Real Dictators - Macías Nguema Part 2: Hiding in the Jungle with all the Money

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

With President Macías in power, educated Equatoguineans come under attack, as a bizarre vendetta is pursued against teachers, lawyers and doctors. Things take a turn for the metaphysical, as Macías declares himself God. Finally, as paranoia completely overwhelms him, his inner circle will take matters into their own hands… Narrated by Paul McGann. A Noiser production, written by Sean Coleman. This is Part 2 of 2. Get every episode of Real Dictators a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to shows across the Noiser network. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TD Direct Investing offers live support. So whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. It's 1975. Sunset at Black Beach on the island of Bioko in Equatorial Guinea. The waves lap the shore. Birds caw as they whirl through the air, riding thermals, searching for fish in the clear ocean waters. They are the only ones who can fish here now. The president, Francisco Macias Nguema, has destroyed all the boats on the island to stop his subjects escaping.

As the sun fades behind the horizon, the sky plunges into familiar darkness. Electricity is scarce here too. Within the yellowing walls of Black Beach Prison, 16 men, political prisoners, limp out of a low building into the yard. Light from a fire glints off old scars and fresh wounds. Each of the men is naked, save for a makeshift covering of banana skins tied around his waist on a piece of string. As they reach the fire, a beat of string. As they reach the fire a beat starts up. They begin to move in motion around the flames but this is no spontaneous dance. It's a ritual of torture inflicted every Saturday evening. As they move they they sing, over and over again, a song in praise of President Macias. Prison guards and soldiers gather round, watching the humiliation.

Some laugh, others chat, paying little heed. It's too early for their attention to be needed yet. But later, when one of the dancers stumbles or slows, the guards will pull glowing iron bars from the fire and use them to spur the prisoners on. This ritual will continue for five, maybe six hours, until the men collapse from exhaustion. Only then will they be shepherded back inside. Translated into English, the words of the song they're forced to sing go, Macias is a serious man. The population adores him.

Let us enjoy ourselves in independence. Work and remain quiet, and the Lord of Guinea will take care of you for a long time. From Noisa, this is part two of the Messias story and this is Real Dictators. In part one we witnessed Messias' meteoric and improbable rise from impoverished orphan to president of the newly independent nation of Equatorial Guinea. In just a few short years since assuming power in 1968, he has already begun a campaign of terror.

The persecution of his political opponents, genuine and hypothetical, and the forced removal of any vestiges of Spanish influence, admired the country in economic turmoil. On the streets his youth militia maraud unchecked. But worse is still to come. As a percentage, a higher proportion of the population will be executed, assassinated, or rendered missing under Masias than even Stalin achieved in the Soviet Union. Journalist and author Paul Kenyon. I think Masias is the least educated, least inspiring individual who's ever run a country. You look at other people who we

found abhorrent, perhaps in the West, and some of them are extremely sharp. Gaddafi, fantastically bright. Mobutu, very impressive. Intellectual, effectively. Mugabe, several university degrees, brilliantly clever with a coherent ideology. There's nothing there. There's no coherent ideology. There's no civic duty, no responsibility to his people. There's no political views. There's a narcissism which isn't unusual in dictators around the world, but it's not backed up by anything. There's nothing behind it. Everything else is absent. In the absence of ideology, Macias' regime is animated by increasingly irrational fears. He suffers from paranoia, medically speaking, not just anecdotally. It's a condition likely worsened by his habitual use of strong, psychoactive substances. The majority of those executed or imprisoned thus far have had one thing in common.

They were all somehow connected with, or influenced by, the former colonial power, Spain. Macias now embarks on a phase of what he calls Africanization. Travel writer, risk consultant, and international educator, Oscar Scafidi explains. Macias decides that actually the place needs to be a lot less Spanish and it needs to be more African. So he renames a lot of places in the territory to have more authentically African names, for example. So the actual capital city, it's still called Malabo today, but it used to be Santa Isabel in Spanish times.

