The Richest Primitive Society
Which country is Africa’s wealthiest?
The answer is often Seychelles, a small island nation in Africa. Back in 2019, its GDP per capita exceeded 17,000 US dollars. Blessed with stunning scenery, its economy rests firmly on tourism, making it a pleasant place to live.
Yet a per capita GDP of 17,000 USD is not Africa’s all-time peak. That milestone arrived in 2008, when one West African nation hit 23,000 USD in GDP per capita. On paper, it nearly crossed the threshold for developed-nation status.
Beneath this dazzling economic figure, however, nearly 60 percent of its people lacked access to piped drinking water. The under-five child mortality rate stood at 20 percent, and the country was listed among the world’s least developed nations.
GDP is normally the most intuitive metric for measuring a nation’s economic and social progress. Faced with this one-of-a-kind paradox, even the United Nations was caught off guard. It eventually coined a specific term for this case: a high-GDP, destitute state. This extraordinary little West African country is Equatorial Guinea.
As we know, modern African history is largely a chronicle of colonial partition. Before World War Two, most of Africa had been carved up by imperial powers, chiefly Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, Italy and Spain.
By the Second World War, the once mighty Spanish Empire held almost nothing left on the African continent. It is worth noting that the phrase “the empire on which the sun never sets” was first used to describe Spain, not Britain. Spain was the first global colonial empire. But while its ancestors had built vast dominions, later generations mismanaged state affairs and the empire steadily declined. By the 20th century, Spain retained only a handful of colonial outposts. Equatorial Guinea became one of the last remaining relics of Spain’s colonial empire.
Equatorial Guinea sits on Africa’s west coast, along the Atlantic shore of the Gulf of Guinea. It covers 28,000 square kilometres and had a population of roughly 1.3 million in 2018.
After WWII, Francisco Franco fought hard to preserve the remnants of Spain’s colonial empire, arguing that ancestral lands must never be surrendered. Yet the global wave of national independence sweeping the post-war world left Spain with no way to hold on. By the 1960s, Spain had already realised Equatorial Guinea would inevitably gain independence. Franco therefore set out to find a local proxy. He hoped to install a puppet president in the soon-to-be independent state to safeguard Spanish interests.
Franco laid out two criteria for his chosen agent: First, unwavering loyalty to Spain. Spain, the former sunlit empire, had grown weak and needed a loyal local figure to keep control. Second, he needed someone simple-minded. Any shrewd leader would resist being a puppet; a capable, ambitious man would be impossible to manipulate.
Colonial powers across Africa were usually skilled at picking such clients: the United States backed Mobutu, France installed Bokassa, Britain nurtured Amin, and so on. Spanish officials searched and found a candidate in Equatorial Guinea who seemed to fit perfectly. In Spanish eyes, he was loyal, and suitably simple — an ideal puppet.
But Spain had grown distant from colonial governance, and its judgment faltered. The man they selected failed the first test: he would prove far from loyal. Worse, Spain had overshot the second requirement. The man was indeed intellectually limited, but severely so.
Now, let us introduce him: veteran of Africa’s national liberation movement, architect of a return to primitive society, author of the declaration of human security, executor of a human purge — Equatorial Guinea’s “Unique Miracle”, Francisco Macías Nguema.
Macías Nguema was born in 1924 in Mongomo, Equatorial Guinea. His family was well-off enough to send him through primary and secondary school. Judging from his later rule, however, what he actually learned during those years remains highly questionable.
In 1944, family connections landed him a civil service post within the Spanish colonial administration. Poor performance forced him to resign three years later, and he spent several years growing coffee. In 1951, he re-entered the bureaucracy as a low-ranking civil servant.
After a decade at the grassroots level, his lucky break arrived. As noted earlier, Spain sought a proxy who was loyal and unsophisticated, and Macías checked both boxes. As an African man, he revered Franco fiercely. To demonstrate his devotion to Spain, he adopted the Spanish name Francisco Macías Nguema, even changing his family name.
His public loyalty impressed the Spanish authorities, and after ten years in minor posts, promotion finally came. In 1963, Macías travelled to Spain to congratulate Franco on 25 years in power. Franco praised him warmly, and Macías became Spain’s chosen proxy for Equatorial Guinea.
Spain still needed to follow formal procedures, so Macías sat for civil service examinations. Whether due to deliberate leniency or leaked exam questions, he managed to fail three times in a row. Spanish officials sighed in disbelief: tiny Equatorial Guinea had produced such a “talent”. On the fourth attempt, they simply skipped the exam and appointed him directly.
