A Spanish island and a mainland
The country is really two places joined by history: the island of Bioko (long called Fernando Pó), sighted by the Portuguese in the 15th century and later handed to Spain, and Río Muni, a slice of mainland forest between Cameroon and Gabon. The island's Bubi people and the mainland's Fang majority have very different pasts.
Spain ran the territories as its only sub-Saharan colony, importing cocoa plantations to Bioko worked in part by contract labourers from Nigeria and elsewhere. Spanish became the language of administration and church, a legacy that still sets the country apart from every French- and English-speaking neighbour.
Macías and terror
Independence came in 1968 under Francisco Macías Nguema, and it went catastrophically wrong. Macías built one of the most murderous dictatorships of post-colonial Africa: he banned the word "intellectual", closed schools and churches, killed or drove out a large share of the educated population, and styled himself with grandiose titles. A third or more of the population is thought to have fled or died during his rule.
In 1979 his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, overthrew and executed him. The change of ruler ended the worst of the terror but not the family's grip: Obiang has held power ever since.
The oil decades
For its first two decades independence brought poverty. Then, in the mid-1990s, large offshore oil and gas fields were found. Production made Equatorial Guinea one of the highest per-capita income countries in Africa and drew American oil companies to a state most of the world could not place on a map.
The wealth did not reach the streets. Human-development indicators stayed low while the ruling family acquired mansions, supercars and — in the case of the president's son and vice-president, Teodoro "Teodorín" Nguema Obiang — a collection of assets that foreign courts in France and the United States later seized or fined in corruption cases. A planned new capital, Ciudad de la Paz (Djibloho), rises in the mainland forest as a monument to the gap between the state's riches and its people.
The longest rule
Obiang has won a series of elections with implausible margins — often well above 90 per cent — in a system where opposition is tightly constrained and independent media barely exist. He has survived alleged coup attempts, including a bizarre 2004 mercenary plot linked to foreign financiers.
As of 2026 he is the world's longest-serving living head of state, and Teodorín is positioned to succeed him. For a small, oil-soaked country of fewer than two million people, the central fact is unchanged since 1979: one family, one name, and a wealth that stays within it.