Part One: The Dumbest Coup In World History

here doing this socially distant podcast to you. We are very socially distant because you and I are almost as distant as we could possibly be while still being on the same continent. So that's very very responsible. Yeah, it's you're You're on one side, I'm on the other. I'm in d c Um. We're all wearing our masks and freaking the funk out. You know, here are the nation's capital. Yeah, here in where I am. Uh, no one is wearing a mask and we all live in the woods. Um,

but we are both coastal elites, so that's fun. Um. De Bridget, you are you are? You are a veteran podcaster. You were on my podcast early on in behind the Bastard's run. When we went to uh protest Nazis at the second Unite the Right rally in d C. That was fun. It was so fun. It was that was my first time I protested a lot of things in my life. That was my first time specifically protesting Nazis. Um, it was a good time. It was it was it was a little like um, it was a little it

was a new experience, I'll put it that way. Yeah, it was a good thing to have done. And speaking of good things to have done, Um, you know what's not a good thing to do? What's that attempt to overthrow the government of a sovereign nation for your own profit. That's a good thing to do. Know, that was such a good intro. I'm so proud, Thank you, thank cut. Yeah, that's what we're talking about today. We're talking specifically about we're talking about cups because coups are in the news. Um,

I'm proud of that one too. Uh. You remember when I'm those guys tried to invade Venezuela and it didn't work out and one of them wound up lying in his own pa. Well, when that happened, I started getting a whole bunch of people hit me up on Twitter being like, you should do an episode about this, and we will someday. But there's just there's there's so many more dumb details that haven't come out yet. I'm certain that it would be silly to cover it right now.

But also some folks reached out and said, like, you should cover something called the Wonga Coup, which was a coup in two thousand four in Equatorial Guinea that's generally seen as one of the worst coup attempts at of all time. So that's kind of what we're talking about today. But I fell down a rabbit hole researching it, and so mostly we're going to talk about like the whole weird and dumb history of white people trying to overthrow governments in Africa, um and usually being doing a really

bad job of it. So that's today. Yeah, that ship never goes well, right, like it's it's always it always turns out badly. Yeah, yeah, and it's awesome because like it doesn't matter if the leader they're trying to overthrow is legitimately shitty or not. They always make the situation worse. And and given how bad some of the dictators are.

It's kind of incredible that they managed to like, like, you've got a guy who like takes hands from people, um for fun, and then like they make it worse somehow. It's incredible. So that's today's podcast topic. Are you ready? Are you ready to dive into this bridget I'm ready.

I'm locked and loaded. I'm stressed in let's do this, alright, alright, alright, alright, So I want to start by going back in time to what I think is the piece of fiction that is kind of the seed for this desire in the heads of some white dudes to carry out coups in Africa, because there's a single fictional book that really started this ball rolling, and it's a book called King's Solemn Minds. Have you ever heard of King Solomon's Minds? Oh my gosh, So this is um I read my dad read this

to me when I was a kid. Uh, And it's like it was one of the big influences behind Indiana Jones, which should give you an idea of kind of like some of the themes that we can expect from King Solomon's Minds. And it was it was written by a fellow named h Writer Haggard and h writer Haggard is like the colonial fiction writer of the eighteen hundreds in early nineteen hundreds, UM and King Solomon's Minds is considered to be like the quintessential classic of British colonialist leadership.

It's the first novel to star big game hunter and explorer Alan Quartermain, who was like kind of like the James Bond of the of the of of colonialism um. And in fact, in the movie League of Extraordinary Gentleman he was played by Sean Connery, So that's interesting. Oh yeah,

now I know, I know it. Yeah, he's like the and if you've never even read one of these books, you've been influenced by this guy because he's Alan Quartermain is like the arc type of like the British big game hunting like Safari dude, and like, yeah, like the guy in um fucking Jumanji, like the White Guy Hunter is based off of old Quartermain. Like that's just how

they always do it. It's a very influential character and in King Solomon's Minds is generally regarded as the first example of a book in the Lost World genre of fiction. So you know those those kinds of books and movies where like a bunch of explorers or scientists find a loster forgotten city in some desolate chunk of the world. Yeah, I'm pretty familiar with that genre. Yeah, H Writer Haggard invented it. King Solomon's Minds is like the first example

of that kind of book. I feel like, I feel like I can picture what this guy looks like, Like I'm picturing a safari hat, like maybe some like loose khaki pants of some kind. Yeah, very specific kind of facial hair. Yes, you you know you know everything about H Writer Haggard in his life now, Um. I mean you kind of get it by the name. Like if someone tells you there's a famous author named H Writer Haggard, you could probably guess, Oh, he wrote books about how

