This is part of our special feature, Beyond Eurafrica: Encounters in a Globalized World.
In our geographic imaginaries, Spanish colonialism tends to be mapped onto South America and perhaps the Philippines. However, the last Spanish colony to claim independence from Spain in 1968 was a territory in West Africa—Equatorial Guinea—a nation-state where Spanish still serves as the official language. A few years before Spanish Guinea’s independence in 1968, exports per capita were the highest in Africa. Moreover, this little known Spanish colony was the fifth largest producer of cocoa on the continent, a surprising status given its size compared to its neighboring rivals: Ghana, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, or Cameroon.[1] And yet, in spite of its roaring economic productivity, hardly any contemporary Spaniards remember how deep Spain’s connections to Equatorial Africa run through history. Indeed, until recently, references to Equatorial Guinea and Spain’s connections to Africa more generally have been relatively scant, altogether absent, or downright problematic in public memorials, history textbooks, or public culture in Iberia. West African migration to Spain and revisionist scholarship, particularly on Spain’s participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, have been gradually creating greater public awareness.
A territory comprised of a mainland region (Río Muni) and several islands (Bioko, Annobon, Corisco, and Elobey) in the Bight of Biafra, present-day Equatorial Guinea became tenuously inserted into emerging Atlantic networks during the fifteenth century. The beginnings of Spanish colonization in the Americas cannot be separated from the Portuguese presence in the Atlantic islands of Madeira, Cape Verde, São Tomé, and Principe. However, what is today Spanish Guinea would occupy a marginal position in an Atlantic economy that would consolidate around the slave trade, in spite of sustained efforts that several European agents made to coopt the island of Fernando Po into the slave trade.
During the second half of the fifteenth century, while searching for a path to China through the Atlantic, Spanish and Portuguese explorers quickly realized that several islands that they encountered on the way provided an ideal ground for planting highly lucrative sugar cane or for accessing timber. Slave labor was key to this master plan—with most of the captives being brought from the West African mainland.
The Portuguese would become the main commercial agents and slavers in the area, with the Spanish focusing their energies primarily on the Canary Islands and the Americas. But the Portuguese never succeeded in creating settlements on the African mainland (except in the Kongo). And yet, notwithstanding this limitation, the three-part plantation model that they developed on the Atlantic islands would have wide-ranging consequences into the Americas and beyond. Their approach to economic extraction consisted of coupling capital investments from Europe, with imported enslaved labor from the West African mainland and with European export commodity markets. First developed in the Levant and the Mediterranean islands, this plantation model traveled through the Atlantic and then to Hispaniola and Brazil.[2] Indeed, Christopher Columbus himself was aware of how lucrative plantations could be, after participating in voyages of exploration of the Atlantic islands and of West Africa before taking off for the Indies. Among the items that he introduced in Hispaniola was sugar cane.[3]
At first, the Portuguese and then the Spanish focused primarily on the island of Fernando Po (which was named after the first Portuguese explorer to reach it), later to be known as Bioko. Unlike other Atlantic islands, however, Fernando Po remained a story of failed Portuguese and then Spanish imperialism until the early twentieth century. After an initial exploration in 1471, the Portuguese were unable to insert it into slave trading networks. Slavers, explorers, scientists, and political figures portrayed the island as a pit of diseases that no outsider would be able to withstand. Aided by the island’s topography, the indigenous population effectively rebuffed European settlements and commercial forays. The Bubis, a Western Bantu population, used the thick forests as a protective device against slavers.[4] Knowledge of their techniques of deflection traveled to neighboring islands, since a 1780s Spanish traveler explained that the southern part of Fernando Po was inhabited by runaway slaves from the Portuguese islands of Príncipe and São Tomé who had created “a republic that is governed by its own laws.”[5] So, even as the number of slaves exported from the Bight of Biafra was increasing throughout the eighteenth century, Fernando Po served at most as a stopping point for slavers, rather than as a supplier of slaves.[6]
In 1778, the Spanish Crown took possession over Fernando Po from the Portuguese with the aim of developing an aggressive presence in the West African slave trading networks. At the time, Cuba was slowly yet steadily becoming a sugar plantation colony, a process that was accompanied by a growing demand for slave labor. However, the Spanish failed to establish a strong base here for the same reasons that the Portuguese had in the previous three centuries. The Crown’s investment in the island was also inconsistent.