That changes in the 70s. The actual island that Equator Guinea's capital is on, it used to be called Fernando Po, named after the Portuguese explorer who discovered it. He decides actually he's going to name it after himself. So he names it Maciengema Biogo. So kind of partly after the local name and partly after himself. Now it's just called Bioco. It doesn't stop there. He forced everyone to change their European names to African names. So he finally drops the Francisco Macias part of his name, which he took from a Spanish colonial person.

And he decides he's now called Macia and Gemma Bioco. So yeah, it takes a much more authentically Fang name. He decides that priests are going to get punished if they baptize any babies with European names. He decides that all medicine is Western. So all the shelves are cleared of Western medicine. All the hospitals are cleared of Western medicine. If you need some sort of treatment, it's going to need to be an authentically African traditional indigenous treatment. And you can imagine what a disaster that was for healthcare in Equatorial Guinea. And then also he decides that certain food products are Western and they're

also banned. So you're not allowed bread anymore. You're not allowed tomatoes, sugar, milk. And it's rather ironic in a lot of these actions, he is actually mimicking the Spanish colonial authorities. So, you know, if we look back to when the Spanish were in charge, they were also telling the Ecuadorian that they weren't allowed to eat bread because that's a Western thing, that's not for you. And now Macias is doing exactly the same thing years and years later. Still not content that Spanish influence has been sufficiently diminished, Macias turns his sights on his next perceived enemy. In another chaotic speech he proclaims, These so-called intellectuals are the greatest problem facing Africa today.

They are polluting our climate with foreign culture. Shortly thereafter his youth militia, the JMM, are unleashed upon the educated classes. In this new wave of attacks, it's other tribes, more so than Macias' own Fang, who suffer. Members of the Bubi, the Andawi, and the Fernandinos are rounded up. Part of the Africanization campaign is also obviously kicking out all the foreigners, and another part is attacking the intelligentsia, attacking people deemed to be intellectuals and throwing them in prison, attacking the people who he thought were simulados, those who had collaborated with the Spanish colonial authorities, completely setting aside the fact that he had collaborated with the Spanish colonial authorities for decades prior to

his election. The president's definition of intellectual is extremely general. Doctors and lawyers are thrown in prison. With no teachers to run lessons, schools are closed or abandoned. Macias has started referring to himself by a new title, the unique miracle. The miracle orders all books to be burned, with libraries torn down. Soon, simply wearing glasses is enough to warrant the death penalty. The use of the very word intellectual is made illegal.

Vacant teaching positions are filled by members of Macias' political party, the PUNT. Before long, literally the only subject taught in schools is, quote, the adoration of Macias. In his younger days, he had to chant verses in praise of Franco. Now the next generation are compelled to revere him. The final straw for the education system comes after an official portrait of Macias is discovered, slashed to ribbons, by the entrance to a secondary school in the city of Bata. On further investigation, anti-Macias slogans are found daubed on the blackboards. The Minister for Education is summoned and informed that this behaviour will not be tolerated.

To prove the point, the minister is hauled through the streets before being executed. His body is left for all to see. Eventually, Messias simply closes all the schools. There will be no more formal education for anyone. In 1975, he decided he was just going to close all the schools in the country because education is not part of the Africanization campaign. There was no attempt to replace them with anything else. He just decided no one was going to school anymore from 1975 onwards. There was this indiscriminate persecution and ultimately imprisonment and killing of anybody that he presumed to be in any way against him.

