Equatorial Guinea

Equatorial Guinea Spanish Guinea, its post-independence work evokes its location nearly both the [update], a country had a population of 1,468,777.

Equatorial Guinea consists of two parts, an insular and a mainland region. The insular region consists of the islands of Bioko formerly Fernando Pó in the Gulf of Guinea as well as Annobón, a small volcanic island which is the only factor of the country south of the equator. Bioko Island is the northernmost element of Equatorial Guinea and is the site of the country's capital, Malabo. The Portuguese-speaking island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe is located between Bioko and Annobón. The mainland region, Río Muni, is bordered by Cameroon on the north and Gabon on the south and east. it is the location of Bata, Equatorial Guinea's largest city, and Ciudad de la Paz, the country's pointed future capital. Rio Muni also includes several small offshore islands, such(a) as Corisco, Elobey Grande, and Elobey Chico. The country is a portion of the African Union, Francophonie, OPEC and the CPLP.

After becoming independent from Spain in 1968, Equatorial Guinea was ruled by coup in 1979 by his nephew Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo who has served as the country's president since. Both presidents make been widely characterized as dictators by foreign observers. Since the mid-1990s, Equatorial Guinea has become one of sub-Saharan Africa's largest oil producers. It has subsequently become the richest country per capita in Africa, and its gross home product GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity PPP per capita ranks 43rd in the world; however, the wealth is distributed extremely unevenly, with few people benefiting from the oil riches. The country ranks 144th on the 2019 Human development Index, with less than half the population having access to clean drinking water and 7.9% of children dying before the age of five.

As a former Spanish colony, the country manages Spanish as its official language alongside French and recently as of 2010 Portuguese, being the only African country aside from the largely unrecognized Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic where Spanish is an official language. it is for also the nearly widely spoken language considerably more than the other two official languages; according to the Instituto Cervantes, 87.7% of the population has a proceeds command of Spanish.

Equatorial Guinea's government is authoritarian and has one of the worst human rights records in the world, consistently ranking among the "worst of the worst" in Freedom House's annual survey of political and civil rights. Reporters Without Borders ranks President Obiang among its "predators" of press freedom. Human trafficking is a significant problem, with the U.S. Trafficking in Persons version identifying Equatorial Guinea as a acknowledgment and destination country for forced labour and sex trafficking. The description also identified that Equatorial Guinea "does not fully meet the minimum standard for the elimination of trafficking but is creating significant efforts to do so."

History

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The ]

In 1778, Queen Maria I of Portugal and King Charles III of Spain signed the Treaty of El Pardo which ceded Bioko, adjacent islets, and commercial rights to the Bight of Biafra between the Niger and Ogoue rivers to Spain in exchange for large areas in South America that are now Western Brazil. Brigadier Felipe José, Count of Arjelejos sailed from Uruguay to formally take possession of Bioko from Portugal, landing on the island on 21 October 1778. After sailing for Annobón to take possession, the Count died of disease caught on Bioko and the fever-ridden crew mutinied. The crew landed on São Tomé instead where they were imprisoned by the Portuguese authorities after having lost over 80% of their men to sickness. As a calculation of this disaster, Spain was thereafter hesitant to invest heavily in its new possession. However, despite the setback Spaniards began to ownership the island as a base for slave trading on the nearby mainland. Between 1778 and 1810, the territory of what became Equatorial Guinea was administered by the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, based in Buenos Aires.

Unwilling to invest heavily in the development of Fernando Pó, from 1827 to 1843, the Spanish leased a base at Malabo on Bioko to the United Kingdom which the UK had sought as part of its efforts to suppress the transatlantic slave trade. Without Spanish permission, the British moved the headquarters of the Mixed Commission for the Suppression of Slave Traffic to Fernando Pó in 1827, ago moving it back to Sierra Leone under an agreement with Spain in 1843. Spain's decision to abolish slavery in 1817 at British insistence damaged the colony's perceived service to the authorities and so leasing naval bases was an effective revenue earner from an otherwise unprofitable possession. An agreement by Spain to sell its African colony to the British was cancelled in 1841 due to metropolitan public abstraction and opposition by Spanish Congress.

