Đang tải bài viết từ Wikipedia…
Thành lập
Thành lập Guinea Xích Đạo
sovereign state in Central Africa
- 12 tháng 10 năm 1968
- Châu Phi hạ Sahara
- Tên dịch máy
Thành lập
sovereign state in Central Africa
Đang tải bài viết từ Wikipedia…
Equatorial Guinea, officially the Republic of Equatorial Guinea, is a country on the west coast of Central Africa and the only Spanish-speaking country in Africa. It has an area of 28,000 square kilometres (11,000 sq mi). Formerly the colony of Spanish Guinea, its post-independence name refers to its location both near the Equator and in the African region of Guinea. As of 2025, the country has a population of 1,853,559, over 85% of whom are members of the Fang people, the country's dominant ethnic group. The Bubi people, indigenous to Bioko Island, are the second largest group at approximately 6.5% of the population. The capital, since January 2026, is Ciudad de la Paz, and Bata is the largest city.
Equatorial Guinea consists of two parts. The mainland region, Río Muni, is bordered by Cameroon to the north and Gabon to the south and east. It has the majority of the population. Río Muni's small offshore islands include Corisco, Elobey Grande, and Elobey Chico. The insular region consists of the islands of Bioko (formerly Fernando Po) in the Gulf of Guinea and Annobón. Bioko Island is the northernmost part of Equatorial Guinea and is the site of Malabo. The Portuguese-speaking island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe is located between Bioko and Annobón. The Equator runs through Equatorial Guinea's territorial waters, about 1.4° north of Annobón.
Pygmies are the first confirmed inhabitants to settle in the area of present-day Equatorial Guinea, followed by a migration of Bantu-speaking groups in the 6th century BC. Portuguese explorer Fernando Pó explored the area in 1472. Via the 1778 Treaty of El Pardo, Portugal ceded territories in the Bight of Biafra to Spain; the territory was declared Spanish Guinea during the Scramble for Africa. Nearly 200 years later, it gained independence in 1968 under the bloody dictatorship of President Francisco Macías Nguema. He declared himself president for life in 1972 but was overthrown in a coup in 1979 by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who has served as the country's president since. Obiang's regime has also been widely characterised as a dictatorship by foreign observers.
Since the mid-1990s, Equatorial Guinea has become one of Sub-Saharan Africa's largest oil producers. It has subsequently become one of the richest countries per capita in Africa; this wealth is extremely unevenly distributed, with few people benefiting from the oil riches. However, the country has the second-highest Human Development Index among Sub-Saharan countries (rank 133rd), and 7.7% of children dying before the age of five in 2021, a continuous reduction from 17.9% in 1990.
Since Equatorial Guinea is a former Spanish colony, Spanish is the main official language. French and (as of 2010) Portuguese have also been made official. Apart from the Spanish territories in Africa (Ceuta, Melilla, and the Canary Islands), Equatorial Guinea is one of the two countries (the other being the partially recognised Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic) and the only sovereign country in Africa where Spanish is an official language. Spain supports education and research for citizens, including cooperation on teachers training and postgraduate/doctoral education. The education was highly influenced by the Spanish system, and Equatorial Guinea has had one of the highest literacy rates among Sub-Saharan African countries.
Since the United States oil companies are the main operators of the oil industry, they are the main supporters of revenue. Equatorial Guinea's government is authoritarian and sultanist and has one of the worst human rights records in the world, consistently ranking among the "worst of the worst" in Freedom House's annual survey of political and civil rights. Reporters Without Borders ranks Obiang among its "predators" of press freedom. Human trafficking in the country is a significant problem, with the US Trafficking in Persons Report identifying Equatorial Guinea as a source and destination country for forced labour and sex trafficking.The country is a member of the United Nations, African Union, Francophonie, OPEC, and the CPLP.
Pygmies likely once lived in the continental region but are today found only in isolated pockets in southern Río Muni. Bantu migrations likely started around 2000 BC from between south-east Nigeria and north-west Cameroon (the Grassfields). They must have settled continental Equatorial Guinea around 500 BC at the latest. The earliest settlements on Bioko are dated to AD 530. The Annobón population, originally native to Angola, was introduced by the Portuguese via São Tomé island.
Portuguese explorer Fernando Pó, seeking a path to India, is credited as being the first European to see the island of Bioko in 1472. He called it Formosa ("Beautiful"), but it quickly took on the name of its European discoverer. The island of Fernando Pó and Annobón were colonised by Portugal in 1474. The first factories were established on the islands around 1500 as the Portuguese recognised the positives of the islands including volcanic soil and disease-resistant highlands. Despite natural advantages, initial Portuguese efforts in 1507 to establish a sugarcane plantation and town on Fernando Pó failed due to Bubi hostility and fever.