colonialism is awesome, didn't he? Yeah? Um. So, the basic gist of the story is that a group of explorers, led by my own quartermain go on the search for a lost europe and who went missing looking for the fabled King Solomon's minds, and that's the big Biblical King Solomon. There's this rumor that he had these famous diamond minds YadA, YadA, YadA. Uh So they go off looking for these this white guy and these minds, and they wind up finding a

lost African civilization that possesses tremendous wealth. The movie Congo, based off the Michael Crichton book of the same name, is the modern adaptation of this story. So yeah, and interestingly enough, for as racist as this book is, it's

not as racist as you might assume. Um it. Actually it actually opens with the main character, Alan Quartermain going on an angry and angry rant about how the in word is never okay to use um and it's it's always So that's good, right, Like that's a step that's pretty progressive, I guess what you mean. Yeah. Yeah, And there's even an interracial relationship in it, although the black woman dating the white guy dies. Um, but like eight that's about as good as your credit kids from a

white guy book. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be expecting that from the eighteen hundreds, like a little interracial pairing. Of course she has to die in the end, of course. Yeah, um yeah. And h writer Haggard did repeatedly point out through his characters that a lot of European colonialist officers

were horrible people. Alan Cortermain regularly notes that a lot of black africancy meats are more worthy of the word gentleman than British officials, so it's it's not the kind of racist you'd expect, but it's also simultaneously still one of the most racist books ever written for a very

specific reason. Um see. The climax of the book comes when the explorers managed to finally okay the lost kingdom of Kuwana Land, which is a surprisingly well organized and advanced society that's completely cut off from the rest of the world by tall mountains in a wide desert. The kingdom is ruled by a cruel king, Twala, who maintains

power by dint of horrific violence. The white explorers are able to get special treatment by convincing the natives that they're white men from the stars, basically magical gods, but they're horrified by the brutality of the king and his evil advisor, Gagool, who regularly burns innocent people as witches

and traders. Um, yeah, I know, a yeah. So it becomes gradually clear that the current king earned his position by murdering his brother, the old King, and forcing his brother's wife an infant son, out into the desert to die. So there's a lot of the Lion King in this story too, Like it was clearly inspired by King Solomon's

minds in a lot of ways. And anyway, it turns out that one of the porters that the white expedition team brought along, um, this guy named Umbopa is the royal child who got ex sild you know, decades earlier, and he was noted throughout the book is being better looking and more well spoken than the other Africans who

like we're working for the expedition. So the white people decided to overthrow the king of Kuwana Land and put their friend Umboba on the front on the throne instead, And after a vicious battle that kills a lot of black people but no white people, they succeeded instituting regime change in Kuwana Land and they get to go home

with pockets full of diamonds. So that's like the that's the story of Like you can you can draw a straight line from King Solomon's mind to the thinking that led us to war in Iraq if you really like it's not hard, yeah, just killing off black and brown people and like like coming back with your pockets full of diamonds. Yeah, that that fantasy and you make everything better by putting your one black friend in charge and

like yeah, that's the whole like that's the story. Um. So I also have to say it really is very Lion King, this idea that you know, this guy was more handsome and like somehow better and then like he comes, he goes away, comes back like I want to be watched The Lion King. Now, yeah, there's some there's some of this in The Lion King for sure. Obviously it has a lot of influences, but there's there's there's pieces

of h writer Haggard in that script. So um yeah, this book was a huge success, was like one of the biggest books of the nineteenth century period. Um And like I said, it inspired the whole Lost World genre. It inspired probably tens of thousands of particularly white British kids, but a lot of Americans too, to go to Africa and like overthrow fucking countries. Um And while he did, like absolutely this book inspired real world coups, it was also inspired by stuff that had happened earlier in the

history of like African colonialism. Um. Cecil Rhodes is mercenary army with the British South Africa Company had conquered Zimbobwi and Zambia. The British East Africa Company, under the command of Mercenary Frederick Lugard, had conquered large chunks of East and West Africa uh and in all these places, local leaders were selected to rule based on their amended amenability to the desires of white Europeans, and for decades the

whole story was repeated all over the continent. So H writer Haggard didn't come up with this idea obviously, but he created like this very classical and and and attractive fictional justification for it that helped, um helped solidify it in the heads of of white colonialists. Is like the way things ought to go. Um. So yeah, that's that's that's cool. It's not cool, but it happened. It's not cool,

it's funny. I really feel like in addition to the way that we understand, you know, um kind of American exceptionalism and the idea of like going to another country or another continent and like and like we're going to quote save them and then get rich in the process, I feel like I see that vibe reverberated in so many different ways, Like even the idea of like how white people have this idea that they're going to go to Africa and save the babies, and they post a

picture of them like helping in Africa Instagram. Like the entire kind of gross vibe. I feel like it's sort of established as a blueprint in this work. Yeah, it really is. And it's like right down to the fact that this would actually be I think a less unsettling novel King Solomon's Minds if h writer Haggard had been

