Get a 14-day free trial with our sponsor Aura and see where your personal information is being sold online: https://aura.com/adayinhistory

When Equatorial Guinea achieved independence in 1968, its new beginning turned out to be the start of a nightmare that continues to this day. Hundreds of thousands of people would be driven into prisons, into exile, or into their graves, at the behest of one insane man: Francisco Macias Nguema. In this video, we’ll show you how this deranged man turned his country into the ‘Auschwitz of Africa.’ So stick around to learn about the mad dictator who dined with the dead and turned Santa Claus into an accomplice in his unspeakable crimes, and don’t forget to like this video to show your support for our content.

Like so many dictators before him, the first thing Macias did was eliminate threats to his power. His rival in the election, a man named Bonifacio Ondo Edu, was accused of coup-plotting and arrested, along with a number of other officials and ministers. They were all executed or left to die in prison. They were the first to be accused of plotting against Macias but far from the last.

In February 1969, Foreign Minister Atanasio Ndongo was accused of a different coup attempt. Macias’ guards cornered him in the cabinet room where the official story claims he leapt from a window to his death. Other witnesses insisted that Macias’ guards killed him, or that Macias himself threw the man from the window. Numerous others were implicated in this supposed conspiracy, including Saturnino Ibongo, the country’s UN ambassador, who was recalled to the country and executed minutes after getting off the plane. Of the 12 men who made up Macias’ first cabinet, only 2 would live to see his fall and by 1971 over 2/3rds of the original 1968 National Assembly had disappeared, never to be heard from again.

#history #FranciscoMaciasNguema #dictator #documentary

Music: Epidemic music

Sources:
Paul Kenyon, Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa, (2018)

Suzanne Cronje, Equatorial Guinea - The Forgotten Dictatorship: Forced Labour and Political Murder in Central Africa, Research Report for the Anti-Slavery Society, (1976)

Rashid Suleiman, ‘Macias Nguema: Ruthless and Bloody Dictator, Afro Articles, November 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/201411040...

Simon Baynham, ‘Equatorial Guinea: The Terror and the Coup’, The World Today 36, no. 2, (1980), http://www.jstor.org/stable/40395170

Copyright © 2023 A Day In History. All rights reserved.

DISCLAIMER: All materials in these videos are used for entertainment purposes and fall within the guidelines of fair use. No copyright infringement intended. If you are, or represent, the copyright owner of materials used in this video, and have an issue with the use of said material, please send an email to [email protected]