On 7 May 1971, Macías Nguema issued Decree 415, which repealed parts of the 1968 Constitution and granted him “all direct powers of Government and Institutions”, including powers formerly held by the legislative and judiciary branches, as well as the cabinet of ministers. On 18 October 1971, Law 1 imposed the death penalty as punishment for threatening the President or the government. Insulting or offending the President or his cabinet was punishable by 30 years in prison. On 14 July 1972, a presidential decree merged all existing political parties into the United National Party (later the United National Workers’ Party), with Macías Nguema as President for Life of both nation and party. In a plebiscite held on 29 July 1973, the 1968 Constitution was replaced with a new document that gave Macías Nguema absolute power and formally made his party the only one legally permitted.
Macías Nguema declared private education subversive, and banned it entirely with Decree 6 on 18 March 1975.
During his presidency, his country was nicknamed “the Dachau of Africa”. He was known to order entire families and villages executed.
Three important pillars of his rule were the United National Workers’ Party, the Juventud en Marcha con Macías militia/youth group, and the Esangui clan of Río Muni. The country’s instruments of repression (military, presidential bodyguard) were entirely controlled by Macías Nguema’s relatives and clan members. The president’s paranoid actions included mandating the death of those who wore spectacles, banning use of the word “intellectual” and destroying boats to stop his people fleeing from his rule (fishing was banned). The only road out of the country on the mainland was also mined. He Africanised his name to Masie Nguema Biyogo Ñegue Ndong in 1976 after demanding that the rest of the Equatoguinean population replace their Hispanic names with African names. He also banned Western medicines, stating that they were un-African.
Macías Nguema was the centre of an extreme cult of personality, perhaps fueled by his consumption of copious amounts of bhang and iboga, and assigned himself titles such as the “Unique Miracle” and “Grand Master of Education, Science, and Culture”. The island of Fernando Pó had its name Africanised after him to Masie Ngueme Biyogo Island; upon his overthrow in 1979, its name was again changed to Bioko. The capital, Santa Isabel, had its name changed to Malabo. In 1978, he changed the national motto to “There is no other God than Macías Nguema”.
During Macías Nguema’s government, the country had neither a development plan nor an accounting system for government funds. After the killing of the governor of the Central Bank, he carried everything that remained in the national treasury to his house in a rural village. On Christmas Eve of 1975 about 150 of his opponents were killed. Soldiers dressed in Santa Claus outfits executed them by shooting at the football stadium in Malabo, while amplifiers were playing Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were the Days.”
Macías Nguema’s government forced tens of thousands of citizens to flee in fear of persecution and to protect their personal safety. Intellectuals and skilled professionals were a particular target, due to which human rights researcher Robert af Klinteberg, in a 1978 study that examined the government’s repression in detail, called it a policy of “deliberate cultural regression.” Af Klinteberg reported that as of 1978, at least 101,000 persons, out of a contemporary population that the World Bank estimates totalled 215,284 persons—nearly 47% of the population—had fled the country. Other reporting, such as a 1979 Time magazine account stating that “perhaps 150,000” persons fled, suggests that the proportion of the population that sought safety in exile may have approached 70%, based on the World Bank’s estimate of the population in 1979.
By the end of his rule, nearly all of the country’s educated class was either executed or forced into exile—a brain drain from which the country has never recovered. Two-thirds of the legislature and 10 of his original ministers were also killed.
Some observers have posited that Macías Nguema may have been a psychopath, a disorder potentially enabled, in part, by reported childhood psychological trauma, and that his behaviour may have been affected by other possible mental illnesses and his reported periodic use of the psychoactive plant Iboga and large quantities of cannabis.