After Britain abolished the trans-Atlantic slave trade within its empire in 1808, it initiated a global campaign for abolition. The British pressure on Spain mounted throughout the next decade and in 1817, the Spanish signed a treaty ending the slave trade to their American possessions. Contraband would thrive, however. Indeed, the slave trade to the Spanish Caribbean would reach unprecedented levels after the abolition of the trade, and the Bight of Biafra would be the main ground of expansion, partially because its geography allowed slavers to conceal their operations. In this context, for slavers, Fernando Po appeared as an ideal stopping point and hiding ground from the British anti-slavery squadrons’ watchful eyes. On the other hand, however, strapped for resources, the Spanish Crown introduced a policy that worked against the interest of Cuban sugar producers and Spanish contraband slavers. Between 1827 and 1836, it conceded rights of use over the island to the British who would turn it, along with Sierra Leone, into a base for its anti-slave trade operations in Biafra.
Under pressure from Spanish traders to assert its sovereignty, however, the Crown retook possession over the island in 1836. But it would be another twenty years before it would begin to make more sustained investment in colonial settlements, and more than half a century before those investments would yield any profits into the metropolitan coffers. The brief British presence did, however, have a long-lasting impact. Among the British settlers were people of color from Jamaica, the Gold Coast, and Sierra Leone (missionaries, teachers, cultivators) who relied on palm oil exports to make ends meet and who were tied to commercial networks in Lagos. They would come to be known as Fernandinos and were the local elites into the twentieth century. Their efforts at small-scale cash-crop cultivation resonated with those of other Afro-descendant communities along the West African coast with ties to the Atlantic economy: the Afro-Portuguese in São Tomé and Príncipe, Efik traders in Old Calabar, or the Duala elites in Cameroon. Many Fernandinos remained on the island after the British returned control over it to the Spanish in 1836.[7]
By the 1860s, Spain had lost its status as a great European power after being excluded from the Council of Europe at the Vienna Congress in 1815. Yet, it maintained a global presence even though it had lost most of its American colonies in 1824. Because of Cuba’s sugar productivity (obtained through the brutal exploitation of enslaved people), by the late 1850s, Spain controlled the second or third most profitable global empire, after Britain and the Netherlands. Yet, Spain’s political power had shrunken. Moreover, Cuba’s economic connections to the US (through credit systems and export markets) was expanding, threatening Spanish hegemony over the island. In the late 1850s, the Spanish government initiated a new wave of expansionism partially in an attempt to re-assert its political power globally, but also in order to make quick profits. The newly created party Unión Liberal ushered in a brief era of micro-militaristic interventions across the globe promoting experiments with formal and informal empire. Troops were sent to Vietnam, Morocco, Santo Domingo, Mexico, and the Pacific coast of Chile and Peru. In some cases, these expeditions were mainly designed to claim reparations for vaguely defined harms and take over customs houses, rather than to lay the groundwork for colonial structures.[8] Efforts to colonize Fernando Po were rekindled in this context.
As the British were laying claims to territories across West Africa out of Sierra Leone, authorities in Madrid approached Fernando Po as a starting point for a similar such project. They took inspiration from the British who used emancipados (African captives whom the anti-slavery squadrons captured on contraband slavers) to settle Sierra Leone.[9] Indeed, this particular model had global resonances: with the surge of abolitionism, looming general emancipation and its aftermath, both abolitionists and anti-abolitionists in Europe and North America considered relocating freed and free Afro-descendants to tropical territories. Such efforts could be intertwined with settler colonialism, since Afro-descendants in the Americas were considered to be potential “civilizational agents” in the Caribbean and Africa.[10]
The Spanish colonial administrators in Fernando Po looked to emancipados and free people of color in the Caribbean as potential settlers who could spread Catholicism and Hispanic culture to this area.[11] Some free people of color were forcefully relocated in 1844, in the wake of a suspected conspiracy against slavery in Cuba. This wave of forced migrations was followed by approximately 560 arrivals in the 1860s, most of them emancipados and convicts.[12] But colonial administrators in Havana were reluctant to encourage such colonization schemes on grounds that the island was losing much-needed labor. In letters to Iberia, they explained that most emancipados refused to embark upon such a trans-Atlantic journey on grounds that it reminded them of their earlier experience in the slave traffic. Yet, this new effort at colonization also ran out of steam relatively quickly around the 1870s, just as other European powers were embarking upon “the scramble for Africa.” Given Spain’s economic lag to other European powers, it is unsurprising that the Crown lacked the resources to invest in its West African colony. Moreover, the Spanish merchant marine, a necessary institution to any expansionist effort in West Africa, declined throughout the 1870s as well.
