
Anti-Slavery Society, 75p) by Suzanne Cron* one of the best writers on Africa and almost the only one to have sided with Biafra against British big business.
Most of those Europeans who have even heard of Equatorial Guinea will laugh off its misery as just a result of African backwardness and barbarity. Yet those like Suzanne Cronje who know the history of the continent know also that the barbarity there is largely due not to inherent sin or stupidity but to the greed and cruelty of the Europeans who came there as slavers, colonists and commercial exploiters.
Equatorial Guinea consists of the island of Fernando Po and a barren chunk of the mainland opposite. The position of the island made it a busy trading post for the export of slaves to America and, after the abolition of slavery, a useful base for Royal Navy ships intercepting the slavers. Although the island was ruled by Spain, the influence of the British was so strong that our Consul sometimes acted as honorary governor. Britain's most famous consul was Sir Richard Burton, explorer and scholar, who went there partly to get away from his wife and partly because he hoped to see a gorilla on the mainland opposite. He loathed Santa
Isabel, a sleazy place, ravaged by yellow fever, and spent most of his time on the mainland gathering information on cannibalism, torture and sexual deviation which all appeared in books like Two Trips to Gorilla/and.
He set out to destroy the still-persisting myth that the Africans round the Bight of Biafra were descended from the Jews. 'External resemblances,' wrote Burton, who did not like either race, 'could be made to establish cousinhood between a cockney and a cockatoo; possibly such discovery of Judaism dates from the days about 1840, when men were mad to find the "Lost Tribes," as if they had not quite enough to do with the two which remain to them.'
The Spanish neglected Rio Muni, the mainland part of their colony, but made some profit out of the island from cocoa, which had been introduced from America by a freed slave. The men from the mainland who toiled on these plantations were hired and employed in conditions not much different from slavery.
Some were brought from as far up the coast as Liberia, causing an international scandal in 1929. Liberians, acting as Spanish consuls, would recruit ignorant villagers to work on the island and often cheated them out of some or all of their earnings. In 1923, under pressure from the American economic adviser, the Liberian government barred the recruitment of boys for Fernando Po. The trade was resumed after the Spanish Consul had 'fixed' the Liberian legislature for the moderate price of £150. Soon government ministers, including the VicePresident, went into the business of recruitment, press-ganging the villagers and flogging those chiefs who dared to protest.
A League of Nations commission published a stern report on these villainies, naming the guilty politicians like W. V. S. Tubman who went on to become the President of Liberia. (When I went to see him a few years before his death, President Tubman showed me round his private zoo and when asked to pose for a photograph, answered: 'I am a child of sorrow, and acquainted with grief.')
Many labourers in Fernando Po contracted tuberculosis, malaria, yellow fever syphilis or one of the other diseases for which this pest-hole is notorious. The government of Nigeria, before and after independence, often protested to Spain about the treatment of Nigerian labourers on the island.
The attitude of recent Nigerian governments to the ill-treatment of nationals in Equatorial Guinea is rather confused by the fact that most of these people are I bos, and therefore loyal to the suppressed secessionist state of Biafra. Indeed the recent thriller by Frederick Forsyth, The Dogs of War, is a thinly disguised account of an attempt by the Ibos, aided by foreign mercenaries, to overthrow the regime of Equatorial Guinea. The story starts just before the fall of Biafra, with Colonel Ojukwu saying goodbye to a group of white mercenaries, and the book implies that Ojukwu masterminded the coup. Oddly enough, it was in spring this year, when there were rumours of uprisings in Equatorial Guinea, that Colonel Ojukwu flew to Ireland to stay with his friend Mr Forsyth.
The description of Equatorial Guinea given with fictional licence by Mr Forsyth is scarcely more searing than that given by Mrs Cronje's carefully factual pamphlet. One quarter of the population is now in exile from a regime where politicians and their wives are publicly tortured and murdered. On Fernando Po (renamed Macias Nguema after the loathsome president) so many fishermen have fled to the mainland that a permit is now required to go to the seashore, and the only fish come as gifts from the Russian trawlers that operate from the island.
Most foreign countries condone the Macias regime out of economic or military opportunism. The French have moved into business posts left by the Spanish colonialists. The United Nations and its still more ludicrous counterpart, the Organisation of African Unity, are silent about the iniquities practised there. Our own posturing busybodies like Jack Jones and Tony Benn—so quick to protest against cruelty in Chile and Spain—show no concern for the starving workers of Equatorial Guinea. Of course not: it is thanks to the Macias slave regime that our workers get cheap cocoa and chocolate.
While the Arts Council pays out hundreds of thousands of pounds of public money to worthless or evil spongers, it is left to the Anti-Slavery Society to commission this pamphlet which, because the Society is so poor, Mrs Cronje wrote for a fee little more than slave wages.
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