My first encounter with Equatorial Guinea came during my Carioca times. It was the second of two samba parading nights at the Rio carnival of 2015: “Teodorin” Nguema Obiang, flamboyant son of Africa’s longest-ruling dictator (as of 2024, 45 years counting…), was partying with his entourage in the camarote next to ours in Rio’s famous Sambódromo carnival stadium. Those days, Rio’s newspapers were full with stories about Teodorin, counting the bottles of champagne consumed and showing older photos of him hanging out with lions, dining in 5-star restaurants, partying with half-naked women, posing in front of his luxury real estate in Malibu and in Paris’ posh Avenue Foch and collecting the most powerful and expensive cars in the word (exactly listed: two Bugatti Veyrons, a Mercedes Maybach. an Aston Martin; a Ferrari Enzo, a Ferrari 599 GTO, a Rolls-Royce Phantom, a Maserati MC12, a Koenigsegg One, a Lamborghini Veneno, one of nine roadsters created to celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary). Teodorin had good reason to party in Rio since his country had, as one of Africa’s greatest producers of black gold and as one of the world’s most unequal nations, lots of money to spend: Equatorial Guinea was funding the carnival parade of one of Rio’s most renowned samba schools, Beija-Flor, with 3,5 million USD. 

 Equatorial Guina is a land of two distinct halves: One part, lush jungles where gorillas and forst elegants roam, lies on the African mainland, while the other half, where the capital Malabo is located, is formed by the island of Bioko, 50 kilometers off Cameroon. In 2022 I was touching down in Malabo: On a city tour. I counted six presidential palaces, one very close to the airport, looking like a French Chateau. On a continent with a history of bloody coups, short evacuation routes make sense. Malabo was pleasant enough to walk around, offering a mix of some semi-posh Miami-style apartment complexes, hints of former Spanish colonial architecture, colourful African markets and slums with open sewage floating down into to the Golf of Guinea. Ramshackle handcarts on the verge of collapse, drawn by vendors in tattered clothes, were mixing with brandnew Mercedes Coupés and Bentleys. Billboards congratulating the President or his son to their birthdays or other achievements were everywhere. While I was siiting at the newly designed boardwalk, one of the skate-boarding youngsters approached me in Spanish: The president, he sad a bit whispering, had already chosen „Teodorin“ as his successor. As vice president, Teodorin was already respnsible for defense and security. Trying to hold back his laugh, he shared with me that Teodorin was even the only one responsible for issuing new passports. Since he was said to enjoy flexible working hours, his office attending time was if at all starting more from 5pm (if not partying in Rio, Paris…).This explained, my new confident was telling me, why many citizens had expired passports.   Nevertheless many young people would be pinning their hopes on Teodorin, hoping that his incompetence and playboy allures would finally lead to the collapse of the regime.

 The next day I did a tour around beautiful Bioko which just extends  50 kilometers to the south and is just 20 kilometers wide. After leaving Malabo we passed the extinct Pico Basilé volcano looming above the capital like a sentinel. I had read that getting a visa for Equatorial Guina could already be a challenge. Now I learned at the first checkpoint that my visa was only valid for the capital itself. To leave Malabo I needed an extra tourist permit. Since the application process would have taken weeks, there was of course a simple solution: I had to pay, at each of the many following checkpoints, a fee for not having a tourist permit. The air was now scent with the smell of ripe Mangoes, the landscape tropical with banana trees and rivers gushing down from the mountains. Everything was lush and even the many billboards of Teodorin and his father were sometimes overgrown by the power of the tropical foliage. Father and son did not only like to build palaces. Here in the bush, they had started to build a university, as well as several football stadiums. None of them was in use, instead they shared the fate of the billboards of its founders. On our way south we now passed several villages. Some of the houses were of modest concrete, others were just miserable wooden shacks. A full zoo of bushmeat, several species of monkey, duiker and porcupine, was on sale at every village. There were so many  pieces of bushmeat hanging, that the rainforest must already be devoid of major animals. 

Halfway south we reached the Blanca beach near the village of Luba. It was a beautiful Sunday and I expected at least the better-off citizens of Malabo to be heading for the beach. Instead I was more or less the only one. A poor vendor was offering an explanation: A short while ago police had installed a checkpoint on the beach access road and had arbitrarily confiscated cars. To get your car released after a few days, I already assumed it, a fee had to be paid.

Apart from Blanca beach, Bioko did not have many beaches to speak of. Except the ones at Ureka on the spectacular south coast: First the road climbed steeply up through rainforest, then steeply down. The whole drive just covered 30 kilometers, but thanks to hundreds of hairpin bends, it took more than two hours and the arrival felt like an arrival at the end of the world: Before we were allowed to access the beach, I had to pay my reference to Papa Boi, chief of the lonely south coast. We were so remotest that even Teodorin did not seem to bother about any power rivalry. Consequently it was not Champagne but two coconut shells of self-brewed malt beer I which I had to drink. The first sip I had to spill out with a loud roar, the second I had to swallow. Terrible. But only now Papa Boi granted me access to his realm. Before us unfolded an endless dreamy beach of purest black sand fringed by an explosion of palm trees and other tropical plants, bordered by the roaring Atlantic Ocean. Water came from everywhere, from sea spray and from above as we were obviously at one of the wettest places on earth. We hiked for hours along the beach and swam in two different lagoons, fed by beautiful waterfalls cascading down from the rainfordest. Every year, from December to February hundreds of turtles are laying their eggs in the black sand. These creatures could not have found a more tranquil and more beautiful place.

But paradise was finite. On the way back to Malabo, I realised that I did not see anybody smiling, except some young kids, and, of course, father and son, who were still smiling from their billboards. In mid 2022 Covid had not been an issue any more in Equatorial Guinea. While entering would have been possible without a test (it could be substituted by paying, yes, a fee…), leaving required a negative test, even when my destination Kenya did not require one any more. Trying to play according to the rules I asked my guide to take me to a test station. There was, however, no possibility, to take a test, but rather an obligation to pay 160 Euro for receiving a negative test.  My guide was frank: “Legal is not possible.”