And that did include not only his own tribe but his own family members reasonably close family members nobody was safe from assias between 1968 and 1975 he had essentially executed two-thirds of the original 1968 parliament and the rest of them if they were sensible they went missing so they went over the border into gabon or into cameroon yeah he had executed 300 prominent figures from the army the police the civil service the government life in equatorial guinea has become a surreal nightmare some simply cannot take it anymore has become a surreal nightmare. Some simply cannot take it anymore. Even now in the early 1970s there's a handful of western stragglers, diplomatic personnel

and the last remnants of the international oil and gas industry. One of the few US officials still based in Malabo finds himself stalked day and night by the JMM. Eventually he has a nervous breakdown and stabs an administrative officer to death with a pair of scissors. Taken back to the States to stand trial, he will cite the terror he's endured under Macias' regime as the explanation for his crime. He said that what had happened was essentially he'd been driven mad because of a deliberate policy of harassment by Macias' security forces forces where they were deliberately trying to intimidate him

by killing Equator Ghanaians associated with him in places where he could either see or hear it from the embassy. So for example, they took the embassy's cook who was an Equator Ghanaian national and they flayed him alive in full view of this American diplomat's residence. And they made sure that while he was either in his home or in the embassy, he could always hear the screams of tortured prisoners to deprive him of sleep. And he said that after a few months of that, it drove him mad. And that's what led him to commit this murder inside the embassy. In 1972, Macias issues yet another decree. He is now, officially, President for Life, Head of the Nation and Party, Commander in

Chief of the Army, and Grand Master of Education, Science and Culture. Which just about wraps everything up. So it's very, very quick disintegration. He's democratically elected, and it was democratic back in 1968. And then what? Less than four years later, we have a president for life. So it's pretty shocking how quickly things went wrong during that time. How then do we begin to explain the apparent inaction on the part of the international community? What accounts for the wall of silence around Equatorial Guinea?

So I'd say the collapse of Equatorial Guinea is certainly embarrassing for Spain, especially given how much money they've pumped in from 1964 through to 1968. And the way they deal with this embarrassment is they essentially have a media blackout of the country post-independence. So there is a ban on reporting anything about what's going on under Macias in Equatorial Guinea back in Spain. So your average Spanish citizen probably had no idea what was going on in the early 70s. Nobody in Europe was interested in what was going on there in terms of human rights. And the people who should have been the Spanish, because it was

one of their former colonies, they weren't allowed to be interested because there was basically a press blackout because it didn't serve their purposes for anybody to understand the nature and the scale of the behavior of Macias. And also, Macias himself does quite a good job of keeping this all under wraps. He essentially closes the entire country out of paranoia. So all the borders are closed. He even puts landmines on the roads leading out of Rio Muni into Gabon and Cameroon to make sure that people can't escape. And of course, the Europeans always had

an excuse to fall back on, which is they could say, well, how can we interfere? It's not our colony anymore. I mean, this would be absolutely appalling for us to start trying to impose our will when we'd withdrawn. They wanted us to withdraw. Look at the independence movements. They wanted us out. There's nothing that we can do. We've got to remember, this is a Cold War context that we're talking about. When Macias kicked out all the Spaniards, we end up with a situation where the Soviets move in and we've got the Cubans there. We also have some North Koreans over there at the time, but they also have very little interest in speaking up. They're still deriving all of the benefits from the relationship, regardless of what's happening to the Ecuadorian lands. So the Russians in particular were very

keen on Equatorial Guinea's strategic location as a listening post so that they could keep an eye on what NATO are up to in neighboring areas. It's also a very useful place for their warships to come and call in. And lastly, it's a very useful resupply point from which they can get men and material and support to the MPLA in Angola, who are busy fighting a pretty brutal civil war against the Western-supported UNITA forces. So the Soviets are absolutely not going to speak up. As long as Macias allows them to continue doing that, they really don't care what he does to his own population.

