The Wonga Coup

by Adam Roberts

  Now the elder diplomat, Alfred Erdos, suddenly snapped into a rage. He pushed his startled companion into a chair in the vault and unleashed a terrifying attack. Erdos grabbed some electrical cord and tightened it around Donald Leahy’s neck. The younger man struggled free, leapt from his chair and stumbled to the reception room. But before he could scrabble for the front door, Erdos snatched a pair of office scissors and plunged them into his colleague. He stabbed gingerly at first, later recalling the skin was tough as leather. But as the men struggled, Erdos thrust the scissors more fiercely – ten times in all – eventually killing Leahy with a bloody blow to the neck.

  Brought to Washington DC and put on trial the following year, Erdos offered a defence of insanity. He had been driven mad, he said, by brutal conditions in one of the most awful countries in Africa. The country where the two men served was a wretched spot where violent death was all too common. He suffered ‘acute paranoid psychosis’ as his home overlooked the main police station of the capital city. He came to fear that he and his family would be murdered. He ‘could hear the comings and goings, the sounds of torture inside and see the bodies carried away’, explained his lawyer. It did little good. The jury showed no interest in his Heart of Darkness defence, nor in the slaughter in the African country. Instead, Erdos was convicted of involuntary manslaughter following a homosexual affair with the victim.

  Whatever the cause of the attack, the trial briefly cast a light on a tiny country that might reasonably claim to be the most wretched on earth. If you look at a map, Equatorial Guinea sits in the armpit of Africa, a small patch of land divided between a square of mainland territory and a scattering of islands in the Gulf of Guinea. The jungle-covered part on the continent borders Gabon and Cameroon; on one of the islands, Bioko, is the capital city, Malabo. Almost nobody has a good word for the place. If you see a man limping on both legs, quipped one American ambassador, you know he has been to Equatorial Guinea. ‘Devil Island’, as it is sometimes known, is unlike much of modern Africa. Senior churchmen and politicians talk of the ‘magical powers’ of the rulers; there are said to be regular witch-burnings. It is both sleepy and sinister, where the vicious rivalries of village politics are elevated to the national level.

  For two centuries Spain owned the territory, but showed almost no interest in its only tropical African possession. Twice the colonial power tried to sell the island part of the colony, Fernando Po (now Bioko). In 1824 Thomas Fowell Buxton, who led a British anti-slavery party, said Britain should buy it and ‘hold it for no other purpose than the benefit of the African’. Fernando Po should be ‘a counterpart to Singapore’ and a centre for ‘enterprise plus native industry’, he argued. But when Spain finally offered to sell for £60,000, in 1839, Britain sniffed at the price. In 1901, a proposed sale to Germany also folded. Only France grabbed some of Spanish equatorial Africa, stealing some mainland territory for its own colonies.

  The Victorian explorer Henry Morton Stanley called Fernando Po a ‘pearl of the Gulf of Guinea’, but added he would not give a penny for a ‘jewel which Spain did not polish’. In 1936 the British novelist Graham Greene, who was generally fond of west Africa, dismissed ‘the little dreadful Spanish island’ where there existed a ‘mild form of slavery that enabled a man to pawn his children’. Towards the end of its two centuries of ownership, Spain did a little to improve the lives of those it ruled. The colonial power set up an economy based on cocoa plantations and a reasonable school system; health campaigns reduced the impact of tropical diseases, at least on Fernando Po. By the second half of the twentieth century, Equatorial Guineans were less poor than most Africans thanks to exports of cocoa. But few Spaniards settled and native Africans were denied political rights and economic chances. When independence loomed, the Spanish organised hasty polls to find a new government. Spain, under its own dictator General Franco, was hardly qualified to promote democracy and Equatorial Guinea was ill-prepared when, late in 1968, it became the 126th member of the United Nations.

  After independence things really went wrong. Its citizens were soon desperate to escape. A sleepy-eyed man, Macias Nguema, won the elections. A shy son of a revered and brutal witchdoctor known as ‘His Saintly Father’, Macias did badly at Catholic mission schools, but took up jobs as a junior bureaucrat and a coffee farmer, then as a court interpreter and subsequently as mayor of a small town. He became an influential leader within an important subgroup of the Fang, the country’s most populous ethnic group, and was groomed for office by a few Spaniards who believed he would serve their interests. They bear some responsibility for what came next.