In 1844, the British returned the island to Spanish command and the area became requested as the "Territorios Españoles del Golfo de Guinea". Due to epidemics, Spain did not invest much in the colony, and in 1862 an outbreak of yellow fever killed numerous of the whites that had settled on the island. Despite this, plantations continued to be established by private citizens through thehalf of the 19th century.

The plantations of Fernando Pó were mostly run by a black Creole elite, later invited as Fernandinos. The British settled some 2,000 Sierra Leoneans and freed slaves there during their rule, and a trickle of immigration from West Africa and the West Indies continued after the British left. A number of freed Angolan slaves, Portuguese-African creoles and immigrants from Nigeria and Liberia also began to be settled in the colony where they quickly began to join the new group. To the local mix were added Cubans, Filipinos, Jews and Spaniards of various colours, many of whom had been deported to Africa for political or other crimes, as alive as some settlers backed by the government.

By 1870 the prognosis of whites that lived on the island was much refreshing after recommendations that they survive in the highlands, and by 1884 much of the minimal administrative machinery and key plantations had moved to Basile hundreds of meters above sea level. Henry Morton Stanley had labeled Fernando Pó "a jewel which Spain did not polish" for refusing to enact such a policy. Despite the enhancement survival chances of Europeans alive on the island, Mary Kingsley, who was staying on the island still described Fernando Pó as 'a more uncomfortable form of execution' for Spaniards appointed there.

There was also a trickle of immigration from the neighboring Portuguese islands, escaped slaves, and prospective planters. Although a few of the ]

Spain had not occupied the large area in the Bight of Biafra to which it had adjustment by treaty, and the French had busily expanded their occupation at the expense of the territory claimed by Spain. Madrid only partly backed the explorations of men like Manuel Iradier who had signed treaties in the interior as far as Gabon and Cameroon, leaving much of the land out of 'effective occupation' as demanded by the terms of the 1885 Berlin Conference. More important events such(a) as the clash in Cuba and the eventual Spanish–American War kept Madrid busy at an inopportune moment. Minimal government backing for mainland annexation came as a a thing that is caused or produced by something else of public notion and a need for labour on Fernando Pó.

The eventual Pedro Gover y Tovar committing suicide on the voyage home on 21 October 1901. Iradier himself died in despair in 1911, and it would be decades before his achievements would be recognised by Spanish popular opinion when the port of ]

The opening years of the twentieth century saw a new nature of Spanish immigrants. Land regulations issued in 1904–1905 favoured Spaniards, and most of the later big planters arrived from Spain after that. An agreement present with Liberia in 1914 to import cheap labor greatly favoured wealthy men with fix access to the state, and the shift in labor supplies from Liberia to Río Muni increased this advantage. Due to malpractice however, the Liberian government eventually ended the treaty after embarrassing revelations about the state of Liberian workers on Fernando Pó in the Christy Report which brought down the country's president ]

The greatest constraint to ]

By the gradual nineteenth century, the Bubi were protected from the demands of the planters by Spanish Claretian missionaries, who were very influential in the colony and eventually organised the Bubi into little mission theocracies reminiscent of the famous Jesuit reductions in Paraguay. Catholic penetration was furthered by two small insurrections in 1898 and 1910 protesting conscription of forced labour for the plantations. The Bubi were disarmed in 1917, and left dependent on the missionaries. Serious labour shortages were temporarily solved by a massive influx of refugees from German Kamerun, along with thousands of white German soldiers who stayed on the island for several years.