In 1778, Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of El Pardo. The treaty ceded Bioko and adjacent islets along with commercial rights to the Bight of Biafra between the Niger and Ogooué rivers to Spain in exchange for large areas of modern-day western Brazil being ceded to Portugal. Brigadier Felipe José, Count of Arjelejos of the Spanish Navy formally took possession of Bioko from Portugal on 21 October 1778. While sailing to Annobón to take possession of it, Arjelejos died from a tropical disease contracted on Bioko, and his fever-ridden crew mutinied. The crew, after having lost over 80% of their men to sickness, instead landed on São Tomé where they were imprisoned by Portuguese colonial authorities.
As a result of this disaster, Spain was subsequently hesitant to invest heavily in its new possession. However, despite such a setback, Spanish merchants began to use the island as a base for engaging in the Atlantic slave trade. Between 1778 and 1810, the territory of what became Equatorial Guinea was administered by the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, based in Buenos Aires. From 1827 to 1843 the Spanish leased a base in Bioko to the United Kingdom, which the British had sought as part of their efforts to suppress the slave trade. In 1827 Britain unilaterally moved the headquarters of the Mixed Commission for the Suppression of Slave Traffic to Fernando Pó, before moving it back to Sierra Leone under an agreement with Spain in 1843. Spain's decision to abolish its involvement in the slave trade under British pressure in 1817 damaged the colony's perceived value to the Spanish and so leasing naval bases was an effective revenue earner from an otherwise unprofitable possession. Plans by Spain to sell its African colony to Britain were cancelled in 1841 due to opposition from Spanish politicians and the public.
In 1844, the British returned the island to Spanish control and the area became known as the "Territorios Españoles del Golfo de Guinea". Due to epidemics, Spain did not invest much in the colony, and in 1862, an outbreak of yellow fever killed many of the whites that had settled on the island. Despite this, plantations continued to be established by private citizens through the second half of the 19th century.
The plantations of Fernando Pó were mostly run by a black Creole elite, later known as Fernandinos. The British settled some 2,000 Sierra Leoneans and freed slaves there during their rule, and a trickle of immigration from West Africa and the West Indies continued after the British left. A number of freed Angolan slaves, Portuguese-African creoles and immigrants from Nigeria, and Liberia also began to be settled in the colony, where they quickly began to join the new group. To the local mix were added Cubans, Filipinos, Jews and Spaniards of various colours, many of whom had been deported to Africa for political or other crimes, as well as some settlers backed by the government.
By 1870, the prognosis of whites that lived on the island was much improved after recommendations that they live in the highlands, and by 1884 much of the minimal administrative machinery and key plantations had moved to Basile hundreds of meters above sea level. Henry Morton Stanley had labelled Fernando Pó "a jewel which Spain did not polish" for refusing to enact such a policy. Despite the improved survival chances of Europeans living on the island, Mary Kingsley, who was staying on the island, still described Fernando Pó as "a more uncomfortable form of execution" for Spaniards appointed there.
There was also a trickle of immigration from the neighbouring Portuguese islands, escaped slaves, and prospective planters. Although a few of the Fernandinos were Catholic and Spanish-speaking, about nine-tenths of them were Protestant and English-speaking on the eve of the First World War, and pidgin English was the lingua franca of the island. The Sierra Leoneans were particularly well placed as planters while labour recruitment on the Windward coast continued. The Fernandinos became traders and middlemen between the natives and Europeans. A freed slave from the West Indies by way of Sierra Leone named William Pratt established the cocoa crop on Fernando Pó.
Spain had not occupied the large area in the Bight of Biafra to which it had right by treaty, and the French had expanded their occupation at the expense of the territory claimed by Spain. Madrid only partly backed the explorations of men like Manuel Iradier who had signed treaties in the interior as far as Gabon and Cameroon, leaving much of the land out of "effective occupation" as demanded by the terms of the 1885 Berlin Conference. Minimal government backing for mainland annexation came as a result of public opinion and a need for labour on Fernando Pó.
The eventual treaty of Paris in 1900 left Spain with the continental enclave of Río Muni, only 26,000 km2 (10,000 sq mi) out of the 300,000 km2 (120,000 sq mi) stretching east to the Ubangi river which the Spaniards had initially claimed. The humiliation of the Franco-Spanish negotiations, combined with the disaster in Cuba led to the head of the Spanish negotiating team, Pedro Gover y Tovar, committing suicide on the voyage home on 21 October 1901. Iradier himself died in despair in 1911; decades later, the port of Cogo was renamed Puerto Iradier in his honour.
