2020 Women in Equatorial Guinea

Women in Equatorial Guinea

Susana Castillo-Rodriguez and Alba Valenciano-Mañé
Subject: Women’s History Online Publication Date: Mar 2020
DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.657
Summary and Keywords
Women who live in the territories that today comprise the Republic of Equatorial Guinea
experienced important material and social changes during pre-colonial, colonial, and
post-colonial times. They faced crucial imbalances in terms of their social and political po-
sition: while Guinean women had a vital role in household management and child rearing,
in most cases they did not control their income nor the circulation of goods and people
within their society. While they have historic commonalities with women in other parts of
Central Africa, their particular experiences during the slave trade and Spanish colonial-
ism, including the deployment of the national Catholic colonial state during Franco’s dic-
tatorship in the territory, contributed to their unique history and situation today. Fran-
coist colonialism, which lasted from 1936 until Equatorial Guinea’s independence from
Spain in 1968, strengthened the existing patriarchal structure of the societies living with-
in the country. Independence did not substantially change the social and political roles of
women in Equatorial Guinea but nevertheless opened up new horizons for them. Since
1968, three generations of empowered women—teachers, traders, farmers, writers, and
politicians—have contributed to the creation of alternative narratives for women and in-
creased the scope of their role in the public domain. Despite these new avenues for
women, Equatorial Guinea’s current regime and economy not only relies on extracting
rents from an oil-based economy but also extracting the organizing and political capacity
of ordinary Guinean women. As before, they still face the challenge of managing their
households without controlling their larger economic circumstances while lacking politi-
cal power in the country.
Keywords: Equatorial Guinea, women, gender roles, colonial and post-colonial history, power relationships, resis-
tance, contestation
Introduction
The Republic of Equatorial Guinea is a small country of an estimated 1.36 million people
located in West Central Africa.1 It comprises the continental territory of Rio Muni and five
islands: Bioko (formerly known as Fernando Poo), Corisco, Elobey Grande, Elobey Chico,
and Annobón. Malabo, on Bioko Island, is the capital and the largest city (estimated at
250,000 inhabitants, according to the Demographic and Health Program in 2001). Since
Page 1 of 34
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1778, part of territory was de juris under Spanish colonial control. In 1901, after the
Treaty of Paris, the territorial boundaries of Rio Muni—the continental part—were de-
fined, and the region as it is known today was assigned to Spain by the European colonial
powers. When Equatorial Guinea gained its independence, colonization and oppression
gave way to a regime of terror under the first presidency of Francisco Macías Nguema
and his pseudo-Maoist dictatorship (1968–1979). In 1979, through a military coup d’état
perpetrated by his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, Macías was ousted from
power. Since then, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has ruled the country with a dynas-
tic authoritarian government. While the state of terror perpetrated by Macías Nguema’s
rule was mitigated after Obiang’s coup, some of the repressive methods and anti-democ-
ratic practices remained. The regime consolidated its power during the last three
decades thanks to the rents generated by an extractive oil economy, which has enormous-
ly enriched the political elites of the country.
The Fang constitute the largest ethnic group in the country, in addition to other cultural
and ethnic groupings such as the Bubi, Ndowé, Bisio, Annobonés, and the Fernandino
community. Six local languages are spoken, but Spanish, the former colonial language, is
commonly used for official and institutional purposes and is also the language of instruc-
tion. Due to geopolitical reasons, French and Portuguese also became official languages;
however, Portuguese is only used in a special edition of Guinean TV news, and French is a
lingua franca in territories that border Cameroon and Gabon.
This wealthy, oil-producing Central African country, with a history of transatlantic trade
and an estimated GDP per capita of $8,333, is the home of extreme inequalities that af-
fect women with special virulence.2 Just as the patriarchal oppression faced by women in
Equatorial Guinea continued while changing over time during the establishment of capi-
talism, colonialism, the dictatorship, and the neoliberal turn linked to oil extraction,
women also continued to find ways to resist and contest their role in society. These
changes and continuities are not usually visible in the androcentric literature that has
continued to dominate the scholarly historical discourse, a problem compounded by the
fact that the recent—and better documented—history of Equatorial Guinea is entangled
with that of its former colonizers. In order to disassociate historical knowledge produc-
tion from a homogeneous image of women in Africa, as well as from perspectives that
take for granted African women as “people without history” until the arrival of colonizers
from whom they adopted many customs, practices, and tastes, the tracing of the sociopo-
litical history of the images and roles of Guinean women is needed.3 Subsequently, the
emphasis in the following paragraphs will be on women’s practices of contestation and
resistance to colonialism and patriarchy.
One last a priori point is needed before engaging with women’s oppressions, resistances,
and agency in the history of Equatorial Guinea: the current nation-state is a constructed
territorial and historical space and should not be taken as a given and bounded reality.
The historical trajectories of these territories that today form the Republic of Equatorial
Guinea do not converge until the final deployment of the colonial state, trade, and econo-
my at the turn of the 20th century. There are many different degrees and forms of en-
Page 2 of 34

gagement with international trade, and colonialism transformed the gender dynamics of
populations in the different parts of the country in diverse ways. The length and scope of
this article do not allow for a detailed account and nuanced discussions of the geographi-
cal and historical disparities; however, it is necessary to acknowledge them in order to
avoid homogenization and teleological narratives in the history of Equatorial Guinean
women.
Equatorial Guinean Women in Pre-Colonial and

Traditional Societies
The Island of Corisco and the Continental Region
Gender differentiation in social roles and in association with particular goods can be
traced back two millennia. The results of an excavation of a necropolis on the island of
Corisco suggest that marked gender differences have existed since the turn of the 1st
century AD, when the so-called Iron Age chrono-cultural period is identified in the archae-
ological register (lasting until the 13th century AD). Confirmation of these hypotheses, as
well as more evidence of how the exact gender roles were defined and their intersection-
ality with other identity categories, is yet to be explored.4
Even with this lack of evidence, the general consensus in the existing literature is that
equatorial Africa’s societies were egalitarian and did not have a centralized power struc-
ture up until their submission to authoritarian colonial rule. However, this consensus is
based on the observation that there is a lack of evidence of a leading political figure or a
hierarchy of leadership positions. It also does not ask the crucial question of whether in-
equality in gender roles existed or not. Equatorial societies were organized in an exoga-
mous clan structure and smaller family units that formed diverse villages. Each village
had a high level of autonomy, and its organization could vary substantially from one re-
gion to another within the equatorial forest, and thus diverse levels of authority and so-
cial hierarchy were found and rendered in the European literature of the time.5 These
small autonomous villages were highly mobile; their food supply was based on hunting
and small-scale slash-and-burn agriculture, shifting the village’s location every few years.
The clan exogamy, which served the fostering of alliances and the avoidance of warfare
among groups, was organized through patrilineal marriage arrangements. For these
arrangements, women would move from their village of birth to the husband’s village,
and the latter would be home to the descendants resulting from the union. The question
as to what extent these patrilineal arrangements implied a patriarchal organization of so-
ciety has generated debate, especially between male self-proclaimed experts of Fang cul-
ture and Fang feminist activists.
Page 3 of 34

Women within the Fang Tradition
Classic ethnographic work, which has stressed the horizontal and segmentary character
of equatorial societies, has neglected the gender dynamics in processes of power central-
ization.6 There is still a lack of critical ethnography with attention to inequalities within
the segmentary societies, however, feminist novelists and activists like Maria Nsué and
Trifonia Melibea Obono trace patriarchy back to the pre-colonial tradition, arguing that
gender inequality and female oppression are old features of Fang tradition.
They observe that bride-price agreements, where women’s futures are arranged by their
families, serve as the foundation of the objectification and commodification of women.7
French Marxian anthropologists, however, have shown that bride-price agreements did
not operate within a market logic but on reciprocity principles: a woman could only be
equivalent to another woman, the goods that would be given to the bride’s family would
never match the non-commensurable value of a woman, and therefore speculation and ex-
cessive accumulation were not initially possible.8 The bride-price then would not be any-
thing but a promise of another woman that, in the future, the clan receiving a bride would
provide to the one giving a pubescent woman.9 According to this perspective even though
women were accumulated as a prestige asset, this did not imply their equivalence to a
material good.
Women’s sexual and romantic lives were not limited to the institution of marriage. In the
Fang tradition, for example, under the umbrella of ébongon, unmarried women could
freely choose their romantic partners, and the maternal clan (still patrilineal) would keep
the children resulting from these relationships before marriage.10 In these relationships,
men were asked to provide imported goods to their romantic partner, allowing the latter
to accumulate certain prestige goods that she would otherwise not have direct access to.
Once married, however, the progeny would always belong to the groom’s clan, and the
woman would have to remain in his household, devoting her labor to its reproduction and
to the cultivation of the farm.
Even though women had the possibility to choose their romantic partner for a period of
time before marriage, they hardly ever became key actors in social reproduction, which
was structured by alliances and exchanges mediated by men. Villages were organized
around the council house (abaa), an exclusively male space where all relevant decisions
over alliances and redistribution were taken. Women, meanwhile, had spaces in their
kitchens and gardens where they dealt with issues mostly related to the domestic
sphere.11 These clear gender roles were not only expressed in the division of labor and
spatial organization of the village but were also staged and dramatized in relevant rituals
of exchange and redistribution, such as the bilaba. During the 18th and 19th centuries
the bilaba was the main institution that moved goods across the equatorial forest, in the
absence of markets or a commercial tradition. The ritual entailed two headmen, who
would exchange differentiated goods in a competitive manner. The goods were also clear-
ly gendered: one would exchange goods from “the exterior” that were considered “male
objects,” including imported goods such as textiles, guns, and iron used for marriage ex-
Page 4 of 34

changes; the other headman was considered to come from “the interior” and would offer
“female goods” coming from the land and traditional farming. The relevance of both cate-
gories of goods was equivalent. However, they could only be accumulated and exchanged
by men.12
On the whole, even though there was not an explicit hierarchy among the members of
these societies, there was an obvious challenge: women were crucial for biological repro-
duction, building up of political alliances, and working on the land, even if they did not
have access to the organization and performance of social reproduction.13 This, together
with the male control and monopoly of “the exterior” of the household and the relation-
ships with foreign trade and people, prepared the ground for future accumulation, power
centralization, and the strengthening of a patriarchal system—which was, however, not
straightforwardly assumed without contestation. There is still a need for scholarly work
to be done around the practices of resistance to and contestation of patriarchal oppres-
sions in Fang households; however, a relevant contribution by the Fang feminist lecturer
Veronica Ñengono shows how the traditional gendered spatial division between the pub-
lic as a male sphere (nseng) and the domestic as typical female sphere (faa) has been
transgressed. Through documenting frequently used Fang idioms related to the trans-
gression of these conceptual and physical spaces, Ñengono elaborates on the meanings
and the porosity of gender roles in the Fang tradition, adding interesting edges to the de-
bates on the organization of the traditional society and the changes it has experienced.14
In a similar vein, the historian Enrique Okenve explains how women often neutralized and
resisted traditional rules by drawing on other traditional categories. The concept of obóm
illustrates this, which colonialists wrongly translated as “the kidnapping of the bride.”
Obóm denotes when a woman ran away with the man she loved and later convinced her
father to consent, rather than accepting an arranged marriage with an older or unknown
man. The practice of obóm became widespread during the colonial period, as a result of
the inflation of the bride-price.15
Bioko Island
Less is known about the predecessors of the Bubi in Bioko, who appeared to be consider-
ably isolated until the 18th century. They lived along the island’s coastline and, unlike the
populations of the continent, were not acquainted with metallurgy before the arrival of
European traders. The only archaeological research on the Bubi prehistory was done by
the Claretian missionary Amador Martín del Molino. His conclusions were influenced by
his own contemporary ethnographic work carried out during the 1950s and 1960s , which
resulted in an ethnographic monograph.16 In this monograph del Molino described the
Bubi religious and belief system, including an analysis of marriage rituals, and hence
touched upon the kinship structure of the Bubi he encountered. His fieldwork took place
among the population that was already part of the Catholic community, who were con-
verts that adopted Christian semantics and adapted their beliefs to the missionaries’ ex-
pectations. Therefore, the extrapolation of his ethnographic findings is inapplicable to the
understanding of prehistoric Bubi.
Page 5 of 34

