Spain's monster: Macías and the colonial legacy in Guinea

Spain's monster: Macías Nguema and Spain's colonial legacy in Guinea

The publication of "Spain's monster", a biography by Antonio Caño, former editor of El País, has peine the debate over Franco's responsibility for the disaster in Equatorial Guinea. Caño argues that the Franco regime refused to launch a coup against Macías Nguema while it was still possible, and that the colonial power handed over control to a tyrant who emerged from within its own colonial administration. The thesis is not new, but its source — a journalist from the establishment — has irritated those who see Spanish decolonisation as a model of restraint compared with the bloodbaths of France or Portugal.

A colony called a province

Equatorial Guinea had a peculiar legal status. From 1959, Fernando Poo and Río Muni were formally Spanish provinces, with their own national ID cards and pesetas. Yet that status came only nine years before independence and did not erase the earlier reality: a colonial regime with categories of non-emancipated, semi-emancipated and emancipated indigenous people. The emancipated enjoyed full rights, but the majority of the Black population was subject to a special justice system that, according to some analyses, was more lenient than the general one — except for cannibalism, which was punishable by hanging. The myth of the "sister province" coexists with the fact that Spanish investment was scarce and the territory ran at a loss.

The independence nobody controlled

The independence process accelerated in 1968 under pressure from the UN. Spain called elections, which were won by Francisco Macías Nguema, a candidate who promised to expel the Spanish. In Franco's circle, the lawyer Antonio García-Trevijano acted as an adviser to Macías and, according to several sources, facilitated his rise. Trevijano, a controversial figure and friend of the dictator, is said to have contributed to Spain's decision not to impose a favourable candidate, unlike what France or Portugal did. The question that hangs in the air: could Franco have staged a coup, or did he simply not want to? The answer divides those who believe a military intervention would have averted the catastrophe from those who argue that Guinea was not worth the political cost of sustaining an untenable colony.

The desert after independence

Macías established a brutal dictatorship: he banned education, cut off electricity, and tortured and murdered tens of thousands of people. An estimated one third of the population died or fled. The last Spaniards left under gunfire along the airport runway. Ritual cannibalism, present in some ethnic groups, was used by propaganda to demonise the regime, although testimony from the time confirms it was an isolated practice. Equatorial Guinea went from being the most prosperous country in Central Africa — with wages that attracted workers from Nigeria and Cameroon — to a failed state that Spain's Ministry of Foreign Affairs today advises against visiting in any area.

Over the years, Guinea became an oil producer under the dictatorship of Teodoro Obiang Nguema, Macías's nephew, who perpetuates the same model of repression. Spain's colonial legacy left behind a language and cultural ties, but also a political class shaped by submission and violence. The final irony: Franco, accused of not having intervened, was perhaps the only European dictator to hand power over to a people without massacres... and the result was a bloodbath.