During the Cuban War of Independence (1868-1898), the island was turned into a presidio (a mixture of military barracks and prison) with close to 600 political deportees reaching Fernando Po from the Caribbean. Mortality rates were so high that deportation was the equivalent of a death sentence.[13] However, some of those who did survive penned memoirs later published in Havana.[14] In spite of a lack of government interest and of scant private capital investments, several Spanish explorers organized expeditions to Fernando Po and Rio Muní, emulating Henry Stanley’s initiatives in the Congo.[15] Indeed, a series of Africa-focused scientific organizations were established during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, most notably the Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid (1876). Events such as the Congreso de Geografía Colonial y Mercantil (1883), which promoted immigration, agriculture, and trade as a means of asserting a Spanish presence in west Africa.
A more successful effort at colonization started at the turn of the twentieth century, after Spain lost Cuba and the Philippines and more energy and resources were available for other global initiatives. Some Catalan firms started investing in land acquisition during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Because of its neutrality, Spain emerged out of World War I with relatively good foreign reserved, which facilitated such colonization efforts. Moreover, cocoa’s profitability on world markets motivated the surge in energy.
Like other European powers in West Africa, the perennial problem that cocoa planters confronted was an adequate labor supply. Throughout the nineteenth century, colonial administrators looked to the Bubis as a potential such labor source, while also trying to tap into the free population of color of the Caribbean. They orchestrated direct attacks against the Bubi religious and social systems as a way of folding them into the colonial project. Indeed, the authority of the indigenous leadership declined steadily throughout the nineteenth century. Extremely high death rates caused by disease (yellow fever, whooping cough, dysentery, trypanosomiasis, which was introduced to the island from Río Muni) and the violent political environment decimated the indigenous population. In the 1820s, there might have been about approximately 30,000 Bubis on Fernando Po. By 1911, census-takers identified 10,000 Bubis.[16]
Even when the Bubis could be made to work on cocoa plantations situated along the coast, many managed to flee into the forested and mountainous interior, making them an unreliable labor force. As late as the 1890s, the colonial governors could not force the indigenous leadership to support a steady labor draft. In 1893, the governor-general asked Bubi leadership for laborers who could work on the public works. The plan came to a halt. Five years later, however, colonial authorities tried extracting forced labor from the Bubi leadership again. Several revolts followed. In 1898, under Esasi, the towns of Balachá, Kodda, and Bepepe managed to settle with the governor and avoid forced labor. In 1904, Bubi groups had less success though. Colonial authorities mandated that all “unemancipated Africans” were supposed to work for two years on a European plantation. Those who were emancipated were expected to provide another laborer who could substitute them and work for four years, or pay a fee.[17] In 1904, one prominent Bubi leader, Sas Ebuera, at the instigation of his subordinate Bioko (after whom Fernando Po would be renamed following independence) refused to provide the requested labor draft. Arrested by the police, he went on a hunger strike, converted to Christianity, and died in custody. In 1906, other Bubi leaders revolted and were put down by force. In the wake of the defeat, approximately 1,800 Bubis were put to work on privately owned plantations, but their productivity was very low according to officials. Resistance continued into 1910, with guerilla resistance as well as petitions to the colonial government by prominent Bubis. In 1917, the metropolitan government ruled that forced Bubi labor for the benefit of private companies was illegal. By that point, most Bubis had been disarmed as well.[18]
Given that cocoa planters could not control native laborers, they looked to labor migrants as a population that could be more easily subjected to forced labor on their properties. They had supported such migration schemes from neighboring African territories (most notably from Liberia) during the nineteenth century. However, the scale of these schemes increased dramatically during the twentieth century.