Del Molino’s descriptions of the archaeological history of the island do not provide exten-
sive information about the social and gender configuration of its inhabitants. Until the ar-
rival of European traders, the population lived in small fishing communities along the
coastline; they moved inland as a reaction to the arrival of foreigners, as a form of protec-
tion. Economic activity changed with the arrival of trade, as fishing was combined with
the cultivation of cash crops. The lack of evidence of a gendered division of labor, com-
bined with more recent ethnographic descriptions that observed a greater role for women
in social reproduction, suggest that Bubi societies might have been more egalitarian than
the continental Fang groups in regard to gender but less so in terms of their political or-
ganization. According to the available literature, the Bubi were organized under the fig-
ures of kings, who concentrated political and religious power. Although extensive primary
sources about the social structure of the Bubi allow insight into the role of women in the
late 19th century, they tell us little about their prehistory.
Contact with Transatlantic Trade and the Con-

solidation of a Patriarchal Tradition
The smaller Equatorial Guinean islands of Annobón, Corisco, Elobey Grande, and Elobey
Chico appeared in the records of early European contacts, and their populations partici-
pated in—and, in the case of Annobón, were part of—the Atlantic trade from the 15th cen-
tury onward. For instance, the Benga, from Corisco and the two Elobey islands, experi-
enced longstanding traditions as traders and middlemen between Europeans and the
Fang population in the hinterland.17 Annobón, in contrast, became an entrepôt and an
agricultural center and was populated with captured slaves from the coast of Angola and
neighboring São Tomé and Principe. Its inhabitants exchanged commodities with the
trading vessels and had long periods without contact with the coastal communities. 18
However, European slave trading operations took place in nearby mainland coastal ports
(Bonny, Calabar, Bimbia, Cape Lopez, Loango, etc.), and coastal peoples were part of the
inner workings of the global economy. From the early 15th century until the beginning of
the 19th century, the island of Bioko and its native Bubi inhabitants seem to have re-
mained on the margins of Atlantic trade routes. Then a British naval base was established
on the island.19 The Spanish Crown had acquired the islands of Bioko, Annobón, Corisco,
and “the adjacent territories” from the Portuguese crown in 1778, with the intention of
establishing a profitable slave trade. However, the enterprise did not succeed, and Span-
ish effective occupation of most of the territories did not occur until a century afterward.
The slave trade seemed to be successful only on the island of Corisco and surrounding
coastal areas, and only as an illegal activity, following the British slave trade’s formal abo-
lition in 1807.20
The fact that Equatorial Guinea remained at the periphery of the transatlantic slave trade
does not mean that its societies were not at all influenced by the circulation of goods and
people that resulted from it. A combination of the small size of village communities and
the lack of a centralized political authority allowed for easy adoption of innovations
Page 6 of 34

through contact with other groups and foreign societies.21 The main innovation, which
was shared among the various cultural areas that today are part of Equatorial Guinea,
was the consolidation of a patriarchal system where men concentrated wealth and power
and women were consigned to the role of biological reproducers and caretakers of the small-
farming system. European goods and currencies such as textiles, gunpowder, iron- ware,
and alcoholic drinks were gradually incorporated in the bride-price repertoires, which
experienced an increase in inflation. The adoption of multiple currencies and their
convertibility allowed for headmen to accumulate riches and wives, and therefore to con-
solidate a social hierarchy. In the Fang tradition, the nkukuma (the rich man) controlled
access to foreign goods and had multiple wives, which allowed him to build alliances with
multiple clans. The mikukuma (pl. of nkukuma) centralized political power, this being ex-
clusively masculine.22
The available primary sources of the period are limited to reports authored by often semi-
literate European adventurers, which offer little detail about trade let alone gender roles
among the communities they encountered.23 Women were mostly depicted as nude bod-
ies, usually shown in groups rather than as individuals, and portrayed as strong laborers
for their crucial role in farming, which was interpreted, in imperial eyes, as a sign of ex-
ploitation and savagery. These representations of women were part of a genre along the
West African coast that described them in broadly similar terms and emphasized similar
features, thus revealing more about the interests, preconceived notions, and gaze of the
observers themselves than about the women being described. These discursive tropes
were later reproduced in missionary rhetoric and colonial literature. The insistence on
the negative effects of farm work on womanhood by the colonial literature could be con-
sidered a reaction to the agency that women had within their communities, for whom
their productive and reproductive labor was highly valuable. While European trade and
foreign goods had been domesticated and incorporated as prestigious possessions, repro-
ductive work was still highly valued. Women appeared in the eyes of European imperial-
ists as physically strong laborers, which conflicted with their idea of weak and subjugated
womanhood in their home communities.
The covering of women’s naked bodies and domestication of their sexuality became a cru-
cial part of the civilizing efforts of missionaries who made their way to Equatorial Guinea
in the mid-19th century. However, what missionary accounts obscure is that imported
cloth and clothing were already widespread along the Central African coast since the be-
ginning of European trade, and inhabitants used clothing according to their needs, tastes,
and desires, which differed from the ones missionaries would later seek to impose.24
While some women, like the Benga in Corisco, rapidly adopted the European fashion
trends, in other regions imported beads, iron necklaces, and clothes were adapted to new
styles that did not pretend to mimic Western-looking clothing; they did not cover their
breasts, for instance, which became one of the main preoccupations of the missionaries.
While women did not have official access to foreign goods, they accessed them through
the relationships they established with men. Men had the obligation to provide their fe-
male kin or romantic partners with gifts and presents.
Page 7 of 34

In addition to incorporating European fashion trends, Benga people from the island of
Corisco adopted elements of European architecture, together with other customs, like
commensality practices, during the 18th century. European china and cutlery, alcoholic
drinks, and the adoption of a European-structured house with a kitchen and dining room
have been well documented in the archaeological and ethnographic record at this time.
However, it is still hard to assess to what extent European gender roles were also adopt-
ed within the Benga, together with material changes in the domestic space.25
Apart from being able to increase their status through the accumulation of foreign goods
and commodities, women could gain access to certain power and prestige positions
through seniority and the management of kinship. As mentioned, the contact with Euro-
pean trade had resulted in the transformation of traditions in such a way that wealth and
power could be accumulated by the figure of a chief or king. The strength of social hierar-
chy among male figures was mirrored in the female realm: wives and mothers of chiefs or
kings possessed more influence than most ordinary males and females. On the island of
Bioko, according to the historian Ibrahim Sundiata, “the daughter of the eldest sister of
the obele (‘king’) was among the most distinguished members at the royal court. Consid
ered the first lady of the kingdom, she lived in the palace, ate with her uncle the king, and
received half of all gifts and debts paid to him.”26
Missionaries, Traders, and Early Colonization

Missionaries, Converts, and Cultural Translators
Missionaries were the key actors during 19th-century colonialism. They operated as rep-
resentatives of the colonial state and rule and also carried their own notions of civiliza-
tion and modernity, which largely—but not completely—overlapped with those of the
Spanish colonial administration. Missions created archives that documented their activi-
ties in detail. The documents they produced constitute a detail account of the patriarchal
and racial oppression under the colonialism. The colonial state assumed that it could ex-
ercise power over women both in the household and in the agrarian economy and that
changing women’s roles would transform society according to colonial will. However,
women appropriated the colonial structures themselves to create opportunities. Although
their voices and actions were not at the forefront of literary production, their actions can
be traced in the archives.27 They influenced the Christian missions and sometimes man-
aged to move upward socially with their engagement, acquisition of certain skills and
knowledge, and their role as mediators between the local and foreign colonial communi-
ties.
Since the early 19th century, the islands of Corisco and Bioko were the main enclaves for
European colonizers, the Baptist Missionary Society, and the American Presbyterian
Church. Strategically situated in the Bight of Biafra, near modern-day Cameroon and
Gabon, the islands experienced the settlement of foreigners alongside their institutions
and infrastructure such as churches, houses, schools, and roads. Both Protestant and
Page 8 of 34

Catholic missionaries, who arrived later, dedicated their efforts to spreading their civiliz-
ing enterprise. Presbyterians operated in their own congregation’s interest, adapting
their proselytization to the local context and trying to use what they understood to be lo-
cal languages in an attempt to reach a large number of potential converts.28 Catholic mis-
sionaries, however, became the main agent of the Spanish colonial state, thus serving the
latter interests at the first instance. These different roles implied dissimilar approaches to
the missionary practice and also different levels of women’s participation.
Initially the Spanish Catholic missions were a male endeavor, which female missionaries
only joined occasionally. The major exception was the Spanish Catholic expedition to
Bioko in 1856 led by Reverend Martinez y Sanz, which involved twelve women from the
Siervas de María congregation and resulted in the death of most of them, with the sur-
vivors returning to Spain six months later. In contrast, Protestant missions, starting in the
mid-1800s, were led by ministers accompanied by their wives and children. A significant
number of the American Presbyterian missionaries were of African American descent.29
Also, both black and white Protestant female missionaries preached and advanced mis-
sion work based on social changes in domestic and public spaces. They promoted changes
in body appearance for local women, the practice of monogamy and Christian marriage,
and a partial abandonment of the farm work traditionally carried out by women, and they
also taught a female focus on housekeeping and domestic manual tasks, primarily sewing,
knitting, and cooking.
Female missionaries often complained about child marriage and the subjection of women
to men’s tyranny. This was the case with Mrs. Lavinia Sneed, an African American woman
who had experienced slavery in America and later worked as an assistant at the Presby-
terian mission in Corisco.30 Protestant women missionaries led activities where local
women gained certain levels of agency. Relations between black and white women, and
between African American missionaries and locals, were nevertheless far from being
equal, and official reports frequently omitted the names of local assistants or servants.31
Both black and white foreign female missionaries who ended up having important roles in
their communities contributed to the training and education—or, rather, acculturation—of
local women. Reverend Robert Hamill Nassau’s wives, Mary Cloyd Latta Nassau (1837–
1870) and Mary Brunette Foster Nassau (1849–1884), were directors of the girls’ board
ing schools at Benito (across Rio Muni, in today’s Cameroon), Baraka (in today’s Gabon
coast), and Corisco Island (Equatorial Guinea). Charity Sneed, the daughter of Lavinia
Sneed, worked as a teacher for young women at the Evangesimba Presbyterian mission
(1859–1862) and at the Corisco mission (1867), both located on the island of Corisco. She
had an important role in reaching out to women outside the church.32 Among her pupils,
local women such as Mrs. Benji-Itongolo and Mrs. Bessie Makae became Bible readers
and relevant figures in their communities. Isabella Nassau, daughter of Reverend Nas-
sau, relied on Ms. Matomba, a local student from Corisco’s female Presbyterian boarding
school, for her translations of religious hymns to the Benga language.33 Some of these
women traveled around the territory, working as teachers, clerks, or translators for the
colonial authorities. Women like Gabriela Benganga, who became the first local employee
Page 9 of 34