super hatefully racist. Um, but he's like you see part of like a lot of the horror that comes from like attempts even as particularly in the modern day, like when we we talked about that lady, that white girl in Africa who like ran that baby killing clinic. Um, yeah,

fucking wild, yeah wild. And it's um, it's always it's always sketchier and often more dangerous when the person doing this stuff is like super woke about it, right, And that's kind of what's so scary about King Solomon's Minds is that it's this white guy being like, oh, these white dudes in Africa are doing horrible things. I know, the right thing. White dudes in Africa should be doing, Like, Yeah, I think you totally hit on something that it's sort

of like scary. If someone is evil and racist, I get it, I understand it. I know where they're coming from. Cool. If they have a mentality that they are righteous or that they're like the fact that this person probably thought he was like doing something good like that is so much scarier. And I feel like has such a more a bigger capacity for evil when you think that you're righteous. Yep.

And and the person we will eventually get to who carries out this possibly the worst planned coup in all of history, is like the Patriot, well the archetype, at least of of that kind of person. So uh. As the eighteen hundreds turned into the nineteen hundreds in the world wars came and went, Europeans in particular and white folks in general gradually started to accept that, on balance, colonialism had at least been a problem amatic idea uh Europe.

Europe gradually began to release their active or their captive African colonies from their chains, and since there was no profit in doing this, colonies were generally let go in the laziest way possible, slap dash elections were held, and as a general rule, men were left in charge who colonialists thought would be trusted to rule in a manner

beneficial to European economic interests. One example of this would be former British military sergeant Idi Amine, who we we did an episode about, you know you, just like we gotta leave this country. It's there's no money in like actually setting up a functional government before we go. So like, uh, this guy is good at beating people up and likes us. Let's put him in charge. Nothing will go wrong. Yeah. So obviously, sometimes these newly freed local people's made decisions

that white folks thought were dangerous. Since the militaries of states like Great Britain and Belgium could no longer be used to enforce order directly, they often turned to mercenaries to do so. These modern datacendants of Alan Quartermain and his companions regularly used their superior military training and access to firepower to carry out their own coups. Mad Mike core is probably the patron saint of this kind of guy.

He was originally a British soldier born in Calcutta and raised on a steady diet of novels by h writer Haggard and his fellow adventure writers. Mad Mike joined the British Army, but by the nineteen sixties the Empire was in steep decline and the colonies he'd been raised to help control we're flying free. So Mad Mike became a mercenary. In nineteen sixty one, he he traveled to the Congo to fight Moishi Shamba, who wanted to create a breakaway

nation by leading the Congo's wealthiest territory and secession. Now this was all, in reality a plot by rich Belgian business owners in the CIA to ensure that black Africans didn't have the opportunity to control a huge chunk of their continents wealth. Like this breakaway chunk of the Congo was more friendly to Belgian economic interests, and the Congo at that point was controlled by the socialist leader who they later assassinated. We did an episode on that, Patrice

lamumba Um. But yeah, so the whole attempt failed. The secession attempt failed, and two of Mike's men were allegedly cannibalized in the attempt, But he didn't lose the bug for trying to like lead coups in African nations. A couple of years later, Shambay was elected Prime Minister of

the Congo under shady read. The CIA put him in power circumstances and Shambay angled himself as an anti communist fighter, but he was really just a tyrant, unhappy Congolese people revolted against Shamba, backed by the U. S. S R. And the Cuban government. Se Guevara got involved, and obviously

these guys weren't super great either. So basically you just had kind of and this is like the story of Africa in a lot of the Cold War, you have like Soviet imperialists on one side being like, we'll give you guns if you do the thing we like, and you have capitalist imperialists on the other side going like, we'll give you guns if you do the thing that

we like. And Mad Mike Core and his fellow mercenaries made a lot of money by just kind of standing in the middle and shooting at whoever had the most cash or shooting for whoever had the most cash. Um For years, the Congo Wars provided white combat veterans with steady employment. Mad Mike was a World War Two veteran. A lot of these guys were World War two veterans, and like they were just guys who, like after the war ended, they couldn't do anything else but kill people.

And a number of them were actually Nazi military veterans. That was even in like the French Foreign Legion had a lot of Nazi military veterans because they were like, all I know how to do is kill people. And the French Foreign Legions like, will you help us kill people who aren't white in Africa? And they were like absolutely, as long as I'm killing so uh now, Mad Mike.