Free to continue unchecked, Macias has finally reached the last bastion of Spanish colonialism as he sees it, the Catholic Church. He first orders that all services must start and end with some kind of phrase elevating himself to equal status to God. So services begin with statements like In the name of Macias and his son or God created Equatorial Guinea thanks to Macias. The next step is to replace all Catholic imagery with photographs of himself, to be worshipped in their own right. I'm not sure how much of a problem Macias had with the Roman Catholic Church itself and how much of a problem he had with it simply because he viewed it as an instrument of control

by the Spanish colonial authorities. Throughout the colonies, obviously not just the Spanish colonies, the British colonies and the French colonies, the idea of using religion as a tool of oppression is quite a familiar theme. The Catholic Church became something that traditionally, after colonialism, people would turn against. They see it as a sort of a manifestation of the power, part of the problem, something that they have to exorcise. In Messiah's case, it was quite interesting,

as he later began to use his own very oppressive methods that we know about. He insisted that images, Catholic images in Catholic churches were removed and that his own portrait was placed there instead. He replaced the person that as a child he'd been forced to stand in front of and pray. But ultimately only the destruction of the churches, the burning of Bibles and the imprisonment and torture of priests will do. Catholicism is now criminalized, on pain of death. By 1979 its institutions in Equatorial Guinea will have been dismantled.

But Christianity has been here for over 500 years. It's not that easy to uproot. Some still go to extraordinary lengths to practice their faith. They had to scramble down into the cellars of the churches. I mean, all the churches were closed by this point, but sometimes they would have a secret access point and they would go down there and they would have these candlelit Catholic rituals. And obviously that was seen as pro-Spanish. That was something that you would end up in prison or worse for. So these sort of secret religious gatherings continue all the way through Messiahs, but at a huge personal risk to those taking part. In religion, as in other areas, Messiahs just goes further and further and further.

In religion, as in other areas, Macias just goes further and further and further. He now bans all religious practice in any form. He even makes his own ancestral faith, Bwiti, illegal. The president has reached a point where he believes that he has developed supernatural powers. Literally, not just figuratively, he claims to have become a god.

So why should anyone else be worshipped but him? not just figuratively, he claims to have become a god. So why should anyone else be worshipped but him? The new slogan sums it up quite simply, there is no other god than Messias. It's 1975, on the Equatoghenaean island of Bioko. A small group of men sit around a fire in their makeshift camp. They're in the grounds of the Nigerian embassy, taking refuge. The Nigerians are the only expat group left of note in Equatorial Guinea. For years they've worked on the farms and plantations.

But their bosses on Bioko have starved and beaten them, and eventually driven them off the land. The JMM have recently been given leave to attack any Nigerians as they see fit, which is how these men find themselves here, in the embassy grounds, awaiting a plane to airlift them to safety. here in the embassy grounds, awaiting a plane to airlift them to safety. Unfortunately for them, Macias has scant respect for diplomatic immunity. As armed forces storm the compound, the Nigerian workers are quickly overcome. Macias has 11 Nigerian citizens killed within the grounds of the Nigerian embassy. And as you can imagine, this greatly upsets the Nigerian government.

And the Nigerian government organizes a repatriation of all their citizens from Ektole, Guinea. And I think they end up taking about 40,000 Nigerians out of the country and back to Nigeria. And you can imagine what that does for the economy. Nigeria. You can imagine what that does for the economy. Then again, rather ironically, we find Macias acting just like the Spanish colonial regime that he was critical of. He starts rounding up members of his own ethnic group, the Fang, on Riomuni, some of them as young as seven years old. He ships them over to Bioko to work as forced labor on the plantations to prevent economic collapse. This is exactly the same thing that the Spanish were doing in the 1920s. He's replicating it 50 years later.

Industry and agriculture grind to an almost complete halt. Food is desperately scarce. What items are produced are bought up by Macias' administration, then sold back to the population at exorbitant costs. This will prove to be a turning point. With his people starving and totally desperate, for the first time Macias is starting to expose himself, to become vulnerable. He's driving his people to distraction. His fears of being attacked are no longer just paranoid imaginings.