working for the administration of Spanish Guinea, accumulated material wealth and were
able to start small trading enterprises, which allowed them to contribute to their extend-
ed family’s well-being and to the building of wide social networks, which ultimately led to
enrichment of their social capital.34 Being translators, teachers, and bible readers, local
mission-educated women became key mediators between the mission, the colonial state,
and their local communities.
Missionary discourses and practices around gender roles were often contradictory, which
shows the tension experienced in the missions’ interactions with local customs and be
liefs. In Reverend Nassau’s diaries (1880–1919) and writings he shows a double standard
in criticizing local customs in observance of church doctrines on chastity, monogamy, and
gender roles.35 The Presbyterian Mission participated in the payment of the dowry while
they were in custody at the girls’ boarding school.36 Presbyterians arranged marriage
among the converts, even if by doing so they had to intercede with the exchange of goods
in the form of marriage payments, a practice they widely criticized as it was considered
part of what caused “women’s situation of enslavement.”37 Reverend Nassau often vacil-
lated between blaming local women’s parents’ greed and white colonizers’ lack of scru-
ples for paying them as purveyors of young wives.38
Among the documentation of Presbyterian missionaries who worked in the Corisco area,
there are relevant sources that deserve critical attention, which recorded the societal
changes resulting from the engagement with European trade and missions.39 Ibia
Dy’Ikengue, a Coriscan minister between the 1870s and his death in 1901, often referred
to the changes that the so-called “local tradition” was experiencing. He blamed material-
ism and the incorporation of European trading goods in the mainstream island culture as
the cause of the corruption of local traditional customs.40 According to Reverend
Dy’Ikengue, a crisis of traditional manhood negatively affected the lives of women, and
this became one of his main preoccupations. In his correspondence with other missionar-
ies Reverend Dy’Ikengue explains how the work with women became crucial for the de
velopment of the Presbyterian mission, yet it created tensions between the mission, influ-
ential mission-educated women, and local big-men.41 Due to incomplete research of his
writing, an in-depth analysis of all the correspondence between Reverend Dy’Ikengue and
other missionaries could bring new insights on gender dynamics in the context of colo-
nialism and changes in traditions in the Corisco area.
Bioko Island: Fernandinas and the Legitimate Trade
The island of Bioko received Baptist missionaries from British colonies in America, includ-
ing missionaries from Jamaica. Bioko is home to the city of Malabo, which today is the
capital of Equatorial Guinea. In 1827, Clarence City (nowadays Malabo) was founded by
the British as headquarters of the Mixt-Court Commission for slave-trade abolition.42 The
city was populated by freed slaves from vessels captured by the British navy; a few mi-
grant workers from Cape Coast, Sierra Leone; and Kru fishermen. Clarence City resi-
dents opened their houses to Protestant missionaries. Portraits and reports from this peri-
od showcase a number of women who became examples of missionary success. These in-
Page 10 of 34

clude Mamma Job and Mrs. Nicolls, who were originally Igbo from Nigeria, enslaved in
the Americas, liberated, and finally brought to Bioko by the British. Job and Nicolls were
often described as “well-dressed in European style” and “well-mannered” women. They
were often taken as proof of the highest level of assimilation missionaries should be able
to achieve in their converts.43
At the beginning of the 19th century, the Bubi from Bioko island engaged with the pro-
duction of palm oil but not with its trade and distribution. This provided an opportunity
for communities of freed slaves and immigrants from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria
to develop an elite of “creole” traders and plantation owners, known as Fernandinos, who
performed the role of middlemen between European traders and the Bubi.44 The small
population of Bioko did not allow for a large-scale expansion of commercial production,
but nevertheless the main harbors of the island became key nodes for commodity trans-
shipment—a role that the ports of Malabo and Luba (known as San Carlos under Spanish
rule) have kept until today. Fernandinos made use of the education provided by Protes-
tant missionaries and climbed the social ladder as they ran small cocoa, coffee, or lumber
plantations. Women like Mamma Job and Mamma Nicholls became well integrated among
the Fernandino community and ran their own missionary enterprises and businesses in
the city. They were instrumental in providing shelter and food to foreigners, opened their
houses for religious services, hosted temporary workers from the neighboring coastal re-
gion, and welcomed a number of emancipated Cubans who were deported to Bioko by the
Spanish government between 1862 and 1898.45
During most of the 19th century, the colonial presence on the island of Bioko was first
mediated by traders and then by Catholic missions. The Spanish presence on the island
was only nominal at these times, and British traders held the role of representatives of
the Spanish colonial state. Some of these British colonists married Fernandino women
who had, in practice, an enormous influence on the organizing of trade and Protestant
churches. Travelers’ chronicles and church reports from the period often refer to these
powerful Fernandino women as “unexpectedly civilized Africans,” sometimes having ex
tremely sophisticated tastes in dress and manners, characterizations that challenged con-
ventional racial stereotypes.46 The diary and letters of the British trader John Holt (1841–
1915) are filled with references to these powerful women. Holt worked closely together
with Mrs. Lynslager, a Fernandina established in Clarence City, whose advice and guid-
ance enabled him to succeed as a trader. Mrs. Lynslager married the British trader who
became the acting governor of Fernando Po (1854–1864). After the death of her husband,
she inherited a fortune and kept the young Holt as one of the administrators of her busi-
nesses. Holt, who later became one of the most prosperous British traders in West Africa,
recorded in his diary his lack of knowledge of the consumption practices of his customers
and the lack of authority he held in front of his African employees. His trading enterprises
would not have been possible without the pivotal role played by the Fernandina women
who were de facto running his business.47 Another relevant Fernandino woman at the
turn of the century was Amalia Barleycorn, who ran several businesses and lent money to
Page 11 of 34

the Claretian mission so that the Santa Isabel Cathedral (Malabo) could be finished by
1916.48
Spanish Colonialism: From Indifference to Na-

tional Catholicism
Women under Colonial Law
At the dawn of the 20th century Spain finally occupied the territories that were supposed
to form the Spanish Guinea (La Guinea Española). In spite of the legitimizing discourse of
the colonial historiography, which depicted Spanish colonialism as “soft and benevolent,”
the final occupation of the continental territories of Rio Muni was extremely violent, as
were the colonial government apparatuses.49 Under the mandate of the governor Angel
Barrera between 1910 and 1925, the main administrative structures and the infrastruc-
ture for economic extraction were set. As in the previous decades, the governing role
played by the religious missions was instrumental in controlling the territory and develop-
ing a cultural assimilation agenda. In terms of Catholic missions, the Claretian male mis-
sionaries were joined by Conceptionist nuns, who ran churches, hospitals, boarding
schools, orphanages and, later, a leprosery.50 Conceptionist missionaries instructed the
women in their boarding schools to marry Catholic men and start Christian families. This
teaching, in addition to literacy, created a divided society between Catholic-educated fam-
ilies and non-converted ones. Access to education had, however, little impact on the legal
status of women, as according to colonial legislation their civil rights were contingent on
the prerogative of men. In colonial Equatorial Guinea, laws were based on a combination
of assimilationist ideology and racist pseudoscientific theories that characterized non-Eu-
ropean populations as “indolent, infantile, drunk, cowardly, superstitious and inferior.”51
The specific legislation for the African territories was composed of statutes and decrees
to regulate the body, mind, and traditional practices of the colonized. With the implemen-
tation of the Patronato de Indígenas (Native Trusteeship) created in 1904, Africans were
classified in several categories with different rights: emancipated, “sponsored,” and non-
emancipated. Spread throughout colonial policies was the aim of promoting Spanish cul-
ture and morals among colonial subjects, as well as their loyalty to the Spanish nation.52
Gender was indivisible from legal status, which placed women below men in terms of
rights. Men were understood as the heads of the household and the interlocutors before
the colonial court; Tribunales de Raza (customary courts and literally “race courts”) were
chaired by the chief of the colonial guard and subordinated to a Tribunal Superior Indíge-
na composed exclusively of local men.
The combination of colonial law and “customary law,” which was also colonial in nature
but considered “traditional,” allowed for the endurance of multiple contradictions within
the legal system that could be navigated according to the particular interests of those in-
volved. For instance, the introduction of the Catholic marriage did not abolish the pay-
ment of the bride-price nor the possibility for a rich man to marry multiple women.53 In
Page 12 of 34

fact, the existence of the nsoa (the bride-price in Fang) among the Fang became a useful
asset for labor recruiters in the colonial economy. The need to accumulate certain goods
in order to marry and start a family incentivized young, single, male Fang to enroll as la-
borers in the plantation economy of Fernando Poo. Instead of eradicating the bride-price
system, as the missionary discourse preached in its more theoretical than practical de-
fense of female liberation, colonial authorities regulated the contents and prices for bride
wealth, in an attempt to secure enrolment into the agrarian colonial economy.54
National Catholicism and the Instrumentalization of Health Care and

Education
After 1936, the regime of Francisco Franco embraced the colonial enterprise as an em-
blem for fascist nation-building. During Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975) the investment
and efforts to turn the territories into a successful extractive enclave substantially in-
creased. Using the language of empire, through fascist nation-building, was crucial for
the construction of the national Catholic state. The state adopted the language of humani-
tarianism in an attempt to present itself as a benevolent regime, especially in the context
of the international relationships in the late 1940s and the 1950s.55 Education and health
care institutions became decisive devices for fostering repression and containment in the
metropole and were also implemented in the colony where, just like in Spain, they were
run by the church in close relationship with the state.
The implementation of a health card, which the local population was forced to accept to
have blood tests and anthropometric measurements, became one of the main control
tools of the colonial state. The local population was forced to participate in severe med-
ical surveillance for the sake of the implementation of a universal health care system.
However, essential medicines for endemic illnesses like malaria were always scarce and
not distributed to local health card holders, unless it was for a new medicine to be
tested.56 The colonial state’s health care techno-political project gave the colonizers the
“power to identify healthy bodies for an agrarian capitalist workforce; the power to force
the population into work; and the power to control and define sick bodies, using the blood
test technology as a census/passport to control the displacement of the population.”57
Women were particularly targeted by the colony’s hygienist politics, which considered
them as the “holders of traditional forms of social organization” and the embodiment of
the “moral depravation of the indigenous population.”58
Education was also at the center of the civilizing and the Hispanization enterprises as a
mechanism for indoctrination and subjugation. In the early years of Francoism, most of
the education programs in the colony were held in a boarding school system managed by
the Catholic missions. The colonial state moved to new laws on colonial education in
1943, after it had previously been mostly run and implemented by missionaries, in line
with governmental decrees.59 The 1943 Colonial Statute on Education focused on teach-
ing the colonial subjects the ideology of national Catholicism and forced women into the
roles of mothers and spouses within their households.60 Women’s chastity was the epito-
me; therefore, their sexuality was in need of a radical transformation. Girls were “locked
Page 13 of 34

up” in single-sex urban boarding schools with a strict policy on discipline and morality, in-
fused by lessons on sewing, “good manners and decency.”61
The highest position that most Guinean women could aspire to within the colony was to
work as either primary school assistant teachers or assistant nurses. Only a few daugh-
ters from the wealthiest “emancipated” Fernandino families attended the Catholic school
(Inmaculada Concepción), with branches in Santa Isabel (Malabo) and Basilé, where they
mingled with the colonialist’s daughters. European pupils received grants to finish their
higher education abroad, while in the case of local students their family was required to
finance the accommodation and study fees abroad on their own. Very few families could
afford such a big expense except the wealthiest Fernandinos, who did send their children
to study abroad, not only to the metropole but also to London, where most of them be-
came lawyers, economists, or medical doctors.
The Onset of Independence: Franco’s Sección Femenina and Women’s