  In power, Macias flattened the economy, destroyed cocoa plantations and killed off a thriving fishing industry. He had two rivals jailed a few months after he took office. Both were murdered: one first had his legs broken and was then starved. That augured ill for everyone else. A bloodthirsty and insecure tyrant, Macias assassinated ministers with zeal, usually after political reshuffles: ten of the dozen cabinet members in his first government were butchered. One survived after militiamen chased him, on foot, through tropical forest. Fishermen’s boats were burned and ordinary people banned from the coast to prevent escape. The only road out of the mainland part of the country was mined. Yet fleeing was often the only way to survive. Two thirds of the deputies of the national assembly plus many senior civil servants were driven out, imprisoned or killed. Some 100,000 people – roughly a third of the total population – fled or were killed under Macias. Tens of thousands were massacred.

  It was a time of slaughter and misery. Diplomats said Macias ruled through fear alone. Though a charismatic (if incoherent) speaker and able to draw some support, especially among the populous Fang, he launched a war against any possible threat. Most functions of government collapsed. Some 7,000 Spaniards fled, followed later by far more Nigerian labourers. A Swedish researcher who crept in called Equatorial Guinea the ‘Dachau of Africa’, then got out as quickly as he could. He echoed the name given to the country by travellers a century or so earlier – ‘Death’s Waiting-room’ – when malaria, yellow fever and other diseases took a terrible toll. Macias eventually tried to ban western medicines as ‘unAfrican’ and many diseases, even leprosy, became prevalent again. The country has yet to recover. The 2004 Lonely Planet travel guide lists a long rollcall of health risks, including rabies, tuberculosis, bilharzia, diphtheria, malaria and typhus. There are also occasional outbreaks of cholera and ebola, plus the menace of AIDS.

  But under Macias man struck with most cruelty. At one Christmas mass execution in a sports stadium in the capital, Malabo, palace guards shot 150 victims while music blared. The song: ‘Those Were the Days, My Friend’. Other executions took place in the notorious Black Beach prison, usually at night. When it became expensive to use bullets, victims were garrotted or forced to kneel to have their skulls smashed with iron bars. Some died of thirst; others were buried alive or died from gangrene following torture. To spread terror, some were beheaded, their heads left on poles in the streets. Emigrés were kidnapped and dragged home to be killed. Many who survived prison were driven insane.

  A witness later recalled: ‘No food in the shops, no water, no electricity, no kerosene for the lamps. At night we walked in blackness. Yes, for eleven years we walked in blackness.’ Survivors saw relatives and neighbours killed. One man described his family’s murder: ‘My father was a successful cocoa farmer. In 1974, Macias’s troops came. My father and brothers were shot dead and our house was burned to the ground. I fled into the bush …’ Nightclubs and schools closed; missionaries were chased from the country. Macias – like Pol Pot in Cambodia – launched a campaign against the educated and they began to ‘disappear’. He banned the word ‘intellectual’, once fining a minister who used it at a cabinet meeting. He called educated people the ‘greatest problem facing Africa today. They are polluting our climate with foreign culture.’ He closed newspapers and jailed priests. The ethnic group that dominates the island part of the country, the B
ubis, fared particularly badly.

  Macias’s reign was tragi-comic – and sadly typical of the worst of African leaders. He seemed to compete with Idi Amin of Uganda in acts of bizarre brutality. He declared himself ‘president for life’, then renamed the island part of the country after himself. He adopted new titles, each more eccentric than the last: ‘Major-general of the Armed Forces’; ‘Great Maestro of Popular Education, Science and Traditional Culture’; ‘The Only Miracle of Equatorial Guinea’. When the national director of statistics gave a population estimate that displeased Macias, the unlucky civil servant was tortured and killed. Former lovers of his mistresses were butchered. Things got so bad Macias’s own wife fled into exile.

  He ordered teachers and priests to promote his cult of personality. School children chanted that Macias alone had freed the country from imperial Spanish rule. The sanctuary of every church was to show his portrait. Priests read out messages venerating the insecure president, such as: ‘God created Equatorial Guinea thanks to Macias. Without Macias, Equatorial Guinea would not exist.’ Some 80 per cent of the people were nominally Christian, but he eventually forced churches shut. Builders walled up Malabo’s colonial era cathedral.