Psychologists have suggested these three exam failures left deep psychological scars. his later pathological hatred of education and knowledge likely stemmed from this trauma.
Equatorial Guinea gained self-rule in 1963, and full independence in 1968. With Spanish backing, Macías won the presidential election and became the country’s first head of state.
The 20th century saw countless absurd rulers across Africa — tyrants and incompetent autocrats alike. Yet those labels do not fully describe Macías, or perhaps all fit him at once. Looking back, the word most commonly used for Equatorial Guinea’s first president is “madman”.
Spain never imagined what would happen next. His first act after taking office was to turn against his former patron. In 1968, the Spanish government cried out in shock: the protégé had turned on his master!
Macías had been packaged as a champion of African independence, committed to expelling foreign powers. During colonial rule, he maintained that facade perfectly. Once power was his, however, he dropped the mask.
Just one month after his election, he launched a nationwide campaign to expel all Spanish residents, urging young people to drive the Spaniards out, unleashing an Equatorial Guinean version of Kristallnacht. The country descended into chaos.
Spain had maintained a permanent community of over 7,000 people in Equatorial Guinea — mostly teachers, technicians, merchants and administrators. At that time, the nation’s total population stood at only 300,000. Expelling these skilled people would devastate the country’s social fabric. Macías responded with brute force: anyone who resisted faced execution.
Most cabinet members opposed his agenda. Out of twelve ministers in Equatorial Guinea’s first cabinet, ten were shot. Spain had spent a lifetime training a hawk, only to be pecked by it.
Yet after their initial fury, watching Macías’s other actions, Spain came to feel he had treated them comparatively gently.
Once his grip on power was somewhat secure, Macías focused on two major tasks: eliminating all political rivals, and forcing Equatorial Guinea back into primitive society.
In 1970, he ended the political — and biological — lives of all opponents. In 1972, he awarded himself a new title: the Unique Miracle of Equatorial Guinea. In a sense, he delivered on this claim; for a tiny nation to produce such a leader was indeed a miracle.
Equatorial Guinea was then an agrarian economy, relying heavily on cocoa and coffee plantations run by Spanish landowners and Nigerian labourers. With the Spaniards driven out, Macías had no idea how to manage the farms. Nigerian workers fled in large numbers, and the country’s sole major industry collapsed within years. Plantations were abandoned everywhere. By 1981, coffee output had fallen by 78 percent and cocoa production by 98 percent. The economy imploded completely.
Economic collapse stirred widespread public anger, and many spoke out against government policy. Macías’s reply was simple: execute anyone who criticised him.
To erase all dissent, he banned newspapers, magazines and all media. Intellectuals across the country were systematically exiled or executed.
Taking advantage of the nation’s high illiteracy rate, Macías ordered churches across the land to hang his portraits. He proclaimed himself the one true god, claiming he could command God. Even in traditional Christian belief, if Macías could command the Almighty, he only ordered God to create Equatorial Guinea — a modest vision, to say the least.
Naturally, many inside his government opposed him, and they were executed without exception. Sometimes even his supporters were killed. Macías ordered executions for no clear reason. At one dinner with a mistress, for instance, whether she ate noisily, burped or passed gas mid-meal, he had her entire family put to death on the spot.
Macías kept numerous lovers. If he took a married woman as his mistress, her husband would be killed immediately. If the woman was unmarried, all her suitors would be executed. Pursuing women in Equatorial Guinea under Macías was like sweeping for mines: every new lover brought a wave of killings.
Executing rivals and lovers solved one problem, but who would run state affairs once all officials were dead? Macías packed his cabinet with relatives and family members, appointing kin as ministers and senior officials. Most prominent among them was his nephew, Teodoro Obiang.
Shooting dissidents was easy, but governance required educated people. Apart from Macías himself, his family had almost no formal schooling. How could they govern? Macías came up with a solution worthy of his “Miracle” title: if family members could not run ministries, abolish the ministries entirely. Health and public works departments were dissolved, since no one was qualified to manage them.
Virtually all state functions were scrapped. Under Macías, only three institutions remained operational: the army, police and prisons. Calling this arrangement a government was generous; international observers described it as little more than an administration running concentration camps.
The only regular spending from state accounts was army and police salaries, and even those wages were often overdue.
Foreign reserves were not held in Equatorial Guinean banks. In 1976, after shooting the last central bank governor, Macías abolished the national bank. By that point, the move barely mattered. In the late 1970s, the remaining population of Equatorial Guinea either languished in concentration camps or was forced to work as slave labour on plantations. Normal economic activity had ceased.