Access to Education
The colonial politics between the end of World War II and the late 1960s provided mixed
experiences for Guinean women. On the one hand, the cultural politics of the colonial
state, particularly through the national Catholic women’s association (La Sección Femeni-
na, The Women’s Section), aimed to create closer affinity with Spanish folklore, national-
ist feelings, and Catholicism. On the other hand, changes in educational policy created
new opportunities for an emergent elite of women who gained access to higher educa-
tion. Both frameworks, education and t women’s associations, were governed by racial
and patriarchal premises and aimed at the submission of women and the suppression of
their identities. However, these frameworks also provided spaces where social networks
could be built and female agency could be deployed for the creation of new female
lifestyles that eventually challenged the traditional and colonial roles that had been im-
posed on women.
The Sección Femenina was a social service organization in the metropole, which was also
the female branch of the fascist party, la Falange Española.. Chaired by Pilar Primo de
Rivera, the sister of the founder of the fascist political party under the Franco dictator-
ship. The organization visited the colony in 1954, with a performance of its folklore sec-
tion, Coros y Danzas (Choirs and Dances), in the cities of Bata, Niefang, Micomeseng, and
Santa Isabel. Later, when the Spanish colonial state in Equatorial Guinea was already in
decline, the Sección Femenina established a local branch of Servicio Social in Bata and
Malabo.62 By the mid 1960s, the Sección Femenina opened Escuelas-hogar (orphanages)
with the aim to implement hygiene policies, such as the vaccination and medical checking
of children, and to train women to be “good mothers and housewives.”63
In 1965, the Sección Femenina collaborated with high schools to train women as teach-
ers, and with religious organizations such as the sisters of the Catholic Mission con-
formed by Oblatas (Oblate Sisters) in the city of Nkué, which was a congregation of
women missionaries of color.64 This kind of associationism undeniably influenced the gen-
Page 14 of 34

eration of women indoctrinated by the Falangists and their theories of womanhood in the
moment prior to independence. Even though the training and message predicated by the
Sección Femenina was rooted in the most conservative and patriarchal version of national
Catholicism, its leaders and organizers did not follow the ideals they were professing:
most of the high-ranking women in the hierarchy of the organization, and those who trav-
eled to Equatorial Guinea, were unmarried women without children who had devoted
their lives to the association. Their behavior was modelled by some Guinean women who,
after studying in the Escuela Hogar, went to Spain to pursue higher education and either
married later in life or returned to Equatorial Guinea and became independent profes-
sionals and politicians alongside their husbands. While Guinean women under the um-
brella of the Sección Femenina reached certain levels of empowerment, the vertical struc-
ture of the organization hindered their capacity to radically change the status quo and
the colonial discourse.65 In line with the Francoist values, the female elite resulting from
the educational programs of the Sección Femenina would always be subordinate to
men.66
By the middle of the 20th century, international pressure and the advent of independence
in neighboring countries forced Spain to provide some political autonomy to Spanish
Guinea. In 1959 the territories became a province of Spain, and in 1964 an autonomous
region within the Spanish state. This new status, with independence on the horizon, im-
plied the need to change the education policy and increase access to higher education for
Guineans. During the 1960s, a significant number of women finished basic education and
became assistant clerks or teachers. Some of them traveled to Spain to pursue university
degrees. This generation of Guineans were meant to be educated leaders that the inde-
pendent Republic of Equatorial Guinea would need, although ideologically and politically
close to the Spanish colonial state. However, against the will of the metropole, Francisco
Macias Nguema won the first post-independence democratic elections of 1968 and be-
came the first president of Equatorial Guinea.67 With a preference to align with the East-
ern bloc during the Cold War, Macias Nguema developed a strong anti-colonial discourse,
which resulted in the expulsion of the country’s intelligentsia, as well as all those with a
history of relationships with their former metropole. This anti-colonial discourse strength-
ened, along with a more general anti-foreigner discourse, during the first half of the
1970s, when a third of the population fled the country due to the violent climate and the
threats residents received. Most of the women who had studied in Spain during the 1960s
went into and remained in exile.
Trinidad Morgades Besari (1931–2019), who was the first woman to graduate in English
Philology at the University of Barcelona (1958), is an example of this generation of edu-
cated women that left the country and only came back after Macias was overthrown
through Obiang Nguema’s coup d’état in 1979. Under Nguemismo, Morgades held many
relevant public positions: she became secretary of the Nigerian Embassy; the cultural at-
taché of the Embassy of Equatorial Guinea in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and minister of so-
cial affairs and women’s promotion; followed by an extensive career in secondary and
higher education, culminating with the position of vice chancellor of the Universidad Na-
cional de Guinea Ecuatorial (UNGE). She was the only female member of the Academia
Page 15 of 34

Ecuatoguineana de la Lengua Española (AEGLE). However, some of the female graduates

from Morgades’ generation, like Cristina Djombe Djangany, never went back to their
country after fleeing Macías’ hostile regime. They became part of the so-called “lost gen-
eration” of Guinean intellectuals that were unable to realize their potential due to the po-
litical closedness of both regimes.68
Migration, Urbanization, and Livelihood

Guinean women have contributed to the supply of household foodstuffs through systems
of self-sufficient, small-scale farming. Since at least the first decades of the 20th century,
the meager surplus of these small farms has been sold in specific sections of the market-
place in urban areas. In addition to what the farms located in the area surrounding urban
areas could supply, other imported and essential products (such as salted fish, oil, salt,
etc.) completed the supply of foodstuffs in the country. Guinean women did not engage
with foreign trade during the colonial period. Today, however, importing and selling for-
eign goods has become one of the main sources of livelihood for less privileged Guinean
women.
The development of the colonial economy caused a large demographic imbalance be-
tween men and women. The labor force required in the cash-crop plantation system was
mostly male and foreign-born laborers. Similarly, most of the European settlers, traders,
and missionaries were also men. In this context, female migration took place from the
rural areas in the continental region to the main cities of Bata and Malabo during colonial
and post-colonial rule. Women from the Ndowé and Fang cultural groups in particular, to-
gether with Fernandinas, opened bars and restaurants that were then turned into broth-
els where foreign-born men spent their discretionary income. Since colonial times, the
hospitality sector has been dominated by women. Some of these businesswomen became
successful entrepreneurs and mingled with the colonial elite. The Fernandina Anita
(Guau) Awaho is a paradigmatic example of this: she owned the most renowned club
where local women met foreign-born men and developed relationships that always im-
plied some sort of material exchange.69 The hospitality industry is currently organized
through a professional association, whose leader has been woman who owns a hotel in
Malabo since the association’s creation in the 1980s.
During the colonial period, either Hausa or Igbo migrant women, mainly the wives of mi-
grant plantation workers who sold their farms’ commodities and turned bulk products ac-
quired in the commercial factories into affordable small portions, carried out most small-
scale trading. With the expulsion of Nigerian workers in 1975, President Macías Nguema
established the forced recruitment of Fang workers from Rio Muni for the cocoa planta-
tions in Bioko. Today the elderly retailers of the main marketplaces in Malabo are the
widows of these Fang workers from Rio Muni, who died in the course of two epidemic
outbreaks that took place in 1976 and 1978. Most of these women have sold many differ-
ent kinds of products over the years: some started selling drinks from their homes in Rio
Muni during colonial times and others cooked sweet fritters and sold them at school
Page 16 of 34

doors before joining their husbands in Malabo. In the city, if they had relevant connec-
tions, women combined the selling of the meager products from their farms with the re-
selling of small portions of the products one could find in the state-owned warehouses.
The marketplace opened a new possibility for ordinary women: they could build their own
network beyond their kin, which offered them a sense of control and the chance to orga-
nize a certain space for mutual help and solidarity and control over certain people and re-
sources. Market women performed the role of managers of income and wealth—in goods
and in people—which outside the marketplace was exclusive to men.70
Another large wave of female migration from Rio Muni to Malabo arrived in the
mid-1980s. At this time, the opening of the borders, diversification of trade, and income
from international aid started to generate visible effects in the poverty-stricken Guinean
economy. This generation of women, born during the late 1950s and the 1960s, had
moved to Malabo, the capital, in search of new opportunities coming from the increased
circulation of people; funds resulting from foreign aid programs; and also from the return
of exiles who had studied abroad, who may or may not have accumulated cash they were
ready to invest. In 1986 the first association of market sellers was created under the um-
brella of the Ministry of Social Affairs, which imposed a membership fee to market
women. Equally as important as joining that association was becoming a member of the
ruling political party.71
In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the process of urbanization linked to
the oil-extraction economy led to the abandonment of subsistence farming activities and
an increase in domestic and international trade.72 While male traders have been in
charge of most import-trading enterprises, women have dominated the retail scene. The
emergence of a middle class with the means to travel abroad and source its needs in in-
ternational markets has led a vast number of Guinean women to engage with all kinds of
trade. A large number of women are focused on the selling of second-hand clothing
(asamsé) imported in big bales (45 kg) from Europe or North America. With the reloca-
tion in 2006 of the main marketplace in Malabo, a few women started to sell first-hand
clothing, cosmetics, and accessories they purchase in Spain. Some of them have been
able to collect enough cash to invest in several shopping expeditions. However, such ex-
peditions do not only require monetary investment but also mobilization of a wide net-
work of collaborators to help with logistics, including the acquisition of a travel visa and
initial capital for the trip as well as the organization of accommodation and provisions
while abroad. Still today, when an option to migrate arrives for women, the Guinean dias-
pora provides a temporary cushion. Nevertheless, difficulties in finding a steady source of
household income in Spain have created a way of living in between the two continents. Al-
though there is a lack of statistics about how many women live in between Spain and
Equatorial Guinea, observationally there is a sense of the existence of a great mobility be-
tween the two countries.
Page 17 of 34

