The biggest butcher of them all
Rowlinson Carter
Malabo, Equatorial Guinea Francisco Macias Nguema Biyoco, President-for-Life of Equatorial Guinea, was executed by firing squad on 1 October in the courtyard of Blackbich prison, Malabo. His trial, which had opened a week earlier, was advertised by a single poster, in the window of the Ministry of Information. It showed the former president astride a tiger, an animal unknown in Africa but nevertheless his party symbol in the 1968 one-and-only election that followed independence from Spain. Macias's teeth were jagged and dripping blood in anticipation of consuming a Plump human leg clenched aloft in his fist. His second course was being Warmed up, plunged headfirst into a large pot. Nobody in the small crowd around the poster complained that the artist was being too hard on Macias.
The prosecution's case against Macias was broadcast in outline on the wireless. 'During 11 years,' it said, 'he held the country under a state of total anarchy, terror, assassinations, maladministration, misery, systematic and persistent violation of the fundamental rights of Guinean and foreign citizens and oppression of all kinds— economic, social, cultural and religious.' There was no mention of his cannibalism, but the prosecutor must have felt he had no need of additional charges.
Macias unquestionably belonged to the top division of African lunatics, thugs and butchers, well ahead of the two notable rivals who have just been removed, Amin and Bokassa. They were, incidentally, the only African leaders with whom Macias got on really well. He admired Hitler too, once explaining to the United Nations that Hitler was the true liberator of Africa. Macias banned all foreign journalists within six months of taking over in 1968, and, with one exception, the ban was successfully enforced until a handful of correspondents, mostly Spanish, were let in for last month's trial. The exception had been Robert af Klinteberg, a Swede, who went in under false colours and compiled a devastating record of the regime for the International University Exchange Fund of Geneva. Klinteberg reported that a third of the population of 300,000 had been driven into exile. A further 30,000 had been killed (a conservative estimate), including an unknown number eaten by the former president. At the trial it was said that 70 per cent of those Guineans who stayed at home had been locked up at some stage for alleged political crimes. The prisons were bursting by 1972 when Macias became presidentfor-life, with titles such as 'The Unique Miracle' and 'Grand Master of Science, Education and Culture'. Hundreds of prisoners were dragged from their cells simply to make room for the stream of new arrivals. There is no doubt about their fate, but there is about how they met it. Clubbing, strangulation and burial alive were fairly common. Some were eaten, if not by the president then by insects or by Kope, the Blackbich prison Alsatian.
One story, which my informant swore was true, concerned a doctor whom Macias summoned when he was not feeling well. Macias was by then doing his best to liquidate intellectuals, including doctors (Western medicine being reserved for himself and his family). On this occasion he was particularly impressed during the diagnosis by the doctor's intelligence and knowledge, so the doctor was killed and his brain devoured. After a few days in Equatorial Guinea I found that the horrible stories I heard were often confirmed without difficulty. I was strolling through Malabo when my companion, a civil servant, spotted an elderly sergeant in uniform and greeted him warmly. An old friend, perhaps? Not a hit of it. It was Sergeant Ondo Ela, principal torturer at Blackbich. 'Tortured me personally,' my companion explained. 'Broke all my fingers and jammed a bayonet into my leg.' There were nasty scars to prove it. Was it not strange, I asked, to be so friendly towards hint? 'No, he's an old and stupid man. If he hadn't done it Macias would have killed him.' When I next met Sergeant Ela, pointed a television camera at him and asked whether he minded discussing his career as a torturer. He did not; indeed, he rambled on, explaining several of his techniques, until the film magazine was empty.
Nowhere is a political career more risky than in Equatorial Guinea. Of the 46 men who helped to draw up the constitution after the country became independent from Spain, 40 have since been murdered. The first cabinet had 12 ministers, of whom Macias slaughtered 10 and drove one mad. The new men who replaced them in the cabinet were themselves routinely killed or sent to Blackbich which, under Sergeant Ela, often came to the same thing. The list of victims is still not complete, but at least 82 politicians have been murdered. Macias was overthrown in early August in a coup led by the second most important man in the country, his 33-year-old cousin, Lieutenant-Colonel Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. One of the difficulties facing the new regime is that there is now hardly anyone of ability left in the country. There are talented exiles, of course, but they are in no hurry to come back. They want first to be certain that the new regime is an improvement on the last. While political prisoners have been released and some civil liberties restored, there are still a number of familiar names from the past in the new government. Macias's trial was a clumsy effort by the new regime to show the world that things had changed. The French and Spanish ambassadors, and the Soviet charge d'affaires were there together with an invited observer from the International Commission of Jurists. Although some dignity was lent to the proceedings by the black gowns of the lawyers, the hearings were decidedly informal. A Vat 69 bottle, serving as a water flask, stood on the bench, while spectators wandered in and out of the court lavatory fiddling with their fly-buttons. Sergeant Ondo Ela was picked up on the eve of the trial and appeared in court, with seven others, on charges of complicity. His defence, predictably, was that he was acting under orders. He was never asked, even by his defence lawyers, from whom the orders came. It was clear that the court was anxious not to implicate any members of the new regime including, perhaps, the new President Teodoro, who is said by some to have taken part in the interrogation and torture of the more important prisoners held in Blackbich. In the end, Sergeant Ela was among those executed.
Under Macias Equatorial Guinea 'drop Ped out of the world', as Klinteberg described it. The economy which had been One of the strongest in Africa, was catastrophically weakened. The Russians did their bit by talking Macias into an agreement that allowed them to ship back to Murmansk all the excellent local fish in exchange for frozen rubbish from other Waters that caused an epidemic of skin disease. The North Koreans also did business with Macias. I do not know what they took out of the country, but what they put into it, as 1 discovered in derelict government offices, were staggering quantities of the speeches of Kim 11 Sung, all of them translated into Spanish and all entirely unopened. it would be unfair not to acknowledge as well the contribution of Prench and Spanish companies that built a string of palaces for Macias. When the price of a single cigarette (not a Packet) reached about £.1, and a bottle of Whisky (smuggled in from Cameroon) 180, Macias recognised the symptoms of inflation and decided that the best way to reduce the amount of money in circulation was to close down the central bank, murder its director, and transfer all the cash to his palace. He later set fire to it. The money that survived is now going back into circulation. Malabo, which is built on an island in a bay, was once known to the Royal Navy as Port Clarence when they used it as a base for intercepting slave ships. It now looks like the ruin of some forgotten civilisation. Before Macias moved his headquarters from the island to the mainland and the security of his own F4ng tribe (the island tribe which he tried to wipe out are called the Bubis), he walled in a couple of square miles around his palace. The walled-in area happened to include the shopping centre, the cathedral (not functioning, as all religions were banned), the city square and all the Spanish houses. The inhabitants were expelled; and as they left, the jungle took over. I watched the removal of a fairly large tree that had grown up inside an office. The place is being cleaned up, but Teodoro, having given orders for the old wall to be knocked down, suddenly had second thoughts. New walls are going up around his residence, not on the scale that Macias found necessary, but built from the rubble of the old.
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