And so in 1975 the president makes a remarkable decision. He is going to abandon his capital. Macias leaves his nephew Teodoro Obiang, more on him later, to oversee things and retreats to the safety of his ancestral homeland. In the eastern jungle he builds a fortress. It's patrolled by heavily armed guards from his militia. But this is no step down. Masir still intends to issue orders and decrees, just from here instead of Malabo.

In 1975, he decided he no longer wanted to be in the capital, in Bioko. He decided he's going to kind of retreat to his ethnic homeland. So he's going to go back into the jungle in Riomuni, be amongst his Fang ethnic group, because he's very paranoid by this stage. So he actually goes back to his home, not even Mongomo, which is like the big settlement in the area. He actually goes back to his home village area, which is Nsangayong. And when he goes in 1975, he also takes the entire national treasury with him. And when the director of the national bank says that's not a good idea, he has the director of the national bank executed on the

spot. Unfortunately, the national director of statistics suffers a similar fate when he dares to publish some negative economic statistics in the late 1970s, talking about how perhaps moving the bank into the middle of the jungle wasn't going to help Equatorial Guinea's economic performance. From 1975 to 1979, Macias is essentially holed up in the jungle, taking a lot of drugs that are not helping his mental health situation. There's a story about him sitting around a banqueting table where he's got 10 or so empty spaces, but he insists that his staff put plates with food and drink in all these empty places.

And the only person in there is Messiahs with 10 to 12 empty chairs and all this food. And he ends up making a rambling speech where it becomes clear that all these seats are actually intended for the people he's already killed so these are the seats of the ghosts which he's imagining are sitting there banqueting with him with messiahs still trying to defend his position and pointing at various seats and shouting the reason that you had to go is that you know that you were plotting against me. This had to happen. I hope you regret it now. Eat up. We'll continue. Now you over there in the corner. At this stage, he's issuing decrees based on imaginary conversations with spirits.

Everyone around him realizes that he's just fully had a mental health breakdown by this stage and just is not in contact with reality he used to trust the fang broadly as an ethnic group and his government used to be the fang now it was actually a small subset of his ethnic group the esangui which is the very small kind of clan that his family is from so we end up with a pretty ridiculous situation where the only people in charge in the country are direct relatives of President Macias. So we've got a cousin as vice president, foreign minister. We've got a nephew as finance minister and head of security. We've got his other nephew, Teodoro Obiang Gema, who's in charge today as military governor of Bioko, head of the armed forces, acting head. So essentially, if you are not related to him, you no longer have any say in how the country is run.

By the end of 1978, Macias has abandoned any pretense of running the country. Equatorial Guinea comes to a standstill. So there he is sitting amongst some of his ancestral bones and he'd taken the entire treasury of the country and had it stashed in this hut. There was nothing left. The symbolism can't be lost there. He'd raped and pillaged the country in every possible way and in the end had taken every last penny from the treasury as his own

even when he could never hope to spend it. It was just his. He possessed the country. He possessed every individual in it. He possessed their raw materials. He'd do what he wanted with it. You have a collapsed economy. Public sector wages have gone unpaid for a very long time.

There's no electricity. Even in the capital city, you can't get electricity. And at least on paper, the president is paying himself 10 million US dollars a year as his official salary. It's just economic madness at this stage. So his nephew, Theodoro Obiang, who's the current president, at the time in 1979, he's actually the military governor on Bioko Island. And he's been left as acting head of the armed forces while President Macias is out in the jungle. Essentially, Obiang realized that the security forces were running out of money

in spring 1979, and he realized this is not a good idea. No matter what the situation is in your country, as a despot, you want to keep the military paid and you want to keep the military on side because they're the only ones that keep you in power. So in spring 79, Obiang sends a six-man delegation of military officers to President Macias on the mainland to ask him to release some cash so they can actually pay these soldiers who are in arrears by months and months and months, which doesn't seem like that unreasonable a request when you think about it, especially as President Macias has all of the national bank's money in cash in his forest hideout. The delegation from nephew Obiang is not well received. Macias takes it as a clear challenge to his authority. Instead of sending the party back with a suitcase of dollars,