Female Spaces, Sororities, and the Margins of

the State
Historically, Equatorial Guinean women relied upon, and strengthened, spaces of sorority
inside kinship structures, religious spaces, and (re)productive and financial institutions.
Only a few of them will be mentioned here, and systematic research and documentation
of such spaces still needs to be done.
In the religious sphere, and around the Catholic missions and boarding schools, Ntonobee
are religious congregations of women characterized by the communality they celebrate as
they sing in their vernacular languages, share their beliefs, and organize religious events.
In Bioko, Ntonobees organize pilgrimages to the Bisila Sanctuary to pay respects to the
“Grand Mother Bisila.”73 Ntonobee choirs also provide space for the organization of faith-
related activities such as catechism and international trips to relevant pilgrimage sites.
Belonging to an Ntonobee choir is sometimes the gateway to traveling abroad and gain-
ing international experience that otherwise women would not have access to.
Among Bubi, the “president of women” is in charge of declaring the day on which the cel-
ebration of bötói (the fertility ceremony) will take place, as part of maintaining tradition,
social memory, and cutlts of ancestor worship.74Töparápará o bóö ö tyóbbò in Bubi, today
popularized by the Pichi word pul na dó, is a ceremony among the Bubi and the Fer-
nandin comunity to celebrate the birth and presentation to the community of a newborn.
This ceremony is entirely organized by a commission of women who hold high levels of
authority within their communities. Pul na dó involves taking the child out of the house to
present him or her to clan members.75
Similarly, rituals related to childbearing among Ndowé are frequently entrusted to

women. When a Ndowé woman has a child, giving birth and the quarantine (dyaee in
Ndowé) take place at the house of the woman’s family. Her husband and relatives bring
clothes and a turtle to compensate the blood shed when giving birth. 76 During the period
of dyaee, the mother is taken care of by her female kin members until the newborn and
mother are fully recovered from the birth. The intimate space of dyaee, which is exclusive
to women, becomes a space to foster sorority that interlinks women of the same kin.
In the Fang kinship structure, an important institution for women’s cooperation and sup-
port is that of N’dá mibóm. It translates literally as “the house of the daughter-in-law”
and refers to the space where women from the same family, as in women married into the
bride wealth of the oldest women of the family, meet up and discuss issues concerning
their households and also wider issues related to the village or neighborhood community.
The elderly women who hold the headship of the n’dá mibóm used to have a significant
capacity for mobilization and achieved high levels of respectability, sometimes parallel to
rich men in the community.77
Page 18 of 34

Similarly, in Fang society, nyandomo groups exist as a counterpoint to the usual patrilin-
eal organization of kinship. Nyandomo groups are constituted by all men from a mother’s
clan (ayong), which coincides with the mother’s brother’s and mother’s father’s ayong.78
The authority figure of the nyandomo group, then, is an elderly woman of the family in-
stead of the headman. Nyandomo groups constitute evidence of the power and authority
that elderly women can hold within the community, in spite of the patriarchal organiza-
tion of Fang society.
When a Fang woman reaches menopause, she abandons the conjugal dorm and leaves the
space for another woman to take her place as the “guarantor” of reproduction; she now
gains a new status and may be invited to join men at the abaa or the community palaver
house, where people who share a language congregate. The abaa provides a good exam-
ple of one form of women’s agency that contests masculine domination through the use of
linguistic resources. The abaa has often been described as the “house of the men’s
words.” It is a space exclusive to male members of the community, which is located in the
public domain of the villages. Access by women is, in principle, forbidden. However, this
does not mean women have no voice in public debates, which happen in the public do-
main where men are the protagonists. In popular language the abaa is referred to as the
metaphor of the male decision-making space, but it is also re-semanticized. A widely used
expression among Fang women when men are in a reunion is abaa be fam. Here, the in-
dexicality of abaa is threefold: abaa means to criticize (“to cut someone into pieces”); to
listen (“to pay attention to what other men say”); and to gossip (“to spread rumors”).79
Hence, the abaa and what it is supposed to represent is de-authorized and mocked.
Mockery, gossip, mutual aid, and sorority support is also forged within Djangué groups,
among other spaces. Djangué or esuan is one of the most popular strategies Guineans
have generated in order to subsist and manage the household finances in precarious and
volatile contexts. These Djangué or “rotating credit and saving associations” allow women
to gain a certain control of their income and share this control with their peers. Djangues
organize regular meetings where the trust and cohesion of the group is actualized and
celebrated.
Women can also perform relevant authority roles by controlling the future of their lin-
eage. The inflation of the bride-price meant that women of fertile age did not necessarily
marry; unmarried women might keep their children with them and become family
heads.80 The case of Bubi women for whom the evolution of traditional marriage meant
that they keep the children resulting from their relationships has generated an important
debate. The Bubi claim to be matrilineal, as distinct from the rest of the cultural groups of
Equatorial Guinea.
Page 19 of 34

Breakthroughs and Continuities: Women in the

Political Sphere
After the independence of Equatorial Guinea in 1968 from Spain, the structure and aims
of the Sección Femenina were mimicked by the Partido Unificado Nacional de Traba-
jadores (PUNT, the United National Workers’ Party). For some women, the Women’s Sec-
tion of the PUNT was a mechanism and roadmap to gain positions of power in politics, ed-
ucation, and administration.81 However, this activism and climbing of the social ladder
was only an option for women close to the president. It can be argued that women contin-
ued to be woefully underrepresented in politics and public life throughout the post-inde-
pendence period. This has resulted in the present-day feminismo de asiento (“chair femi
nism”), a term indicating that the role of the women in Parliament or public and political
positions is only symbolic: it has been a mechanism to persuade international organiza-
tions such as the United Nations that gender policies in Equatorial Guinea show account-
ability toward the inclusion of women, breaking the gap even in the highest public do-
mains.82 Yet, these women’s attitudes, speeches, and actions are in accord with the domi-
nant male vision and practical reality of the public division of gender. According to the
latest report from the United Nations Population Fund, there is a “relative weakness of fe-
male representation in high-level decision-making spheres: Government: 13.3 per cent,
Senate: 17.1 per cent; Parliament: 21 per cent.” Because of the low proportion of women
in any branch of government, these achievements appear to be more symbolic than sub-
stantive.83
Equatorial Guinea has a long way to go to reach gender equality. Health outcomes show
how alarming the inequity can be for women in the country. Maternal mortality remains
high, and more than a third of young women aged fifteen to nineteen are already moth-
ers, according to the United Nations Population Fund (2017). The government has invest-
ed in integrated sexual and reproductive health services, but—as with all government
spending in the country—their sustainability is at risk, as its income is exposed to the
strong fluctuations in commodity prices. Guineans, both women and men, have very limit-
ed access to information on HIV, contraceptive methods, and sex education, which results
in high levels of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing.84 The oil industry, as well as the
many projects funded through oil wealth, has brought many male workers with dispos-
able income into the country, which has seen the demand for sexual services skyrocket.
Cases of forced labor, sex trafficking, and prostitution have been reported. Girls are
sometimes encouraged by parents to provide such services, especially when clients are
foreigners, and to receive goods in exchange.85
Women and Political Engagement
Despite being vulnerable under government policies, Guinean women have branched out
into activism and leadership while also overcoming men’s power by generating spaces for
their own voices to be heard. This is the case, for instance, for the coros de animación
(“cheer-up chorus”) and women’s bié (songs in Fang) made up to celebrate the arrival of a
Page 20 of 34

child, a marriage, and other life events. The musical genre called bié is now being used to
complain, criticize, and denounce many different types of violence women suffer: econom-
ic, physical, political, and familial. By the same token, in a country where freedom of ex-
pression cannot be taken for granted, coros de animación and biés are used to praise the
regime. Through the lens of society, biés are seen as a social transgression of the gender
normativity, which keeps women’s voices from being wholly obliterated and suppressed.
Hence, this musical genre embodies women’s freedom, makes them visible, and allows
them to take over the public space.
Guinean women have also found a strong voice in literature. The work in this field began
with Maria Nsue’s novel Ekomo (1985), in which the female protagonists subvert con-
straints imposed by Fang rituals and customs as well as their place defined by European
colonialism.86 Nsue, with contemporaneous writers Raquel Ilombe del Pozo Epita,
Trinidad Morgades Besari, and Remei Sipi, paved the way for a generation of women that
changed the Guinean literary canon and multiplied the spaces where gender equity was
redefined. Female characters embodied the contradictions and challenges of being be-
tween and betwixt tradition.87 Through literature and grassroots activism, Melibea Obono
and a group of activists and writers have made visible the oppression, criminalization,
and denial of women’s homosexuality, opening up a space for public debate on sex; tradi-
tion; and the violence, oppression, and repression suffered by Guinean women.88 A gener-
ation of young writers followed, with stories about sexism and portraits of young women
mostly characterized by their questioning minds and transgressive behaviors rather than
their traditional values as mothers. Guinean women writers try to make sense of the reali-
ty of their society scarred by the experience of transnational migration.89 Real and
poignant, many Guinean women share the diasporic condition because they left the coun-
try as a student or in exile, from the 1950s onward, and never returned. The relation be-
tween migration and gender has been studied by Remei Sipi and Juan Riochí. Remei Sipi,
activist, essayist, and founder of the Barcelona-based publishing house Ediciones Mey,
has worked in Spain mobilizing women in the same way that Trinidad Nchama (known as
“Mamá Etugu”) does with the activist group “Las Barrenderas
Desesperadas” (“Desperate Street Sweepers,” Madrid, Spain). Along with denunciations
of reproduced forms of inequality and female oppression, this organization speaks out
about being fearless of the current regime as they advocate for a “clean” and transparent
political system in Equatorial Guinea, based on respect for human rights and freedom of
speech. Women belonging to this grassroots movement are very active on social media.
They use different platforms, including Facebook and WhatsApp, to mobilize and join ef-
forts with the new generation of afroespañolas (Afro-Spaniards). Under the bigger um-
brella of Afroféminas, these Afro-descendant women are opening up discussions about
racism, identity, and the right to belong within Spanish society by means of perfor-
mances, art, writing, and public lectures.90
In advancing other spaces for contesting gender inequalities, the diasporic community of
Guinean women in Spain is networked with their counterparts in Africa, and both groups
feed into and support each other in their aims for social justice and visibility.
Page 21 of 34

