Spanish Guinea

Equatorial Guinea, 1926–1968. Draft, not yet reviewed

Spanish Guinea was a set of insular and continental territories controlled by Spain from 1778 in the Gulf of Guinea and on the Bight of Bonny, in Central Africa. Between 1926 and 1959, the Crown united Bioko and Río Muni as the colony of Spanish Guinea. The economy was based on the exploitation of the commodity crops of cacao and coffee, produced at large plantations, in addition to logging concessions. Francisco Macías Nguema won the presidential election in September, and Spain formally handed power to the new government on 12 October 1968.

Seat of power: Malabo

No rulers documented for this era yet.

Culture

• The Spanish colony in the Guinea region was established in 1778, by the Treaty of El Pardo between the Spanish Empire and the Portuguese Empire.
• From 1827 to 1843, the United Kingdom had a base on Bioko to combat the continuing Atlantic slave trade conducted by Spain and illegal traders.
• Toward the end of the 19th century, planters started developing large cacao plantations on the island of Fernando Po, and with the indigenous Bubi population decimated by disease and forced labour, the economy of the island came to depend on imported agricultural contract workers.
• In 1930 an International Labour Organization commission discovered that Liberian contract workers had been recruited under conditions of criminal compulsion scarcely distinguishable from slave raiding and slave trading.

Picture

Bioko is an island of Equatorial Guinea, located 32 km south of the coast of Cameroon.

Image: Unknown author, Public domain, file

Sources

• Spanish Guinea (Wikipedia)
• Spanish Guinea (Wikidata)
• About the picture (Wikipedia)

Text adapted from the Wikipedia articles listed as sources, CC BY-SA 4.0.