By the 1890s, European administrators regarded forced labor as a means of building colonial regimes across West Africa. However, after World War I, the British and the League of Nations proffered the idea that forced labor was not and should not be like slavery, and that efforts should be made to prevent the morphing of forced labor arrangements into slavery. The ideological justification for such arrangements was that African populations were unable to govern themselves and were too apathetic to be motivated by salaried work. However, since abolitionism had been such an essential ideological aspect of European empire-building in Africa, slavery could not be countenanced either. In this vein then, forced labor was a compromise between slavery and free labor, supposedly, akin to an apprenticeship that would come to an end at an undetermined point in the future, when colonial administrators would deem Africans ready to govern themselves. This particular ideological justification for forced labor suited Spanish interests well. Cocoa planters in Fernando Po looked to Cameroon, Río Muni, Liberia, Nigeria, and West Central Africa (Loango) for migrant workers.
The laboring conditions on Fernando Po’s cocoa plantations drew the ire of British social progressives. Their attention was fixated on West Africa in the wake of two major scandals. Revelations of laboring conditions akin to slavery on the Cadbury plantations in São Tomé and in Príncipe drove a consumer boycott in Europe.[19] Moreover, Roger Casement, a British Consul and social activist who became a celebrity, penned a scathing report in 1904 that publicized the brutal treatment of native workers on the Belgian Congo’s rubber plantations.[20] This suggests that the British Foreign Office was paying close attention to labor abuses beyond its territories. Indeed, the British consul in Calabar followed closely news about abuses of British subjects and breaches of contract on Fernando Po throughout the 1890s.
News about the brutal treatment of migrant workers in Fernando Po became more widely shared following a strike action. In 1899, approximately 400 workers went on strike, after the death of one young man who had been whipped by an overseer. Beyond the violence of this act, the strikers complained that they were being paid significantly less than they had been promised. Most of them were from the Gold Coast, which is why their plight attracted the attention of British authorities. In response, the British embargoed labor migration from its West African possessions to Fernando Po. Even when the Spanish authorities introduced a Native Labor Code in 1906, the British government still considered it insufficient evidence of a will to end brutal laboring conditions. According to reports penned by British vice-consuls in Fernando Po, small planters were much more likely to breach labor contracts and to force laborers into highly exploitative situations because they had access to less liquid capital. In 1913, the Spanish government passed a new labor ordinance in response to British pressures. Employers lost access to migrant laborers if they failed to pay them three months in a row. Contracts could not be longer than two years, and rations had to be distributed on a daily basis. Flogging was not permitted, and the supervisors who flogged workers could be fined. However, laborers were to be punished for misdemeanors such as leaving the plantation without permission, insubordination, “groundless” complaints. These measures brought smallholding cocoa planters to collapse. However, by this point, the Spanish government was more interested in supporting large plantations.[21]
Two other labor migration schemes would supply Fernando Po with migrant workers. Between 1914 and 1927, the Spanish government had an agreement with Liberian authorities that allowed planters in Fernando Po to access Liberian laborers. The tactics used in such recruitments relied however on coercion. Moreover, many of the workers shipped to Spanish Guinea would not return after their contracts ended. As the Liberian government was expanding the infrastructure, they started looking on the agreement with the Spanish with skepticism. They eventually withdrew from it in 1927. Some private agreements soon followed that allowed for the ongoing flow of laborers until 1930.[22]
Fernando Po planter support for Franco during the Spanish Civil War was rewarded in the 1940s. The Francoist regime used Spanish Guinea as a model colony, a showcase of European munificence. Corporatist economic policies and price controls helped capital investors reap high profits. In 1942, Spanish and British authorities signed a labor migration agreement. By the mid-1950s, close to 16,000 workers from Nigeria were working in Fernando Po. Throughout the 1940s, their labor would enable cocoa and coffee producers in Spanish Guinea to supply 11% of all imports reaching Iberian Spain.[23]
The Spanish colonial administration managed to extract cash crops from the island by means other than plantation cultivation or the direct coercion of indigenous Bubis and migrant workers. Catholic education and land distribution were two other policies used to control the Bubis. They were mostly planned by Catholic missionaries (the Claretians) and by the Patronato de Indígenas (1904), an institution modelled on the colonial regime in South America. The Bubis, like indigenous people in the Americas, were treated as legal minors, or wards of the colonial regime. The Patronato was ostensibly responsible for protecting the Bubis by securing access to land for them, providing schooling, and making sure that they were not abused by European settlers. By 1910, the governor general, Angel Barrera, estimated that approximately a third of the cocoa crop on the island was produced by smallholding Bubis.[24] A Bubi elite with missionary education and land emerged soon thereafter. When the Patronato dissolved in 1959, the Bubi participants acquired full shareholder rights to agricultural cooperatives that the Patronato had created. In the mid- 1960s, Bubi cooperatives supplied 20% of the cocoa crop on the island.[25] Their economic success under Franco consolidated their commitment to the regime, even as they were witnessing decolonization and pro-Nkrhumah support in the nearby mainland colonies. Ties of debt and privileged access to Spanish markets consolidated the relationship between the Bubi elite and the colonial administration.