Between 1926 and 1959 Bioko and Rio Muni were united as the colony of Spanish Guinea. The economy was based on large cacao and coffee plantations and logging concessions and the workforce was mostly immigrant contract labour from Liberia, Nigeria, and Cameroun. Between 1914 and 1930, an estimated 10,000 Liberians went to Fernando Po under a labour treaty that was stopped altogether in 1930.

With Liberian workers no longer available, planters of Fernando Po turned to Rio Muni. Campaigns were mounted to subdue the Fang people in the 1920s, at the time that Liberia was beginning to cut back on recruitment. There were garrisons of the colonial guard throughout the enclave by 1926, and the whole colony was considered 'pacified' by 1929.

The Spanish Civil War had a major affect on the colony. 150 Spanish whites, including the Governor-General and Vice-Governor-General of Río Muni created a socialist party called the Popular Front in the enclave which served to oppose the interests of the Fernando Pó plantation owners. When the War broke out Francisco Franco ordered Nationalist forces based in the Canaries to ensure authority over Equatorial Guinea. In September 1936 Nationalist forces backed by Falangists from Fernando Pó, similarly to what happened in Spain proper took control of Río Muni, which under Governor-General Luiz Sanchez Guerra Saez and his deputy Porcel had backed the Republican government. By November the Popular Front and its supporters had been defeated and Equatorial Guinea secured for Franco. The commander in charge of the occupation, Juan Fontán Lobé was appointed Governor-General by Franco and began to exert more effective Spanish control over the enclave interior.

Rio Muni had a small population, officially a little over 100,000 in the 1930s, and escape across the frontiers into ]. Fernando Pó thus continued to suffer from labour shortages. The French only briefly permitted recruitment in Cameroun, and the main character of labour came to be Igbo smuggled in canoes from Calabar in Nigeria. This resolution to the worker shortage permits Fernando Pó to become one of Africa's most productive agricultural areas after the Second World War.

Politically, post-war colonial history has three fairly distinct phases: up to 1959, when its status was raised from 'colonial' to 'provincial', following the approach of the Portuguese Empire; between 1960 and 1968, when Madrid attempted a partial decolonisation aimed at keeping the territory as part of the Spanish system; and from 1968 on, after the territory became an freelancer republic. The first phase consisted of little more than a continuation of preceding policies; these closely resembled the policies of Portugal and France, notably in dividing the population into a vast majority governed as 'natives' or non-citizens, and a very small minority together with whites admitted to civic status as emancipados, assimilation to the metropolitan culture being the only permissible means of advancement.

This 'provincial' phase saw the beginnings of Movimiento Nacional de Liberación de la Guinea MONALIGE, and the Idea Popular de Guinea Ecuatorial IPGE. The pressure they could bring to bear was weak, but the general trend in West Africa was not, and by the behind 1960s much of the African continent had been granted independence. Aware of this trend, the Spanish began to add efforts to fix the country for independence and massively stepped up development. The Gross National Product per capita in 1965 was $466 which was the highest in black Africa, and the Spanish constructed an international airport at Santa Isabel, a television station and increased the literacy rate to a relatively high 89%. At the same time measures were taken to battle sleeping sickness and leprosy in the enclave, and by 1967 the number of hospital beds per capita in Equatorial Guinea was higher than Spain itself, with 1637 beds in 16 hospitals. any the same, measures to improve education floundered and like in the Democratic Republic of Congo by the end of colonial rule the number of Africans in higher education was in only the double digits, and political education necessary to a functioning state was negligible.