Discussion of the Literature

Apart from the recent essay by the Guinean essayist Juan Riochí, Las mujeres de Guinea
Ecuatorial: Una aproximación a los estudios de género, which constitutes a first attempt
to construct a comprehensive narrative of women’s roles in the past and present of Equa-
torial Guinea, there is no introductory text yet on Equatorial Guinean women’s history.91
The most relevant work on the colonial history of Guinean women is the recent mono-
graph by the British scholar Joanna Allan, Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships,
and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea.92
In regard to the literary canon, Equatorial Guinea has a strong masculine perspective and
women remain invisible. The present article offers a few references that have emerged
since the 1990s that help to produce an overview of the topic. Remei Sipi has published a
number of texts highlighting the multiple oppressions women are confronted with, both in
Equatorial Guinea and in the diaspora.93 Entre dos aguas by Catalan anthropologist Vir-
ginia Fons described maternity rituals among Ndowé women in the 1990s. 94 Also in the
1990s, historian Gustau Nerin wrote Guinea Ecuatorial, historia en blanc i negre on colo-
nial sexual and racial stereotypes, drawing on both archival material and interviews. 95
Yolanda Aixelà posed the critical debate on Bubi matrilineal kinship, which later was
picked up by Juan Aranzadi.96 Framed within the Bubi symbolic world, José Francisco
Eteo Soriso described women’s rites de passage for fertility and birth.97 Aixelà has also
written about Equatorial Guinean women’s roles after migration to Spain.98 Benita
Sampedro Vizcaya and Baltasar Fra Molinero have recently recovered an important part
of the unpublished work by Raquel Ilombe del Pozo Epita, which they published in a vol-
ume entitled Ceiba II (Poesía inédita) in 2014.99 Sampedro Vizcaya has also addressed the
biography of Isabel and Manuela Urquiola, two Basque sisters who resided on the island
of Elobey Chico and in Fernando Poo during the 1870s, while linking their story to the in-
visible role of European women within colonial society and as agents of colonialism them-
selves.100 To unveil the fundamental role played by Guinean women in fighting and resist-
ing all forms of authoritarianism, Joanna Allan brings to light cases and situations in
which Guinean women propagated a counterhegemonic discourse by using cultural tools
such as dance, traditional songs, and oral histories.101
A fully-fledged literary tradition representing Guinean women is emerging; they are not
only authors but also the main characters in their novels, where they appear to challenge
gender, social, and ethnic roles. Following the pioneering work of María Nsue and Raquel
Ilombe del Pozo Epita, Melibea Obono opened up the field on LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisex-
ual, transgendered, and queer) literature.102 Lucía Mbomío digs into the lives of white
women married to Guinean men in a Spanish society radiating racism and prejudices
against interracial marriages.103 The increasing presence of women writers is being re-
flected in the number of books and PhD dissertations published in the United States.104
Page 22 of 34

Primary Sources
Missionary reports, travel narratives, ethnographic studies, and diaries are the primary
and earliest sources for the history of Guinean women.105 Imperial narratives about the
colonial history of Equatorial Guinea, published in the collections of the Institute of
African Studies in Madrid (IDEA), focus on facts and dates about the metropole and its
power relations with Equatorial Guinea with women relegated to the broader category of
colonial subjects. Until the early 21st century, white men authored ethnographic mono-
graphs in which women played the role of cultural facilitators as leaders or participants
in social ceremonies. The ethnographer’s observations were then simply listed for rituals
devoid of historical or social contextualization.
Two Women, by Robert Hamil Nassau and his sister Isabella Nassau, depicts the stories
of Anyntyuwe (a Mpongwe from today’s Libreville) and Ekâkise (a Benga from Cameroon)
and questions African traditional practices from a colonial and missionary perspective.106
The first two monographs on Bioko and the Bubis present a more detailed picture of
African society, yet with many reifications and ethnographic inventions.107 Field notes
and reports from colonial officers also offer first-hand observations. The UK National
Archives; the Liverpool Record Office; the Angus Library and Archive (Oxford); the
Archive and Special Collections of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, Lon-
don); the Presbyterian Historical Society (Philadelphia); the Divinity Library (Yale); the
Theological Seminary Libraries (Princeton); and the Burke Archival Library (Columbia)
preserve British and American documentation relating to economic relations and mission-
ary work. Researchers need to disentangle and trace a chronology of the material be-
cause of the Spanish administration’s neglect of Equatorial Guinea’s colonial documenta-
tion located in Archivo General de la Administración, Archivo Histórico Nacional, Archivo
del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, Archivo Nacional de Cataluña, Real Academia de la
Historia, and Fondos de la Asociación Nueva Andadura. Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida and col-
leagues provide an exhaustive inventory of bibliographical sources on Equatorial
Guinea.108 In 2012, the sociologist and essayist Max Liniger-Goumaz donated his library,
probably one of the most comprehensive collections about the contemporary history of
Equatorial Guinea, to the Centro de Estudios Afro-Hispánicos (CEAH) of the National Dis-
tant-Learning University (UNED), Spain.
Links to Digital Materials

The digital library of the Centro de Estudios Afro-Hispánicos at the UNED in Madrid
offers a great collection of primary and secondary sources for the study of the past and
present of Equatorial Guinea.
The Spanish researcher Enrique Martino published the archival material used for his PhD
research in an open-source website. Since then, it has become a relevant repository of
literature and colonial documentation, mainly from the period 1858–1979.
Page 23 of 34

Further Reading
Aranzadi, J., and Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida, eds. Guinea Ecuatorial (des) Conocida: Lo que
sabemos, ignoramos, inventamos y deformamos acerca de su pasado y presente. 2 vols.
Madrid: Editorial UNED, forthcoming.
Castillo Rodríguez, Susana. “Official Press in Equatorial Guinea: Tracing Colonial and
Postcolonial Governance in Ébano.” In Creating and Opposing Empire: The Role of the
Colonial Periodical Press. Edited by Adelaide Vieira Machado, Isadora de Ataíde Fonseca,
and Sandra Ataíde Lobo. Routledge Studies in Cultural History. Forthcoming.
de Castro, Mariano L. and Donato, Ndongo-Bidyogo. España en Guinea: Construcción del

desencuentro; 1778–1968. Sequitur, 1998.
Fegley, Randell. Equatorial Guinea: An African Tragedy. Peter Lang, 1989.
Fernandez, James W. Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa. Prince-

ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.
Liniger-Goumaz, Max. Historical Dictionary of Equatorial Guinea. 3rd ed. Scarecrow

Press, 2000.
Martino, Enrique. “Dash-Peonage: The Contradictions of Debt Bondage in the Colonial

Plantations of Fernando Pó.” Africa 87, no. 1 (2017): 53–78.
Ndongo-Bidyogo, Donato. Historia y tragedia de Guinea Ecuatorial. Madrid: Cambio 16,

1977.
Nerín, G. Guinea Equatorial, història en blanc i negre: Dones negres i homes blancs a la
Guinea Equatorial (1843–1968). Biblioteca Universal Empúries, Barcelona, 1998.
Nzé Abuy, Rafael María. Nsoa, o dote africana. Instituto Politécnico Salesianos, Atocha.
Madrid, 1984.
Obono Ntutumu, Trifonia Melibea. “¿La mujer fang tiene precio?” ASODEGUE, 2012.
Sampedro Vizcaya, Benita. “Rethinking the Archive and the Colonial Library: Equatorial
Guinea.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 9, no. 3 (November 2008): 341–363.
Sampedro Vizcaya, Benita, ed. “Guinea Ecuatorial: Poéticas/Políticas/Discursividades.”

Special issue, Revista Debats 123, no. 2 (April 2014).
Sampedro Vizcaya, Benita. “Health, Raciality, and Modernity in Colonial Equatorial

Guinea.” In Post/Colonialism and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Black Atlantic. Edited by
Jerome Branche, 51–74. London and New York: Routledge, 2018.
Sampedro Vizcaya, Benita, and Baltasar Fra-Molinero. “Theorizing Equatorial Guinea.”

Special issue, Afro-Hispanic Review 28, no. 2 (Fall 2009).
Page 24 of 34

Sundiata, Ibrahim. “The Fernandinos: Labor and Community in Santa Isabel de Fernando
Poo, 1827–1931.” PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1972.
Sundiata, Ibrahim. From Slaving to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in
the Era of Abolition, 1827–1931. University of Wisconsin Press. Madison, 1996.
Ugarte, Michael. Africans in Europe: The Culture of Exile and Emigration from Equatorial
Guinea to Spain. University of Illinois Press, 2010.
Valenciano Mañé, Alba. “When the Big Ones Abandon the Market: Morals and Politics of
Price in Equatorial Guinea.” In The Politics and Ethics of the Just Price: Ethnographies of
Market Exchange. Edited by G. Orlando and P. Luetchfort, 49–70. Research in Economic
Anthropology. Emerald, 2019.
Notes:
(1.) Statistical data on Equatorial Guinea are unreliable and very incongruent among dif-
ferent sources. The last census conducted by the government was in 2015. However, the
reports have not been made public. The data used in this article came from the official
datasets of the National Institute of Statistics of Equatorial Guinea (Instituto Nacional de
Estadística de Guinea Ecuatorial) and the Demographic and Health Program. The data
from the National Institute of Statistics derive from an estimation done from the popula-
tion census of 2015. Demographic health data is based on a census carried out in 2001.
(2.) World Bank. “Country Profile, Equatorial Guinea.” The World Bank Group.
(3.) Yolanda Aixelà, “Africanas en el mundo contemporáneo: Las mujeres de Guinea Ecua-
torial,” in Introducción a los Estudios Africanos, ed. Yolanda Aixelà, Lluís Mallart, and
Josep Martí (Vic: Ceiba, 2009), 51–64; and Rafael Romero Moliner, “Notas sobre la
situación social de la mujer indígena en Fernando Póo,” Cuadernos de estudios africanos
18 (1952): 21–39.
(4.) Manuel Sánchez-Elipe, “Las comunidades de la edad del hierro en África Centro-
Occidental” (PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2015).
(5.) Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equato-
rial Africa (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); James Fernandez, Bwiti: An
Ethnography of Religious Imagination in Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1982); and E. Okenve, “Equatorial Guinea 1927–1979: A New African Tradition” (PhD
diss., SOAS University of London, 2007).
(6.) Classic ethnographies refers to the works that have focused on various aspects of the
organizational structure of the Fang-Bulu-Beti, mainly Philippe Laburthe-Tolra, Pierre
Alexandre and Jacques Binet, and James Fernandez. Later work by Enrique Okenve and
Juan Aranzadi is along the same vein.
Page 25 of 34

(7.) See Maria Nsué’s novel Ekomo (Madrid: Sial, 1985); and a recent interview with Tri-
fonia Melibea Obono.
(8.) See the relevant article by Enrique Martino on the articulations and disarticulations
of Fang kinship institutions (the bride-price in particular) and the commercial and colo-
nial economy. He argues that the monetization of the bride-price and the penetration of
commerce did not completely transform local logics and arrangements. In any case, the
monetization of the bride-price resulted in the creation of equivalences nor in the com-
modification of women. He finds that it is precisely because of this lack of equivalence
that the recruiting method for the colonial plantation system collapsed completely after
World War II. Enrique Martino, “Nsoa (‘dote’), dinero, deuda y peonaje: Cómo el par-
entesco fang tejió y destejió la economía colonial de la Guinea Española,” Éndoxa: Series
Filosóficas 37 (2016): 337–361.
(9.) Gerorge Balandier, The Sociology of Black Africa: Social Dynamics in Central Africa
(London: Andre Deutsch, 1970); and Pierre Alexandre and Jacques Binet, Le groupe dit
Pahouin (Fang – Boulou – Beti) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958).
(10.) Pierre Laburthe-Tolra, Les seigneurs de la forêt: Essai sur le passé historique,
l’organisation sociale et les normes éthiques des anciens Beti du Cameroun (Paris: Publi-
cations de la Sorbonne, 1981).
(11.) Verónica Ñengono Nguema Bindang, “Simbología de los espacios nseng y faa en la
tradición fang: Una aproximación al concepto de la mujer,” in III Seminario Internacional
sobre Guinea Ecuatorial.
(12.) Jane Guyer, Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (Chicago:
Chicago University Press), 41–43.
(13.) Claude Meillassoux, Maidens, Meals and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Com-
munity (Cambridge University Press, 1975).
(14.) Verónica Ñengono Nguema Bindang, Simbología.
(15.) Enrique Okenve, “Equatorial Guinea 1927–1979,” 127.
(16.) Amador Martin del Molino, Los bubis, ritos y creencias (Malabo: Centro Cultural
Hispano Guineano, 1993).
(17.) Gustau Nerín, Corisco y el estuario del Muni, 1470–1931: Del aislamiento a la glob-
alización y de la globalización a la marginación (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015).
(18.) Valerie De Wulf, Histoire del’île d’Annobon et de ses habitants du XVe au XIXe siècle
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014).
(19.) Ibrahim Sundiata, Equatorial Guinea: Colonialism, State Terror, and the Search for
Stability, New York: Westview of Contemporary Africa (1990), 22.
Page 26 of 34