It was the population of Rio Muni that would drive the anti-colonial initiative forward. Spanish military rule in Rio Muni began in earnest in 1926. Voyages of exploration had occurred in the 1870s, but attempts to occupy territory only started half a century later, likely motivated by a need for labor on Fernando Po. In 1926, the military was sent to “pacify” the native population, the Fang: the war was brutal, the colonial investments that followed low, and many of the Fang forced to work on cocoa plantations in Fernando Po. Moreover, the war against the Fang provided a training ground for some of Franco’s supporters in the Civil War.[26] It is then unsurprising that it was the Rio Muni population that would clamor for independence. By the 1960s, in response to anti-Spanish mobilization in the area, the regime provided Guinea with limited autonomy; in 1968, it granted it full independence. The first president, Francisco Macias Nguema (1968-1979), was from Rio Muni.
Upon independence and following the loss of a privileged access to Spanish markets, the export economy collapsed. It was the discovery of oil deposits that would fuel a new wave of development under Equatorial Guinea’s second president, and the world’s longest serving head of state—Teodoro Obiang Nguema. Rich oil reserves were discovered in 1991, catapulting the country’s income from $132 million (or $330 per capita) in 1991 to $19 billion ($24,304) in 2012. The administration has been, however, accused of very high levels of corruption. The vast majority of the oil revenue has been siphoned into large infrastructure projects overseen by contractors with ties to the administration. Only 2-3 percent of the budget has been allocated to education and health. Oil reserves are estimated to dry out by 2035, and extraction has already been declining since 2012.[27]
Oil wealth came with new forms of inequality and exploitation. Some of the old stories of slavery and forced labor have taken an uncanny contemporary form.[28] Undocumented migration has been tied to circuits of human trafficking, supplying workers for the construction, service, and sex industries. According to the US Department of State, child slavery is rampant, with the government doing little to halt it.[29]
Adriana Chira is an Assistant Professor of History at Emory University, where she teaches courses on global human trafficking, race and slavery in the Atlantic world, and Cuban history. Her first book project is a socio-legal history of popular ideologies of race in nineteenth-century Cuba. Her second book project focuses on reverse Atlantic networks after the end of the contraband slave trade to the Americas, with particular attention to Spanish colonialism in West Africa.
Photo: Antique world planisphere portolan map of Spanish and Portuguese maritime and colonial empire. Created by Antonio Sanches, published in Portugal, 1623 | Shutterstock
References
[1] Spain in Equatorial Africa (SIE: Madrid, 1964), 51.
[2] Philip Curtain, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, 2nd edition (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
[3] William D. Phillips, “Africa and the Atlantic Islands Meet the Garden of Eden: Christopher Columbus’ View of America,” Journal of World History 3.2 (1992): 149-164.
[4] On the Bubis, see Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 137-146.
[5] Martín del Molino, “Datos etnográficos de los bubis en el siglo XVIII,” Guinea Española 60.1565 (1963): 38.
[6] Ugo Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
[7] Dolores García Cantús, Fernando Poo: Una aventura colonial española (Barcelona: CEIBA Ediciones, 2006); Ibrahim K. Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the Era of Abolition, 1827-1930 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 124-125; Lynn, Martin, “Commerce, Christianity, and the Origins of the ‘Creoles’ of Fernando Po,” Journal of African Studies 25 (1984): 257–278.
