1.
and
four hundred
The year after Equatorial Guinea's assumption of indepen- dence from Spain in 1968, President Macias Nguema, who had seized emergency powers during a major internal crisis, estab- lished a ten-year autocratic rule as a result of which all remaining Spaniards and at least a quarter to a third of the total national population of between three and thousand people left the country. On 7 May 1971, key portions of the 1968 Constitution were abrogated and President Macias assumed full control of the Government. Reports emanating from a country virtually sealed off from the outside world over those ten years suggested that it had one of the most repres- sive and totalitarian régimes in Africa.
2.
In
Amongst the atrocities reported by exiles in the first few years were the murder in prison of between eighty and one hundred political prisoners - including some of the former leaders of the government (Macias claimed that they had been plotting against him in prison), and the alleged execution of 319 persons listed in December 1974 by exiles in Europe. 1975, Nigerian migrant workers, who formed the main labour force of the country's cocoa plantations, began to withdraw because of acts of harassment and brutality. Within three months, 50 000 of the estimated 60 000 Nigerian workers in the country had left, bringing reports of torture and indiscriminate imprisonment. President Macias is reported to have forced an equivalent number of the country's citizens to replace the Nigerians in the plantations.
3. A substantial research report on Equatorial Guinea pub- lished in December 1976 by the Anti-Slavery Society and submitted to
to the UN Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Dis- crimination and Protection of Minorities listed violations of human rights which included the suppression of the right to communicate freely, the
freely, the circumscribing of religious freedom, torture, government-sanctioned murder and the disappearance of prominent public figures, such as cabinet ministers and dip- lomats. (By 1974, over two-thirds of the members of the 1968 Assembly were reported to have disappeared.)
4.
In its 1978 Annual Report, Amnesty International stated that arbitrary arrest and summary executions had come to characterize the Government of President Macias, who spent most of his time in a well-guarded enclosure which he left only on rare occasions. Both the mainland province of Rio Muni