  When he ran short of money Macias took hostages. One author lists prices for prisoners of different nationalities. He collected a generous ransom of nearly $60,000 for a German woman; a Spanish professor earned him $40,000 and a Soviet corpse was released for $6,800; finally, a living Frenchman went for $5,000. In 1976 a Soviet plane crashed into a mountain near Malabo, killing all on board. Macias refused to release any bodies until compensation of $5 million was paid for ‘damage to the mountain’. None of this helped his international relations. Spanish and Soviet aid dried up. African governments despised him. Nigeria’s rulers planned invading in 1976 after tens of thousands of Nigerian workers were expelled and many were killed. The idea was forgotten only when Nigeria’s own military leader, General Murtala Muhammed, was assassinated.

  Some say that Macias was a cannibal. It seems likely. The skull of one ancestor, the great-grandfather of the Fang, is revered and held by the leader of the day. Macias held this, and built up a large collection of other skulls. He encouraged the reemergence of secret societies, like the Bwiti cult, which engage in symbolic ritual consumption of skeletons and sometimes require sacrifices. One expert, Max Liniger-Goumaz, suggests that such societies of powerful men believe eating part of a person is a way to absorb his virtues or strengths. He describes the procedure for obtaining cadavers:

  Each member of the society in turn had to provide a corpse. If no corpse was forthcoming by natural means, recourse was had to poison – particularly strophanthus – and the victim was chosen by all the members of the sect. If this process did not succeed, the member responsible was obliged to offer himself for sacrifice.

  Others had earlier noticed the habit among the Fang, the dominant ethnic group which Macias now led. Richard Burton, a Victorian traveller and one-time British consul in Fernando Po, had noted ‘the average traces of anthropopophagy [cannibalism]’. Mary Kingsley, another Victorian traveller, suggested ‘the cannibalism of the Fans [her term for the Fang], although a prevalent habit, is no danger, I think, to white people, except as regards the bother it gives one in preventing one’s black companions from getting eaten’. She saw no ritual goal, suggesting of the Fang: ‘Man’s flesh, he says, is good to eat, very good, and he wishes you would try it.’

  Man-eater or not, few dared challenge the ruler of Equatorial Guinea. When a poster of Macias was torn from the front of the vice-president’s office, police arrested an opposition leader and killed him. An ex-ambassador, a possible rival to Macias, was immersed repeatedly in a barrel of water for a week until he died. Opposition parties were closed. Terrifying youth militia committed atrocities on the government’s behalf.

  Given these horrors, why did nobody rise up – or no foreigner intervene? Most outsiders took little notice of the tiny Spanish-speaking ex-colony of no economic or strategic significance. In Africa governments practised self-serving ‘African solidarity’, which meant not criticising fellow presidents however wicked, as long as trouble did not spill over borders. Macias eventually got so bad that a group of African leaders did suggest, politely, that he stand down, but to no avail. At home, most Equatorial Guineans with power went along with Macias’s malevolent ways, while ordinary people struggled to survive and escape. But one effort was made to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea – and it would prove to be a model for the Wonga Coup.

  3

  The Albatross of War

  ‘… BRITISH REGISTERED QUOTE ALBATROSS UNQUOTE … BRITISH, CANADIAN AND FRENCH MERCENARIES … MAY ATTEMPT TO ASSUME CONTROL OVER FERNANDO PO …

  Foreign Office Cypher, marked ‘Secret’, 1973

  ‘Knocking off a bank or an armoured truck is merely crude. Knocking off an entire republic has, I feel, a certain style.’

  Character in The Dogs of War (1974)

  On the third day of the new year a man called Llambias slid a piece of paper into his typewriter and started punching the keys. He had a story to tell, one he hardly believed himself. Doing so, he helped save the dictatorship of Equatorial Guinea. The year was 1973. Llambias worked for Special Branch, an investigative part of the British police, in a small patch of territory on the southern tip of Spain. Gibraltar, a tiny corner of sovereign Britain, offered little: a large rock, some famous monkeys and a harbour. But it was a meeting point for gunrunners, smugglers, mercenaries, terrorists and other shady characters who passed through the Mediterranean. Llambias’s job was to keep an eye on them. He typed a four-page report for his bosses.