[8] Stephen Jacobson, “Imperial Ambitions in an Era of Decline: Micromilitarism and the Eclipse of the Spanish Empire, 1858-1923,” in Endless Empire, eds. Alfred McCoy, Josep Fradera, and Stephen Jacobson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 74-91.
[9] For an analysis of how British abolitionism was intertwined with colonialism in Sierra Leone, see Bronwen Everill, Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
[10] Ikuko Asaka, Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Everill, Abolition and Empire. For a Spanish version of this discourse, Jerónimo María Usera, Observaciones al llamado Opúsculo sobre la Colonización de Fernando Poo publicado por D. Adolfo Guillemar de Aragón (Madrid: Imprenta y Librería de Don Eusebio Aguado, 1852).
[11] Anti-slavery squadrons also captured contraband slavers in West Atlantic and Caribbean waters.
[12] Archivo General de la Administración (Spain), 81/6941: “Relación nominal circunstanciada de los doscientos negros emancipados que por Real Orden de veinte y uno de marzo de mil ochocientos sesenta y dos se han trasladado desde esta Isla de Cuba a la de Fernando Poo en el vapor transporte Ferrol.” Havana, June 14, 1862. On convicts, Archivo Histórico Nacional (Spain), Ultramar, leg. 4709, exps. 1-156.
[13] AGA 81/6946: “Informe dado por la comisión creada por Real Ordén de 29 de setiembre de 1881 para proponer los medios para fundar en Fernando Póo una colonia penitenciaria. Ministerio de Ultramar.”
[14] Juan B. Saluvet, Los deportados a Fernando Poo en 1869 (Matanzas: Aurora del Yumurí, 1892); Emilio Valdés Ynfante, Cubanos en Fernando Póo: horrores de la dominación española en 1897 a 1898 (Havana: El Figaro, 1898); Hipólito Sifredo y Llópiz, Los mártires cubanos en 1869 (Havana: La Prensa’ de R. M. Davila, 1893); For a secondary source, Susan Martín-Márquez, Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), chs. 1, 2, and 5.
[15] Manuel Iradier, Africa: Viajes y trabajos de la Asociación Euskara “La Exploradora” (Madrid: Miraguano, 1994[1901]); exploration had taken place in the 1870s.
[16] Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery, 168.
[17] The term “emancipated African” referred to individuals who had petitioned the Spanish colonial government to grant them a variable set of rights.
[18] Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery, ch. 9.
[19] Catherine Higgs, Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa (Ohio University Press, 2012).
[20] https://archive.org/stream/CasementReport/CasementReportSmall#page/n1/mode/2up
[21] Gervase Clarence-Smith, “African and European Cocoa Producers on Fernando Póo, 1880s to 1910s,” Journal of African History 35.2 (1994): 179–200; Jordi Sant Gisbert,. “El modelo económico colonial y sus contradicciones: Fernando Poo (1900–1936),” Afro-Hispanic Review 28.2 (Fall 2009): 57–80; Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery, 130-137.
[22] Enrique Martino, “Dash-peonage: the contradictions of debt bondage in the colonial plantations of Fernando Po”, Africa 87.1 (2017):53-78.
[23] Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery, 181.
[24] Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery, 173.
[25] Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery, 172.
[26] Barrie Wharton, “The impact and legacy of twentieth-century Spanish colonial policy on the socio-political development of Guinea Ecuatorial”, GEFAME: Journal of African Studies, 3.1 (2006). Available at: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/g/gefame/4761563.0003.102/–impact-and-legacy-of-twentieth-century-spanish-colonial?rgn=main;view=fulltext#N6
[27] Peter Maass, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil (New York: Knopf, 2009); Ken Silverstein, The Secret World of Oil (London and New York: Verso, 2014); Human Rights Watch, “’Manna from Heaven’? How Health and Education Pay the Price for Self-Dealing in Equatorial Guinea,” June 15, 2017: https://www.hrw.org/report/2017/06/15/manna-heaven/how-health-and-education-pay-price-self-dealing-equatorial-guinea
[28] Randall Fegley, “Death’s Waiting Room?: Equatorial Guinea’s Long History of Slavery,” In African Systems of Slavery, eds. Jay Spaulding and Stephanie Beswick, 135–159 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2010).
[29] https://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/countries/2016/258762.htm
Published on March 1, 2018.