he has all six of them executed. One of them is Obiang's brother, Macias' own nephew. For anybody wanting the president for life gone, it's do or die time, and Obiang wants him gone. At that stage, I think he realizes that it's push or be pushed. Obiang essentially evacuated his family. And then on the 3rd of August, 1979, he leads a coup against the president. Teodoro Obiang and Guayma Mbasago, to give him his full name, may be Macias's nephew and stand-in in Malabo. He may also be the acting head of the security forces. Nonetheless, he must still tread carefully, lay the groundwork. After a series of secret meetings through the middle of 1979, the coup begins in earnest.

It almost certainly has the backing of Spain, Gabon and Cameroon. Skirmishes break out between loyalists and rebels in the main cities. It doesn't take long for Macias' men to surrender. They've seen the writing on the war. On Bioko Island, Obiang meets little obstruction. He's too well known, too feared to be opposed. He's overseen many of the goings-on at Black Beach Prison in recent years. The city of Bata is next to fall on August 6th.

Obiang feels confident enough now to declare victory. On August 9th, he holds a press conference. The coup, he announces, has been successful. There's only one problem. They can't track down Macias. So this was a man basically sitting in a room full of bones with a lot of American dollars and a lot of weapons trying to hide from his own people and his own family who were trying to overthrow him. And if you think that this is what he had become only, what is it, 11 years earlier in 1968, taking over the country in this sort of surge of excitement and hope and expectation about a newly independent Equatorial Guinea away from Spanish control.

You know, what a fall. A fall that was almost entirely fueled by his ranting paranoia. The man tasked with finding the deposed president is Florencino Maiella. He is the Soviet-trained commander of the Equatorian Navy. It's not long before a tip-off comes in. It's from an elderly woman in the eastern jungle. You'll never guess who she's just seen. Commander Aayla's men make their way to Macias' hideout. They find a unique miracle sitting under a tree, exhausted and delirious, chewing on a stick of sugar cane.

He has with him a few suitcases filled with foreign currency. He's burned the rest of the Treasury's foreign reserves. The ashes of $105 million smoulder in a nearby fire. By the way, it sounds as though one is sort of over-egging it here, but it's not with Macias. It's almost impossible to over-egg it. Macias' immediate family, his wife and three youngest children, are nowhere to be seen here or in Malabo.

That's because he sent them abroad, to North Korea. There they will be cared for and protected by Kim Il-sung, a man with whom Macias has struck up a rapport, even a friendship over the years, in the course of the shady dealings between their two nations. Eldest son Tio is in Cuba, the ward of Fidel Castro, though he'll shortly be sent back to Equatorial Guinea. But Monica, Macias' daughter, will grow up in Pyongyang, her education overseen by the Kims. She'll come to consider herself Korean, speaking the language fluently. Later she'll move to London and will author a book about her childhood under the watchful eye of not one, but two dictators.

That's a story for another day. Macias is brought back to Malabo in handcuffs. But what to do with him now? If they put the dictator on trial and have his crimes listed publicly, Obiang and his cronies risk being implicated in the reign of terror. Many of them are up to their necks in it. On the other hand, if they disappear him or execute him without any due process, they'll undermine their own supposed democratic credentials before they've even begun. Over the previous eleven years, Macias has destroyed the legal system anyway.

There isn't a court in which to try him, a judge to oversee proceedings, or clear laws under which he can stand accused. In the end, they decide that a military tribunal is the only way forward for him and ten co-defendants. With the blood of 80,000 victims on his hands, the multiple charges against Macias include genocide. The multiple charges against Macias include genocide. So his trial is held in a rather grand colonial cinema in the centre of town. They're sitting there with a sort of military panel and they're all waiting for him.