  Llambias wrote that the Polish-born British owner of a boat in the harbour had approached him that day. George Allan owned the Albatross, an ‘ex-Admiralty MFV’ (Motorised Fishing Vessel), a British naval attack and transport ship that he had bought in Britain two years earlier for £11,000. He had made a confession. In October 1972 he was in a nearby Spanish harbour, Fuengirola, when a man called Peter Dean had offered £5,500 plus all expenses to hire the boat and crew for six weeks. It was a good price and a deal was struck. Another man with a Scottish accent then turned up. He used the name Harry Greaves – but was better known as Alexander Ramsay Gay – and was evidently in charge. He ordered the boat to sail for Gibraltar, where it would be fitted for a long voyage – 4000 kilometres (2500 miles) – to the Gulf of Guinea.

  In Gibraltar they loaded curious equipment. Gay ordered three 18-foot Seacraft rubber landing boats – also known as rigid inflatable boats (RIBs) – each with a 50-horsepower outboard engine, from Britain. They arrived and were packed into the Albatross on 4 November. Provisions and fuel were stored: 2500 litres (550 gallons) of fuel in two large tanks, plus 32 drums of 200 litres (45 gallons) each. That gave the Albatross a range of 4800 kilometres (3000 miles). By mid December a small gang of men had gathered, some British and four French. The men soon let slip they were soldiers-of-fortune. Most had fought in the Nigerian civil war, and they had battle anecdotes to share. Gay fought for the Biafran rebels in Nigeria; a Briton called Scott Sanderson plus the four French soldiers had been on the victorious Nigerian government side. Soon more equipment arrived from Tangier, across the Mediterranean in Morocco: 50 jackets, 100 pairs of trousers and sets of military webbing.

  By Christmas the boat owner, Allan, had grown suspicious. Gay told him to prepare for the delivery of 106 boxes, each weighing 60 kilos (130 lbs) and containing arms and ammunition of different sorts. The weapons were ordered, said Gay, by ‘a German agent’, an arms dealer from Hamburg who dealt with the Spanish government. It was done with the ‘knowledge of the Spanish foreign minister, Senor Lopez Bravo’ and various officials. The Spaniards were first told the arms were destined for Iran, but then a real Iranian delegation appeared in Madrid to buy weapons. So they changed stories: the German said he was really buying guns for a terrorist group, the Black September organisation. When a senior Spanish civil serva
nt questioned the sale, a bribe of $9,000 satisfied him. The arms and ammunition in boxes, it was agreed, would be marked as containing machinery. They would first go to the Spanish port of Malaga, then be put on to a Corsican coaster. The coaster would rendezvous with the Albatross, at an unspecified spot, for transhipment.

  Llambias’s report was dated early January 1973. At that time, said Allan, he had been ordered by Gay to sail on to Olhao, in Portugal, where he expected seven more hired guns to arrive: two more Britons, four more Frenchmen and a Canadian. Then the Albatross would sail for the Canary Islands, en route to the Gulf of Guinea, where a time and place would be arranged for the weapons to be transhipped. From there the Albatross would sail on to Cape Verde, refuel and pick up more provisions. Then, at an unknown point, the boat would collect ‘50 Negro mercenaries’. Llambias concluded: ‘Their final destination will be three miles off Fernando Po where, in conjunction with arrangements already made ashore, they will attempt to take over the island’s administration.’

  How was Allan sure? ‘Under very lengthy interrogation’ the boat owner admitted he had carried out a ‘clandestine search’ of Gay’s cabin in the Albatross. He found a ‘map of the town and port of Fernando Po marked with code names (mainly names of European capitals) showing strategic points’. And why did Allan continue to work for the hired guns? Llambias explained: ‘He had no alternative but to carry on with the operation because he knew that if he did not, his life and that of his son and of his wife, would be short ones. He had already been threatened to this effect’, by Gay. ‘He was therefore carrying on with the operation come what may and if he did survive, would report back.’

  Llambias’s report is a startling document. Obtained in 2005 from Britain’s National Archives it is published here for the first time. It reveals the details of a carefully planned, Britishled coup attempt against Equatorial Guinea by a group of hardened soldiers of fortune in 1973. These men had spent the preceding years fighting as mercenaries in a fierce civil war in Nigeria, a neighbour of Equatorial Guinea. In those early days there were many puzzles to answer: the British authorities did not know who financed and organised the plot, nor the reason for it. It was not clear if Spain backed it, and nor was it obvious that anyone should intervene to stop it. Some of these puzzles would eventually be answered, in spectacular fashion.