To Be an African City Under an Oil Dictatorship: Conflictual Intersections Seen from Ethnicity and Race in Malabo and Bioko Island (Equatorial Guinea)

Abstract

Malabo and Bioko Island provides an excellent case study for the analysis of a postcolonial political process that is directed at reducing the ethnic differences within its territories. In this case, the Equatorial Guinea’s predatory dictatorship has sought to legitimize the uncomfortable centralized power of the island through population transfers and ethnic homogenization, a process that makes visible the conflictual intersections that arise between its diversities. In fact, ethnic and linguistic Fanguization processes, that is the promotion of the Fang ethnolinguistic group as over other ethnicities of the country, have emerged which have also worked to disguise the vast plunder of natural resources. In this chapter, the analysis of Malabo illustrates the conflictual ethnic intersections that Equatorial Guinea’s dictatorship tries to veil in Bioko Island, while ethnic segregation, social exclusion, and postcolonial racial distinctions are clearly visible.