Equatoguinean Exiles

The third of the country that fled — Equatoguineans who left during the Macías years, when schools closed, the word intellectual became an accusation and the president declared himself the country's only miracle, and whose descendants live in Spain, Gabon and Cameroon.

Identity

Population: Estimated over 100,000 abroad, including descendants; roughly a third of the population fled between 1969 and 1979

Location: Spain (Madrid, Valencia), Gabon, Cameroon and, more recently, the United States

Language: Spanish, with Fang, Bubi and Pichinglis maintained variably in the diaspora

Language family: Indo-European → Romance → Spanish; Niger-Congo → Bantu (Fang, Bubi)

Traditional governance: Opposition parties, cultural associations and human rights organisations abroad, largely banned or unviable at home.

Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)

Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.

Spanish diaspora

The largest, in Madrid and Valencia, with the deepest institutional and literary presence.

Gabonese and Cameroonian communities

Those who crossed the nearest borders, often on foot, and stayed.

Post-1979 political exiles

Those who left under the current government rather than under Macías.

Culture

Clothing: Contemporary dress in the countries of residence; Equatoguinean dress at cultural association events, which is much of what such associations do.

Food: Pepesup, cassava and plantain cooked in Madrid kitchens; the food is one of the most durable markers in a diaspora scattered across three continents.

Ceremonies: Independence day observed with deliberate ambivalence; commemorations of the Macías years; cultural association gatherings; the balele and other dances performed abroad.

Marriage customs: Marriage within the diaspora and into host societies; families are frequently split across Spain, Gabon and the country itself.

Initiation rites: Education, which is the point: the generation that fled did so because education had become dangerous, and the diaspora's investment in it has been correspondingly heavy.

Food & Recipes

Every dish the Atlas publishes for Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon, at national rather than community level — 21 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.

Equatorial Guinea

9 dishes

StapleEquatorial Guinea

Malanga con Pescado

Boiled malanga cocoyam with fish in tomato sauce, the everyday plate on Bioko and the mainland. The root is the starch and the fish is whatever the boats brought.

Serves 6 · 50 minutes

National dishEquatorial Guinea

Pepesup

A fiery broth of goat or fish with chilli and bush spices, drunk as much as eaten. Equatorial Guinea's most-cited dish and reputed to settle any stomach.

Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes

National dishEquatorial Guinea

Arroz con Pescado

also Rice with fish

Rice cooked in a fish and tomato base with palm oil, the mainland Equatoguinean weekday meal and a clear inheritance from Spanish rule.

Serves 6 · 1 hour

Street foodEquatorial Guinea

Akwadu

Banana baked with coconut, butter and lime, served warm as a sweet. Simple, cheap and made from what grows within a few metres of most kitchens.

Serves 6 · 35 minutes

Festival & feastEquatorial Guinea

Sopa de Cacahuete

Groundnut soup with chicken or smoked fish, thickened and served with rice. Made for family Sundays and celebrations, and shared with the whole Gulf of Guinea.

Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes

Regional specialityEquatorial Guinea

Bubi Banana Soup

Green banana cooked with palm oil, fish and greens in the Bubi manner on Bioko, where the island's volcanic soil grows bananas that are the community's mainstay.

Serves 6 · 1 hour

Regional specialityEquatorial Guinea

Bilola

also Sea snails in sauce, Caracoles de mar

Sea snails simmered in palm oil with chilli and greens, a Bioko island dish eaten from the shell with a pin, and a Malabo bar staple.

Serves 4 · 1 hour

Drink & sweetEquatorial Guinea

Malamba

Sugarcane spirit distilled locally and drunk neat or with lime, poured at celebrations and offered to guests on arrival.

Serves Serves as a spirit · Distilled traditionally

Drink & sweetEquatorial Guinea

Topé

also Palm wine, Vino de palma

Palm sap tapped from the standing tree and drunk the same day, sweet in the morning and sharply alcoholic by evening. Bioko's social drink.

Serves Varies · Tapping takes days; the wine is drunk within 24 hours

Cameroon

12 dishes

StapleCameroon

Fufu Corn

Maize flour beaten into a smooth stiff paste, eaten with njama njama or huckleberry greens in the north-west. The standard plate of the Anglophone highlands.

Serves 6 · 30 minutes

StapleCameroon

Koki Beans

also Koki corn, Ekoki

Black-eyed beans ground to a paste with palm oil and spinach, wrapped in banana leaf and steamed into a savoury pudding. A Cameroonian street and household staple.

Serves 8 · 2 hours, plus overnight soaking

National dishCameroon

Ndolé

Bitterleaf boiled repeatedly to draw out the bitterness, then cooked with ground groundnuts, shrimp and meat. Cameroon's national dish, from the Douala coast.

Serves 8 · 2 hours

National dishCameroon

Mbongo Tchobi

also Black stew, Sauce noire

Fish or meat in a jet-black sauce made from burnt spices — mbongo seed, country onion and njangsa — from the Bassa country around Edéa. Smoky, bitter and unlike anything else in Africa.

Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes

Street foodCameroon

Soya

Beef skewers rubbed in a groundnut and chilli spice mix and grilled over charcoal, sold from evening braziers across the north and in every Yaoundé quarter.

Serves Makes 12 · 40 minutes, plus 2 hours marinating

Festival & feastCameroon

Eru

Wild forest vine leaves shredded fine and cooked with waterleaf, palm oil and smoked fish, from the south-west. Made for celebrations and eaten with water fufu.

Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes

Festival & feastCameroon

Achu Soup

also Yellow soup, Taro fufu and yellow soup

Pounded taro served with a bright yellow palm-oil soup coloured with limestone, the ceremonial dish of Cameroon's North West grassfields, eaten with the fingers from a shared bowl.

Serves 8 · 2 hours 30 minutes

Regional specialityCameroon

Poulet DG

Chicken with fried ripe plantain and vegetables, whose name stands for Directeur Général because it was originally what you served a man of importance.

Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes

Regional specialityCameroon

Kondre

also Plantain and goat stew

Goat and unripe plantain stewed with country onion and njangsa until the plantain thickens the pot. A grassfields dish cooked for visitors and for the head of the household.

Serves 6 · 1 hour 45 minutes

Regional specialityCameroon

Sanga

also Maize and cassava leaf

Fresh maize kernels cooked with cassava leaf and palm oil into a thick green-and-gold porridge. A Beti and southern Cameroonian dish of the maize harvest.

Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes

Drink & sweetCameroon

Foléré

Hibiscus juice with pineapple, ginger and mint, sold from freezers in the north and served cold at every celebration. Cameroon's name for what is bissap elsewhere.

Serves 8 · 30 minutes, plus chilling

Drink & sweetCameroon

Bil-Bil

also Millet beer, Bilibili

Sorghum beer of northern Cameroon, brewed by women in great clay pots and sold from the compound door. Sour, cloudy and drunk from a shared calabash.

Serves Makes about 8 litres · 1 hour active, plus 4 days germinating and 3 days fermenting

Stories & Oral Literature

The Only MiracleHistorical account

Francisco Macías Nguema ruled from 1968 to 1979 with a title that translates as the country's only miracle. He closed schools, banned the word intellectual, had the national library's holdings destroyed, and presided over killings and disappearances on a scale that emptied the professional class. Estimates of the dead run into the tens of thousands; around a third of the population left.

Writing From Somewhere ElseLiterary account

Equatorial Guinea is the only sub-Saharan African country whose official language is Spanish, and nearly all its literature has been written in exile. Donato Ndongo, María Nsue Angüe and Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel have produced a body of work in Spanish that is read in Madrid and largely unavailable in Malabo, which is itself the subject of a good deal of it.

Proverbs

“They closed the schools and called it independence.”
The Macías years, as remembered in the diaspora.

“We write in Spanish because we could not stay to write in Fang.”
A literature produced abroad.

“Oil found the country and did not find us.”
Wealth that did not reach the exiled or the poor.

Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs

Creation: Roman Catholicism, from three centuries of Spanish presence; Macías banned Catholic worship outright in 1978, which is remembered as the point at which the regime turned on the last institution standing.

Beliefs: Roman Catholicism, restored after 1979 and dominant; Fang and Bubi ancestral practice, including bwiti, maintained variably; the diaspora's associations function as quasi-religious centres of continuity.

Ancestors: The dead of the Macías years are frequently unburied and unlocated, and the absence of graves is a defining grievance of the exile community.

Gods, Goddesses & Spirits

The Christian God

Worshipped in a Catholicism banned outright in 1978 and restored afterwards

Bwiti

The initiatory tradition of the Fang, carried into exile in fragments

Ancestors

Honoured in a diaspora where most graves are unreachable

Architecture

Traditional settlements: Apartment districts of Madrid and Valencia; border settlements in Gabon and Cameroon; nothing built, which is the point about exile.

Building techniques: None distinct: the community builds nothing of its own abroad and has had no say in what is built at home, where oil money has produced a purpose-built capital at Oyala.

Village layout: Dispersed. The community's geography is a list of cities rather than a place, and its institutions are associations rather than buildings.

Artifacts

Exile literature in Spanish

Literature

The country's literary output, nearly all of it written and published abroad.

Human rights archives

Historical Timeline

1968
Independence from Spain; Francisco Macías Nguema becomes president.
1969–1979
Schools close, the professional class is killed or driven out, and around a third of the population flees.
1978
Catholic worship is banned outright; the last independent institution is closed.
1979
Macías is overthrown by his nephew Teodoro Obiang and executed; some exiles return.
1995–present
Oil is found in quantity; the country's per capita income soars while political exile continues.

Sources & Further Reading

Open sources

Britannica: Equatorial Guinea — historyEncyclopaedia Britannica
Human Rights Watch: Equatorial GuineaHuman Rights Watch

Premium & scholarly sources

Equatoguinean literature in Spanish — scholarshipJSTOR