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The Witch Doctor President and Other Horrific Rulers

Khalid Elhassan December 25, 2019 32 min

34. A Tyrant’s End

The capture of Nguema after his overthrow. Pintrest

Nguema was murderous in both his public and private lives. The thought of other men having known his women sexually so displeased him, that he murdered all his mistresses’ former lovers. Dissent was brutally crushed. Troublesome journalists were hacked apart, the bits thrown into the ocean to feed the sharks. In one episode, 150 opponents were executed in a soccer stadium by soldiers dressed up as Santa Claus, while speakers blared Mary Hopkins’ “Those Were the Days“.

Francisco Macias Nguema during his trial. Executed Today

News that displeased Nguema was “fake news”. When his statistics director presented figures he disliked, Nguema killed him. Nguema took a relatively prosperous Equatorial Guinea, and reduced it to a hellhole. The economy got so bad that 90% of the GDP eventually consisted of foreign aid. To keep people from fleeing, he destroyed boats, the railways, and mined the roads out of the country. He was eventually overthrown by his own family, when his insanity threatened them. In 1979, Nguema was arrested, tried by a military court, sentenced to death, and executed.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.