(20.) Ibrahim Sundiata, Equatorial Guinea, 21; María Dolores García-Cantús, Fernando
Poo, Una aventura colonial española: Las islas en litigio; Entre la esclavitud y el aboli-
cionismo, 1778–1846 (Vic: CEIBA, 2005), 25–40; and Nerín, Corisco y el estuario, 221.
(21.) JanVansina, Paths; and Enrique Okenve, “Equatorial Guinea 1927–1979.”
(22.) Jan Vansina, Paths; Enrique Okenve, “Equatorial Guinea 1927–1979”; and Georges
Balandier, Sociology of Black Africa.
(23.) Shadreck Chirikure, “Documenting Precolonial Trade in Africa,” Oxford Research

Encyclopedia of African History (2017).
(24.) Jeremy Rich, “Civilized Attire: Refashioning Tastes and Social Status in the Gabon
Estuary, c. 1870–1914,” The Journal of the Social History Society 2, no. 2 (2005): 189–
213; Enrique Okenve, “Equatorial Guinea,” in Routledge Encyclopaedia of World Dress
and Fashion, vol. 1 (New York: Berg, 2010), 387–392; and A. Valenciano-Mañé, “De vesti-
dos y colonización en Guinea Ecuatorial: En busca de agencias escondidas en las narrati-
vas coloniales (1850–1914),” Revista Debats 123 (2014): 28–42.
(25.) Alfredo González-Ruibal, “Colonial Encounters in Spanish Equatorial Africa (Eigh

teenth-Twentieth Centuries),” in Archaeologies of Early Modern Spanish Colonialism, ed.
Montón-Subías, Berrocal, and Ruiz (New York: Springer, 2016), 175–204.
(26.) Ibrahim Sundiata, “Engaging Equatorial Guinea: Bioko in the Diasporic Imagina
tion,” Afro-Hispanic Review 28, no. 2 (2009): 131–142, 137.
(27.) Joanna Allan, Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in

Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019).
(28.) Susana Castillo Rodríguez, “The First Missionary Linguists in Fernando Po: Translit-
eration and the Quest of Spanishness in an Anglicized Colony,” in The Relationship be-
tween Colonialism and Missionary Linguistics, ed. Klaus Zimmermann and Birte Keller-
meier-Rehbein (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2015).
(29.) Susana Castillo Rodríguez, “El proyecto con agentes nativos de la misión jamaicana
en Fernando Póo: Su herencia colonial,” Revista Éndoxa 37 (June 2016): 385–411.
(30.) Historical Sketches of the Missions under the Care of the Board of Foreign Missions
of the Presbyterian Church (Philadelphia: The Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society of the
Presbyterian Church, 1886).
(31.) Mary Carol Cloutier, “Bridging the Gap, Breaching Barriers: The Presence and Con
tribution of (Foreign) Persons of African Descent to the Gaboon and Corisco Mission in
Nineteenth-Century Equatorial Africa” (PhD diss., Trinity International University, 2014),
174; and Baltasar Fra-Molinero, “Dios entre el alcohol y los rifles: Robert Hamill Nassau,
historiador y misionero en el Golfo de Guinea,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 20, no.
1–2 (April 2019).
Page 27 of 34

(32.) Mary Carol Cloutier, Bridging the Gap, 170.
(33.) Robert Hamill Nassau was extremely prolific, and most of his writings are available
in online repositories. Robert Hamill Nassau, A History of the Presbytery of Corisco:
Ogove River, West Coast of Africa (Trenton, NJ: Press of A. Brandt Jr., 1888); Robert
Hamill Nassau, Crowned in Palm-Land: A Story of African Mission Life (Philadelphia: J.
Lippincott, 1874); Robert Hamill Nassau, Mawedo: The Palm-Land Maiden (New York:
American Tract Society, 1882); Robert Hamill Nassau, “Letter of Reverend Nassau,” The
Church at Home and Abroad 11 (1892): 161–162; Robert Hamill Nassau, “Rev. Ibia
J’Ikenge,” The Assembly Herald 6, no. 3 (1902): 106–107; Robert Hamill Nassau,
Fetichism in West Africa (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1904); Robert Hamill Nassau, The
Path She Trod: A Memorial of Mary Brunette (Foster) Nassau (Philadelphia: Press of
Allen, Lane, and Scott, 1909); Robert Hamill Nassau, Corisco Days: The First Thirty Years
of the West Africa Mission (Philadelphia: Press of Allen, Lane, and Scott, 1910); Robert
Hamill Nassau, “Two Women: The Lives of Two African Christians,” 1911, manuscript,
Vail Memorial Library, Lincoln University, published as Robert Hamill Nassau, Two
Women: Anyentyuwe and Ekâkise, ed. Henry Bucher (Morrisville, North Carolina: Lulu
Publishing Services, 2014); Robert Hamill Nassau, In an Elephant Corral, and Other Tales
of West African Experiences (New York: Neale, 1912); Robert Hamill Nassau, Where Ani-
mals Talk: West African Folklore Tales (Boston: Gorham Press, 1912); Robert Hamill Nas-
sau, My Ogowe: Being a Narrative of Daily Incidents during Sixteen Years in Equatorial
West Africa (New York: Neale, 1914); and Robert Hamill Nassau, “Ibiya: A West African
Pastor,” The Missionary Review of the World 27, no. 6 (1914): 442–444.
(34.) Beganga, a Ndowé woman from Ukomba, the coast near Bata, was educated in the
Presbyterian Mission of Bolondo and married a Mr. Taiver, who was the son of a Coriscan
woman and a European trader. The nuanced tracing of women like her, who hardly ever
appear in the colonial archive but are still very present in the oral family histories, is rele-
vant for a critical historiography of the region. Remei Sipi, Voces Femeninas de Guinea
Ecuatorial: Una Antología (Barcelona: Mey, 2019), 9.
(35.) Robert Hamill Nassau, The Gaboon and Corisco Missions (New York: Board of For-
eign Missions 1873).
(36.) Nassau, Corisco Days.
(37.) Nassau, Mawedo.
(38.) David Jonathan Mandeng, “The Philosophy of the Mission of Robert Hamill Nassau
in the Contemporary World” (PhD diss., Temple University, 1970).
(39.) John Cinnamon, “Missionary Expertise, Social Science, and the Uses of Ethnograph-
ic Knowledge in Colonial Gabon,” History in Africa 33 (2003): 413–432.
(40.) Ibia J’Ikengue, Customs of the Benga and Neighboring Tribes (New York: American
Tract Society, 1872). Originally written in Benga language as “Mbembo ja benga na be-
tomba be bakake na bo.”
Page 28 of 34

(41.) Mary Cloutier, “Ibia J’Ikengue: A Man’s Man among the Benga,” Journal of Global
Christianity 1, no. 1 (2015): 57–78.
(42.) Amador Martín Del Molino, La ciudad de Clarence: Primeros años de la actual ciu-
dad de Malabo, capital de Guinea Ecuatorial, 1827–1859 (Madrid: Instituto de Coop-
eración para el Desarrollo, 1993).
(43.) Phil J. Fisher, The Island Heritage: Episodes from the Missionary History of Fernan-
do Poo, West Africa; A Play for Young People (London: Holborn Publishing House, 1926).
(44.) Martin R. S. Lynn, “John Beecroft and West Africa 1829–1854” (PhD diss., University
of London, 1978); William Gervase Clarence-Smith, “African and European Cocoa Produc-
ers on Fernando Póo, 1880s to 1910s,” The Journal of African History 35, no. 2 (1994):
179–199; and Amador Martin del Molino, La ciudad de Clarence: Primeros años de la ac-
tual ciudad de Malabo, capital de Guinea Ecuatorial, 1827–1859 (Malabo: Centro Cultural
Hispano Guineano, 1994).
(45.) Henry Roe, West African Scenes: Descriptions of Fernando Po (London: Andesite
Press, 1874); Benita Sampedro Vizcaya, “Inscribing Islands: From Cuba to Fernando Poo
and Back,” in Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa, ed. Cecilia Enjuto-
Rangel et al. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 99–113; and Susana Castillo
Rodríguez, “The Circulation of Language: Cuban and Afro-Cuban Loanwords in Equatori-
al Guinea,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 239 (2016), 157–192.
(46.) John Holt, The Diary of John Holt and the Voyage of the “Maria,” ed. Cecil R. Holt
(Liverpool: Henry Young and Sons, 1948); Nathaniel Boocock, Our Fernandian Mission
(London:W. A. Hammond, 1912); and see for example Mary Kingsley’s views on the “ex
cessive flashiness” of Fernandian women in Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa
(London: National Geographic, 2015, originally published in 1897).
(47.) Peter N. Davies, ed., The Diary of John Holt, (Liverpool: Research in Maritime Histo-
ry 5, 1993).
(48.) Remei Sipi, Voces Femeninas; and Clarence-Smith, “African and European Cocoa
Producers,” 179–199.
(49.) Gustau Nerín, La última selva de España: Antropófagos, misioneros y guardias

civiles; Crónica de la conquista de los fang de la Guinea Española, 1914–1930 (Madrid:
Catarata, 2010).
(50.) David Brydan, “Mikomeseng: Leprosy, Legitimacy and Francoist Repression in Span
ish Guinea,” Social History of Medicine 31, no. 3 (2018): 627–647.
(51.) Carlos Petit, “The Colonial Model of the Rule of Law in Africa: The Example of
Guinea,” Law and Philosophy Library 80, no. 4 (2007): 467–512.
Page 29 of 34