Some may wonder how the state still earned foreign currency. After plantation agriculture collapsed, Macías discovered a new source of revenue: hostage-taking. Kidnapping was cheap and highly profitable, a form of tertiary industry in his view.
He ordered mass roundups of foreigners residing in or even passing through Equatorial Guinea. Captives were priced openly for ransom from their home governments. A German woman was ransomed for 57,000 US dollars; a Spanish professor fetched 40,000 USD. Macías applied his kidnapping business impartially. He would not spare Americans, and even captured Soviet citizens. The Soviet Union had maintained friendly ties with Equatorial Guinea in the early independence years, and Macías showed his “kindness” by setting a discounted ransom of only 6,000 USD for Soviet hostages. That was his final gesture of goodwill toward the Soviet bloc.
Holding Soviet nationals and detaining American diplomats during the Cold War seemed suicidal, yet Macías felt untouchable. He calculated that invading such a destitute country would cost more in fuel than any possible gain. Nations weighed the costs and chose to pay ransoms, writing it off as a lost expense.
The foreign ministry was all but dissolved. The few remaining staff who spoke foreign languages spent most of their time writing ransom letters to governments. In 1976, 114 officials signed a joint petition urging Macías to end the country’s diplomatic isolation. Macías offered no debate. He had every signatory shot.
Domestically, alongside banning all printed media, Macías closed and burned every library. In 1974, he shut all public schools. In 1975, private education was prohibited, and he executed his own former teacher. Equatorial Guinea became the world’s only nation without teachers.
Macías forbade his own children from learning to read, and banned anyone in the country from uttering the word “knowledge”. As intellectuals were killed or fled, even people who spoke coherently became targets.
Years of purges wiped out Equatorial Guinea’s educated class; scholars either died or escaped. Only a dozen skilled technicians remained. In this country, competent tradesmen were the elite.
Without maintenance, public infrastructure crumbled completely. Equatorial Guinea became the only African nation without electricity. Between Macías’s rise in 1968 and his fall in 1978, more than 50,000 people were killed out of a population of 300,000, and over 150,000 fled abroad. Only one-third of the original population stayed behind. No schools, no books, no power, no knowledge, no functional government, no economy. After a decade of rule, Macías had dragged Equatorial Guinea back to primitive silence.
By 1979, a lingering question hung over everyone: what drove Macías’s actions? The population had been decimated, and terror alone kept the survivors compliant. In his later years, prisons had few prisoners left to execute. Even his closest aides lived in constant fear, waiting for their turn to die.
In June 1976, several army officers came to demand unpaid wages, as troops had gone months without pay. Macías responded in his usual way and executed all of them. One of the dead officers was Obiang’s elder brother. After his brother’s killing, Obiang knew he would likely be next.
When the coup finally came, there was almost no resistance. Macías and a handful of loyal supporters fled with two crates of US dollars, only to be captured two weeks later. His regime fell with surprising ease.
To distinguish himself from his uncle, Obiang decided to put Macías on trial. He immediately hit one major obstacle: there was no law. Macías could barely read a business card, let alone build a legal code. There were no established statutes or criminal charges for such a trial.
When the new government prepared to prosecute Macías, it discovered no domestic legal framework existed. In desperation, they invited a panel of Spanish judges to conduct the trial under Spanish military law.
Macías faced charges including treason, embezzlement, genocide and destruction of public property. He was held responsible for eighty thousand murders. After reviewing the case, the judges unanimously recommended life imprisonment. This was no joke. Based on psychiatric evaluation, the Spanish legal team concluded Macías suffered from severe mental illness and was unfit for the death penalty.
After his arrest, medical teams conducted full psychiatric assessments and confirmed he had lived with intermittent psychosis for thirty years. For a decade, Equatorial Guinea had been ruled by a madman.
In his final years, his eyesight and hearing deteriorated badly. He refused glasses or hearing aids and was almost cut off from the world. He spent his days locked in a room, smoking and muttering to his collection of human skulls — clear signs of psychosis. The judges therefore argued that capital punishment was inappropriate for a mentally ill defendant.
Obiang thought the Spanish judges had been blinded by academic legalism. He overruled their verdict and sentenced Macías to death. Ironically, decades of personality cult propaganda had convinced many Equatorial Guineans that Macías possessed divine power, and no local soldier dared shoot him. The court finally hired Moroccan royal guards to carry out the execution.