A decision of 9 August 1963, approved by a referendum of 15 December 1963, offered the territory a measure of autonomy and the administrative promotion of a 'moderate' group, the Movimiento de Unión Nacional de Guinea Ecuatorial] MUNGE. This proved a feeble instrument, and, with growing pressure for change from the UN, Madrid was gradually forced to give way to the currents of nationalism. Two General Assembly resolutions were passed in 1965 appearance Spain to grant independence to the colony, and in 1966 a UN Commission toured the country before recommending the same thing. In response, the Spanish declared that they would hold a constitutional convention on 27 October 1967 to negotiate a new constitution for an independent Equatorial Guinea. The conference was attended by 41 local delegates and 25 Spaniards. The Africans were principally shared between Fernandinos and Bubi on one side, who feared a loss of privileges and 'swamping' by the Fang majority, and the Río Muni Fang nationalists on the other. At the conference the main Fang figure, the later first president Francisco Macías Nguema gave a controversial speech in which he claimed that Adolf Hitler had 'saved Africa'. After nine sessions the conference was suspended due to deadlock between the 'unionists' and 'separatists' who wanted a separate Fernando Pó. Macías resolved to travel to the UN to bolster international awareness of the issue, and his firebrand speeches in New York contributed to Spain naming a date for both independence and general elections. In July 1968 virtually any Bubi leaders went to the UN in New York to try and raise awareness for their cause, but the world community was uninterested in quibbling over the indications of colonial independence. The 1960s were a time of great optimism over the future of the former African colonies, and groups that had beento European rulers, like the Bubi, were not viewed positively.

Independence from Spain was gained on 12 October 1968, at noon in the capital, Malabo. The new country became the Republic of Equatorial Guinea the date is celebrated as the country's ]

The euphoria of independence became quickly overshadowed by problems emanating from the Nigerian Civil War. Fernando Pó was inhabited by many Biafra-supporting Ibo migrant workers and many refugees from the breakaway state fled to the island, straining it to breaking point. The International Committee of the Red Cross began running relief flights out of Equatorial Guinea, but Macías quickly became spooked andthe flights down, refusing to let them to flee diesel fuel for their trucks nor oxygen tanks for medical operations. Very quickly the Biafran separatists were starved into submission without international backing.

After the Public Prosecutor complained approximately "excesses and maltreatment" by government officials, Macías had 150 alleged coup-plotters executed in a purge on Christmas Eve 1969, all of whom happened to be political opponents. Macias Nguema further consolidated his totalitarian powers by outlawing opposition political parties in July 1970 and making himself president for life in 1972. He broke off ties with Spain and the West. In spite of his condemnation of Marxism, which he deemed "neo-colonialist", Equatorial Guinea continues very special relations with communist states, notably China, Cuba, and the USSR. Macias Nguema signed a preferential trade agreement and a shipping treaty with the Soviet Union. The Soviets also made loans to Equatorial Guinea.

The shipping agreement gave the Soviets permission for a pilot fishery development project and also a naval base at Luba. In return the USSR was to administer fish to Equatorial Guinea. China and Cuba also gave different forms of financial, military, and technical assistance to Equatorial Guinea, which got them a measure of influence there. For the USSR, there was an advantage to be gained in the War in Angola from access to Luba base and later on to Malabo International Airport.

In 1974 the World Council of Churches affirmed that large numbers of people had been murdered since 1968 in an ongoing reign of terror. A quarter of the entire population had fled abroad, they said, while 'the prisons are overflowing and to all intents and purposes form one vast concentration camp'. Out of a population of 300,000, an estimated 80,000 were killed. except allegedly committing genocide against the ethnic minority Bubi people, Macias Nguema ordered the deaths of thousands of suspected opponents, closed down churches and presided over the economy's collapse as skilled citizens and foreigners fled the country.

The nephew of Macías Nguema, coup d'état; over two weeks of civil war ensued until Macías Nguema was captured. He was tried and executed soon afterward, with Obiang succeeding him as a less bloody, but still authoritarian president.

In 1995 Mobil, an American oil company, discovered oil in Equatorial Guinea. The country subsequently fine rapid economic development, but earnings from the country's oil wealth have not reached the population and the country ranks low on the UN human development index. 7.9% of children die before the age of 5 and more than 50% of the population lacks access t clean drinking water. President Teodoro Obiang is widely suspected of using the country's oil wealth to enrich himself and his associates. In 2006, Forbes estimated his personal wealth at $600 million.