Land regulations issued in 1904–1905 favoured Spaniards, and most of the later big planters arrived from Spain after that. An agreement was made with Liberia in 1914 to import cheap labour. Due to malpractice however, the Liberian government eventually ended the treaty after revelations about the state of Liberian workers on Fernando Pó in the Christy Report which brought down the country's president Charles D. B. King in 1930.
By the late nineteenth century, the Bubi were protected from the demands of the planters by Spanish Claretian missionaries, who were very influential in the colony and eventually organised the Bubi into little mission theocracies reminiscent of the famous Jesuit reductions in Paraguay. Catholic penetration was furthered by two small insurrections in 1898 and 1910 protesting conscription of forced labour for the plantations. The Bubi were disarmed in 1917, and left dependent on the missionaries. Serious labour shortages were temporarily solved by a massive influx of refugees from German Kamerun, along with thousands of white German soldiers who stayed on the island for several years.
Between 1926 and 1959, Bioko and Río Muni were united as the colony of Spanish Guinea. The economy was based on large cacao and coffee plantations and logging concessions and the workforce was mostly immigrant contract labour from Liberia, Nigeria, and Cameroun. Between 1914 and 1930, an estimated 10,000 Liberians went to Fernando Po under a labour treaty that was stopped altogether in 1930. With Liberian workers no longer available, planters of Fernando Po turned to Río Muni. Campaigns were mounted to subdue the Fang people in the 1920s, at the time that Liberia was beginning to cut back on recruitment. There were garrisons of the colonial guard throughout the enclave by 1926, and the whole colony was considered 'pacified' by 1929.
The Spanish Civil War had a major impact on the colony. A group of 150 Spanish whites, including the Governor-General and Vice-Governor-General of Río Muni, created a socialist party called the Popular Front in the enclave which served to oppose the interests of the Fernando Pó plantation owners. When the War broke out Francisco Franco ordered Nationalist forces based in the Canaries to ensure control over Equatorial Guinea. In September 1936, Nationalist forces backed by Falangists from Fernando Pó took control of Río Muni, which under Governor-General Luiz Sanchez Guerra Saez and his deputy Porcel had backed the Republican government. By November, the Popular Front and its supporters had been defeated and Equatorial Guinea secured for Franco. The commander in charge of the occupation, Juan Fontán Lobé, was appointed Governor-General by Franco and began to exert more Spanish control over the enclave interior.
Río Muni officially had a little over 100,000 people in the 1930s; escape into Cameroun or Gabon was easy. Fernando Pó thus continued to suffer from labour shortages. The French only briefly permitted recruitment in Cameroun, and the main source of labour came to be Igbo smuggled in canoes from Calabar in Nigeria. This resolution led to Fernando Pó becoming one of Africa's most productive agricultural areas after the Second World War.
Politically, post-war colonial history has three fairly distinct phases: up to 1959, when its status was raised from "colonial" to "provincial", following the approach of the Portuguese Empire; between 1960 and 1968, when Madrid attempted a partial decolonisation aimed at keeping the territory as part of the Spanish system; and from 1968 on, after the territory became an independent republic. The first phase consisted of little more than a continuation of previous policies; these closely resembled the policies of Portugal and France, notably in dividing the population into a vast majority governed as 'natives' or non-citizens, and a very small minority (together with whites) admitted to civic status as emancipados, assimilation to the metropolitan culture being the only permissible means of advancement.
This "provincial" phase saw the beginnings of nationalism, but chiefly among small groups who had taken refuge from the Caudillo's paternal hand in Cameroun and Gabon. They formed two bodies: the Movimiento Nacional de Liberación de la Guinea (MONALIGE), and the Idea Popular de Guinea Ecuatorial (IPGE). By the late 1960s, much of the African continent had been granted independence. Aware of this trend, the Spanish began to increase efforts to prepare the country for independence. The gross national product per capita in 1965 was $466, which was the highest in black Africa; the Spanish constructed an international airport at Santa Isabel, a television station and increased the literacy rate to 89%. In 1967, the number of hospital beds per capita in Equatorial Guinea was higher than Spain itself, with 1637 beds in 16 hospitals. By the end of colonial rule, the number of Africans in higher education was in only the double digits.
Nội dung từ bài Wikipedia “Equatorial Guinea”, theo giấy phép CC BY-SA 4.0.