Macías’s story ended here. He stands among Africa’s many tyrants as one of the few who faced justice for his crimes.
After his death, his nephew Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo became Equatorial Guinea’s new president. Obiang learned lessons from his uncle. He abolished the secret police and concentration camps — institutions he had largely managed himself. Much like Beria’s amnesty after Stalin’s death, Obiang brought an end to the reign of terror.
Still, Macías left Equatorial Guinea reduced almost to a primitive state.
The question arises: how did this shattered nation become one of Africa’s highest GDP per capita countries decades later? That brings us to Obiang. His governance skills were mediocre, his character deeply flawed, yet he had extraordinary luck.
Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo took power in 1979. He remains president to this day.
Under Obiang, Equatorial Guinea was only marginally better off than under Macías, and its economy stayed deeply impoverished. Then, starting in 1991, massive oil reserves were discovered in its territorial waters. As if fate pitied the nation after Macías’s slaughter, more than 5 billion barrels of crude oil were found in its waters. The figure is not exceptional on a global scale, yet for a country of just over one million people, it was a windfall from heaven.
ExxonMobil signed an extraction deal with the Equatorial Guinean government. The contract was remarkably one-sided: Equatorial Guinea, the resource owner, received only 12 percent of oil revenue. President Obiang played a central role in negotiating these terms.
Anyone who has spent time in Equatorial Guinea speaks of its pervasive, staggering corruption. Under Obiang’s rule, nearly all oil wealth flowed to the ruling elite, while ordinary citizens gained almost nothing. Corruption within the presidential family reached breathtaking levels.
Obiang may not have been a skilled administrator, but he understood risk hedging. He sent one son to study in the United States and another to China, placing bets on both sides. His US-educated son, Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, was appointed vice president of Equatorial Guinea. He repeatedly made headlines for lavish spending and remains a target for prosecutors worldwide.
In 2017, French prosecutors charged Teodoro with corruption and money laundering. French police had previously seized his six-storey mansion near the Champs-Élysées in Paris, with over a hundred rooms and views of the Arc de Triomphe, valued at more than 100 million euros. Inside the property, authorities found jewels and antiques worth another 40 million euros. This was only the tip of the iceberg.
In France, Teodoro once spent 6 million US dollars on 15 luxury cars in a single purchase and 24 million USD on artworks. He even bid for Michael Jackson’s crystal glove.
Beyond France, US authorities seized more than 30 million US dollars of his assets over corruption allegations. In 2016, Brazilian customs confiscated 16 million US dollars in undeclared cash he carried with him. In 2019, Swiss authorities seized and auctioned 25 luxury cars worth 20 million British pounds.
None of these massive seizures crippled Teodoro. As recently as 2020, he vacationed in the Maldives with dozens of servants, posting on social media that he spent at least 38,000 British pounds every day.
In Equatorial Guinea, 76.8 percent of its people live on less than 2 US dollars per day. Even modest restraint from the vice president would greatly improve their lives, yet he chose not to act.
Equatorial Guinea has a curious geography. Its territory is split into two parts: a mainland section on the African continent, and Bioko Island. One-sixth of the nation’s population lives on Bioko, including the capital Malabo and the entire political elite.
Oil money transformed Malabo. Without the omnipresent corruption, visitors might mistake it for a near-developed city. Yet little more than a hundred kilometres away, on the mainland and in rural areas, ordinary Equatorial Guineans live like citizens of any other poor African state. The government has little interest in lifting living standards or developing other industries. Few worry about what will happen once oil runs out.
Falling oil prices and gradual resource depletion have dragged the economy down year after year. By 2019, GDP per capita had fallen to roughly 8,000 US dollars.
Obiang fears no popular uprising from mainland civilians, because he maintains a capable navy. He imported a 3,500-ton frigate and a 1,500-ton patrol vessel from Bulgaria. While insignificant for major naval powers, this fleet makes Equatorial Guinea’s navy the second strongest in West Africa, surpassed only by Nigeria’s. It is more than enough to stop any mainland force from landing on Bioko Island.
Obiang’s real concern is not his own people, but mercenaries from across the globe. Mercenary groups view Equatorial Guinea as a high-risk, high-reward target: overthrow the president for enormous profit, with limited downside if captured. Among these challengers was a mercenary expedition funded by Margaret Thatcher’s son.
So ends the story of Equatorial Guinea. Though its small population and oil wealth have spared it from large-scale humanitarian catastrophe in recent decades, its deep corruption simmers quietly in this remote corner of the Atlantic, drawing little global attention.
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