(52.) Agustín Miranda Junco, Leyes coloniales (Madrid: Imprenta Sucesores de Ri-
vadeneyra, 1945); Pedro María Belmonte Medina, Penología e Indigenismo en los antigu-
os territorios españoles del Golfo de Guinea (Córdoba; Universidad de Córdoba, Servicio
de Publicaciones, 1998); and Antonio Carrasco González, La novela colonial his-
panoafricana (Madrid: Sial, Casa de África, 2001).
(53.) Moliner, “Notas sobre la situación social,” 21–39; and Sampedro Vizcaya, “Inscrib
ing Islands.”
(54.) Enrique Martino, “Dash-Peonage: The Contradictions of Debt Bondage in the Colo-
nial Plantations of Fernando Pó,” Africa 87, no. 1 (2017): 53–78.
(55.) Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida, “Raza y pedagogía: El inspector Heriberto Ramón Álvarez
y la enseñanza colonial franquista en Guinea (1938–1949),” Spagna contemporanea 51
(2017): 57–86.
(56.) Rosa María Medina-Doménech, “Scientific Technologies of National Identity as Colo-

nial Legacies: Extracting the Spanish Nation from Equatorial Guinea,” Social Studies of
Science 39, no. 1 (2009): 81–112.
(57.) Rosa María Medina-Doménech, “Scientific Technologies,” 86.
(58.) Heriberto R. Álvarez García, Historia de la acción cultural en Guinea Ecuatorial

(Madrid: Instituto Superior de Estudios Africanos, CSIC, 1948), 503.
(59.) For example, following missionaries’ requests, a Royal Decree issued in 1884 by the
Spanish colonial administration stipulated that education must be exclusively in Castilian
and all schools be supervised regularly to make sure that they complied with the law.
Archivo Nacional Histórico, Madrid, Ultramar 5310/14, no. 3.
(60.) Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida, “Raza y pedagogía.”
(61.) Heriberto R. Álvarez García, Historia de la acción cultural.
(62.) Amalia Morales Villena and Soledad Vieitez Cerdeño, “La Sección Femenina en la
‘llamada de África’: Saharauis y guineanas en el declive del colonialismo español,” Vegue-
ta: Anuario de la Facultad de Geografía e Historia 14 (2014): 117–133.
(63.) Cecile S. Stehrenberger, “El folklore, la Nación, y el Género en un Encuentro Colo

nial: Coros y Danzas de la Sección Femenina del Falange en Guinea Ecuatorial,” Afro-His-
panic Review 18, no. 2 (October 2009): 231–244.
(64.) Cristina Dyombé Dyangani, Identidad cultural ndowé (New York: International
Ndowé Press, 2008).
(65.) Cécile S. Stehrenberger, “El folklore, la Nación.”
(66.) Joanna Allan, Silenced Resistance, 86–87.
Page 30 of 34

(67.) Francisco Macías Nguema overtook the metropole’s favorite candidate, Mr. Bonifa-
cio Ondo Edu, then prime minister of the autonomous government and head of National
Unity of Equatorial Guinea (MUNGE).
(68.) Gustau Nerín, “De la generación esperanza a la generación perdida: El fracaso en la

formación de élites para la independencia en Guinea Ecuatorial,” in Tras las huellas del
colonialismo español en Marruecos y Guinea Ecuatorial, ed. Yolanda Aixelà Cabré
(Madrid: CSIC, 2015).
(69.) Gustau Nerín, Guinea Equatorial: Història en blanc i negre (Barcelona: La Campana,
1998).
(70.) Alba Valenciano-Mañé, “The Clothes of Extraversion: Circulation, Consumption and

Power in Equatorial Guinea” (PhD diss., University of Barcelona, 2017).
(71.) Alba Valenciano-Mañé, “The Clothes of Extraversion.”
(72.) Alicia Campos-Serrano, “Extraction Offshore, Politics Inshore, and the Role of the
State in Equatorial Guinea,” Africa 83, no. 2 (2013): 314–339; Janet Roitman and Gérard
Roso, “Guinée-Équatoriale: être ‘off-shore’ pour rester ‘national,’” Politique Africaine 1,
no. 81 (2001): 121–142, 125; and Jędrzej George Frynas, “The Oil Boom in Equatorial
Guinea,” African Affairs 103, no. 413 (2004): 527–546, 543.
(73.) Susana Castillo Rodríguez, fieldwork notes, Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, Summer
2018.
(74.) Amador Martín del Molino, Los bubis.
(75.) José-Francisco Eteo Soriso, Los ritos de paso entre los bubis (Madrid: Casa de
África, Sial Ediciones, 2017).
(76.) Cristina Dyombe Dyangani, Identidad cultural ndowé; and Virginia Fons, Entre dos
aguas: Etnomedicina, procreación y salud entre los ndowé de Guinea Ecuatorial
(Barcelona: CEIBA, 2004).
(77.) Amancio Nse Angüe, “La familia fang: Ventajas e inconvenientes para el desarrollo y
la construcción de una sociedad democrática,” in Perspectivas antropológicas sobre
Guinea Ecuatorial, ed. Juan Aranzadi and Paz Moreno, Curso de verano de la UNED (Mal-
abo, UNED, 2010).
(78.) Juan Aranzadi, “Supervivencias actuales del parentesco ‘tradicional’ fang,” in I Jor-
nadas de Antropología de Guinea Ecuatorial (UNED, UNGE, 2009).
(79.) Abaa be fam; abaa medjo; and abaa bitom in Fang.
(80.) Yolanda Aixelà, “Africanas.”
(81.) Morales and Vieitiez, “La Sección Femenina,” 131.
Page 31 of 34

(82.) Melibea Obono, interview with the author, October 2018.
(83.) United Nations Population Fund (2018).
(84.) NFPA, “Equatorial Guinea Country Programme Document, 2019–2023.”
(85.) US. Department of State “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2013:
Equatorial Guinea” (2013).
(86.) María Nsué, Ekomo; and Benita Sampedro Vizcaya, “Ekomo’s Interventions,” in
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Faszer-McMahon and Victoria Ketz (New York: Routledge, 2015), 177–192.
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caya and Baltasar Fra-Molinero (Madrid: Ediciones Verbum, 2015); Trinidad Morgades
Besari, “Antígona,” Teatro África 14 (2000), reprinted in AJHCS 8 (2005); and Remei Sipi
Mayo, Inmigración y género: El caso de Guinea Ecuatorial (San Sebastián: Tercera Pren-
sa, Hirugarren Prentsa, s.l. Reedición en editorial Hakuma Matara Group, 2006).
(88.) Trinidad Akeng, Camino de piedras gordas: Mamá Etugu, la voz de una activista
(2018); Isabel Mikue Rope, Ebihi Nga-Mbot (el clamor de una esposa) (Editorial Jorge
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premio Raquel Ilombe del certamen literario (Madrid: AECID, 2017); and O’Sirima Mota
Ripeu and María del Carmen, El punto ciego de Casandra (Madrid: Sial, 2017).
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Las tres vírgenes de Santo Tomás (Suma de Letras, 2008); Guillermina Mekuy, Tres almas
para un corazón (Martínez Roca, 2011); Victoria Evita, Mokámbo: Aromas de libertad
(Creativa Real, 2010); Trifonia Melibea Obono, Herencia de Bindendee (Madrid and Vien-
na: Ediciones en Auge, 2016); Trifonia Melibea Obono, La bastarda (Madrid: Flores
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Sial/Casa de África, 2018).
(90.) Desiré Bela-Lobedde, Ser mujer negra en España (Barcelona: Plan B, 2018); Silvia
Albert Sopale, “No es un país para negras” (performance); and Lucía Asué Mbomío Ru-
bio, Las que se atrevieron (Casa de África, Sial, 2017).
(91.) Juan Riochí Siafa, Las Mujeres de Guinea Ecuatorial: Una aproximación a los estu-
dios de género (Madrid: Diwan Mayrit, 2018).
(92.) Joanna Allan, Silenced Resistance.
(93.) Remei Sipi Mayo, Las mujeres africanas: Incansables creadoras de estrategias para
la vida (L’Hospitalet de Llobregat: Editorial Mey, 1997); and Sipi Mayo, Inmigración y
género.
(94.) Virginia Fons, Entre dos aguas.
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(95.) Gustau Nerín, Guinea Equatorial, història en blanc i negre: Dones negres i homes
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gorización sexual de los grupos matrilineales,” Studia Africana 16 (2005): 80–89; and Juan
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Guinea Ecuatorial, ed. Juan Aranzadi (Madrid: UNED, 2011), 11–76.
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(107.) Oscar Baumann, Eine Afrikanische Tropen-Insel: Fernando Póo und die Bube
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1923).
(108.) Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida et al. “Fuentes escritas, audiovisuales y materiales para el
estudio de Guinea Ecuatorial”. In Guinea Ecuatorial (des)conocida. Lo que sabemos, igno-
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Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida (coords). (UNED, forthcoming).
Susana Castillo-Rodriguez
Department of Spanish, SUNY Geneseo
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Women in Equatorial Guinea

Women in Equatorial Guinea

Summary and Keywords

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 21 April 2020

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 21 April 2020

Equatorial Guinean Women in Pre-Colonial and

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Women within the Fang Tradition

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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 21 April 2020

Contact with Transatlantic Trade and the Con-

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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 21 April 2020

Missionaries, Traders, and Early Colonization

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Bioko Island: Fernandinas and the Legitimate Trade

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Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 21 April 2020

Spanish Colonialism: From Indifference to Na-

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National Catholicism and the Instrumentalization of Health Care and

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 21 April 2020

The Onset of Independence: Franco’s Sección Femenina and Women’s

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 21 April 2020

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 21 April 2020

Ecuatoguineana de la Lengua Española (AEGLE). However, some of the female graduates

Migration, Urbanization, and Livelihood

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Female Spaces, Sororities, and the Margins of

Similarly, rituals related to childbearing among Ndowé are frequently entrusted to

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Breakthroughs and Continuities: Women in the

Women and Political Engagement

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Discussion of the Literature

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Links to Digital Materials

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de Castro, Mariano L. and Donato, Ndongo-Bidyogo. España en Guinea: Construcción del

Fegley, Randell. Equatorial Guinea: An African Tragedy. Peter Lang, 1989.

Fernandez, James W. Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa. Prince-

Liniger-Goumaz, Max. Historical Dictionary of Equatorial Guinea. 3rd ed. Scarecrow

Martino, Enrique. “Dash-Peonage: The Contradictions of Debt Bondage in the Colonial

Ndongo-Bidyogo, Donato. Historia y tragedia de Guinea Ecuatorial. Madrid: Cambio 16,

Sampedro Vizcaya, Benita, ed. “Guinea Ecuatorial: Poéticas/Políticas/Discursividades.”

Sampedro Vizcaya, Benita. “Health, Raciality, and Modernity in Colonial Equatorial

Sampedro Vizcaya, Benita, and Baltasar Fra-Molinero. “Theorizing Equatorial Guinea.”

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 21 April 2020

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 21 April 2020

(14.) Verónica Ñengono Nguema Bindang, Simbología.

(15.) Enrique Okenve, “Equatorial Guinea 1927–1979,” 127.

Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 21 April 2020

(21.) JanVansina, Paths; and Enrique Okenve, “Equatorial Guinea 1927–1979.”

(23.) Shadreck Chirikure, “Documenting Precolonial Trade in Africa,” Oxford Research

(25.) Alfredo González-Ruibal, “Colonial Encounters in Spanish Equatorial Africa (Eigh

(63.) Cecile S. Stehrenberger, “El folklore, la Nación, y el Género en un Encuentro Colo