And outside, crowds have gathered and the proceedings are being relayed by these small tannoys. So you can hear echoing down the street and there's military there and there's people and you can see they're delighted. There's a sense of freedom. They've all come out for the first time on the streets and you can see there's a sense of community. People are sort of with their arms around each other and they're all chatting to each other. Masai is brought into this grand old cinema and he's wearing a sort of golden yellow shirt quite smart but he looks completely dazed and he's brought in by two men and he sat down on a stool in the middle of what once I think would have been the stage and he sat down there with nobody anywhere near him but

a whole bank of European journalists sitting in what would have been of course in the cinema. Masaius looks, he looks dazed, he looks disorientated. He doesn't look frightened. But we know that later on in his case, and with pretty good reason, he points to them all and says, well, all those people accusing me, you were all there. You were all part of this. And that's probably the most honest thing that he said in his later years.

And that was true. So he's charged with genocide, mass murder, embezzlement of public funds, systematic violations of human rights, treason. It's pretty clear he has committed all of these crimes. Yeah, there's not much question. The trial did not meet international standards by any stretch of the imagination. But yeah, he did all of these things. So it's not surprising that he was found guilty. Macias' defense was he wasn't the actual person doing the physical killing. And he was pointing the finger at a lot of the people putting him on trial saying, you were the people in Black Beach prison beating people to death with iron bars, so why are you talking to me about human rights abuses? As part of the process, Macias is forced to listen to the names of each and every person killed under his regime, as they're read out for all to hear. Ultimately, Macias is found guilty of 101 counts of murder,

and is handed down 101 death penalties. But even now, the former president still holds sway. So he was marched out of court, having been sentenced to death. And there was a situation where people were still so in awe of him and his almost sort of, his malevolence, which they thought might even come from another dimension, from his ghost, if they were the ones who took part in his execution. So they couldn't summon an execution squad who were brave enough to do it from amongst locals, and they had to get them from outside Equatorial Guinea. outside Equator, Royal Guinea. On September 29, 1979, at the probable age of 55, just six hours after the guilty verdict, Macias is led out into the yard of Black Beach Prison.

Alongside him are six of his collaborators. The hired Moroccan gunmen of the firing squad raise their weapons. By the time of Macias' demise, the death toll is utterly jaw-dropping. Almost a quarter of the entire population has perished under his regime. Many dare to believe now that the worst is over for Equatorial Guinea. But there are already signs that the coup was more family drama than a genuine attempt at change. Having toppled his uncle, Theodoro Obiang is still in charge today. He is, as of 2023, the longest-serving president in the world. He is, as of 2023, the longest-serving president in the world.

The discovery of oil in 1996 saw the creation of a lucrative export industry. But much of the country remains in abject poverty. Allegations of high-level corruption, mismanagement of public funds and human rights abuses, including torture, still abound. It remains to be seen whether the promise of independence can be realized for the people of Equatorial Guinea. Sadly, President Macias fits into a wider pattern of dictators in this part of the world at this time. So we have Bokassa over in the Central African Republic. We have Idi Amin over in Uganda.

Both of these dictators got the boot in 1979. It's a real shame to see how much damage bad leadership can do when there's no checks and balances. Of course, the people who took over, his own nephew, the people who'd been there during many of the atrocities that we've described, they were the ones who took over. And they are, or he is the man still in power now, and his son will probably take over from him.

And so there we have it. We have a series of dictators who've risen out of the ashes of Messiahs and who were there taking part very much in what he was doing. In the next episode... Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq for more than three decades, holding onto power despite multiple assassination attempts and failed rebellions. Modelling himself on Joseph Stalin, right down to the moustache, he constructed a grandiose personality cult and oversaw brutal purges of political rivals. During his time in office, he took on the might of the US military, not once, but twice.

How did a young man from a tough peasant background rise to the very top of Iraq's leadership? How did he manage to stay in power for so long, in a country where coups came around almost as often as elections? And was Saddam's ultimate downfall a matter of cosmic irony, or just unbelievably bad timing? That's next time.