Uh again, it's probably the most famous of these guys, and he he among other things, he was renowned for telling black mercenaries who attempted to join his mercenary army that he only hired white women or white men. Uh. He earned a colorful reputation for, among other things, shooting the toes off of a fellow mercenary who had raped a woman in the field. Um And as a general rule, uh, Mad Mike soldiers were kind of rough customers. You might say, yeah, yeah,

I would say they sound like rock customers. Yeah yeah, shoot shot the toes off a man, I mean, you know. So as the fighting in the Congo War on Mad Mike wound up on the side of Mobotu sesse Ciccu, the Congo's longest lived dictator. Uh Moboto also patterned himself as an anti communist fighter, which was enough to earn the allegiance of the CIA and of Mad Mike. In order to help Mobot stay in power and fight against rebels, he put together a commando army of Irish mercenaries, the

Wild Geese. Here's how the Washington Post recalled their service in the obituary they wrote for Mad Mike earlier this year. This guy fucking had the longest life. Like, sorry, and I went a million years. I never would have thought that you were going to say he died earlier this year. Yeah, he was a hundred years old. Like, get incredible, um quote, I believe we have a great mission here, he told

a fellow mercenary. According to a history of the Simba Rebellion by John Hopkins, professor Piero guil Jas, the Africans have gotten used to the idea that they can do whatever they like to us Whites, that they can trample on us and spit on us. So that's that's the kind of fella Mike is dubbed the White Giants. Mr Horrors men spelled swept through the country, mowing down untrained and outnumbered Seemba forces who believed that witchcraft made them impervious.

Two bullets in total. The mercenary unit was paid about three thousand dollars a month by US authorities, according to a Post report, and backed by what The New York Times described as an instant air force created by the c i A. So can way back up to the White Giants just for like one second that needed. It's it's actually the reason why they were called giants is

actually pretty sad. It's because they all grew up in wealthier western countries and had access to a lot of protein and milk and stuff like that when they were growing up, and folks in the cong go Uh tended to be malnourished, in large part due to the fact that the Belgian colonialists who had owned them had starved the entirety of Central Africa for decades prior to this point, and so people in the Congo tended to be smaller,

and white mercenaries tended to be very large. Well that's up, Jesus. Yeah, it's not great. It's not great. The world. Yeah, so the white giants or the wild geese, whatever you wanna call them, killed a shitload of people. Mike himself bragged to journalists, quote, killing communist is like killing vermin. Killing African nationalists is as if one is killing an animal. My men and I have killed between five thousand and ten thousand Congo rebels in the twenty months that I've

spent in the Congo. But that's not enough. There are twenty million Congolees, you know, and I assumed that about half of them at one point or another were rebels whilst I was down there. This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One of them is that, uh, the generation prior to Mike, King Leopold of Belgium had killed fully half of the population of the Congo. And here you have another white guy generation later being like, if we just got rid of another half, yeah, pretty

bad people, pretty bad. And Matt Mike is perfectly embodies the fact that a lot of the men who were responsible for fighting the Nazis would have been perfectly happy with Nazism if Hitler had just picked slightly different white people to fight. Oh yeah, I have to It's funny that you say this, I feel like I have to like tell, like admit something. When I was young, I thought that there was just like white people. I had no idea that there was like in like these white

people don't like that white people. I thought it was just white people. And when we found that out, it was like a big sort of galaxy brained thing for me. I didn't realize that white people could have problems with other white people. That was like a whole um new understanding of how white people function. For me, it's we're fascinating. There's this thing going on. I mean it's been going on for a long time within like Nazi circles, but

it's it's hitting the internet. Nazis now, well, we're like in depictions of Mussolini, they'll depict him as a black man. And the reason is because there's a chunk of white people who think that Italians are still who still think Italians aren't white. It's it's pretty wide the time. Yeah. Uh yeah, that's like the racism equivalent of still using my Space, like like we've moved on having like a

hot mail email. Yeah, yeah, that's hot mail for Nazis is calling like Italians non white um so, yeah, yeah, Mike killed a lot of people. Mike and has been were good enough at killing to ensure that the regime of Mbuto say Ciccu was established and allowed to persist for thirty brutal years. Mabot spent the time robbing the Congo blind, providing no social services, building no infrastructure, and torturing unknown numbers of Congolese people who complained about any

of this. The CIA was fine with all of it, because, again, Maboto was not a communist. Now, um Mad Mike's success made him in to a mini celebrity, and he was indeed a colorful character, and one interview he told a Post reporter quote, I think I'd like to have been born in the time of Sir Francis Drake. Yes, out sailing, robbing the Spaniards, and when you brought the booty back to Queen Elizabeth, you knelt before her and she made you a night. You were respectable even though you were

a thief. So yep, yep, that's the guy he is. So Unfortunately for Mad Mike, Mike and a lot of other people, it turns out that coups are kind of addictive. In nearly nineteen eighties, sixty two year old mad Mike Hory led forty men in an attempt to overthrow the socialist Resume regime of the Seychelles and reinstall an old pro capitalist president. The plan was comical. Mike's men dressed as rugby players with a drinking club named Ye ancient order of froth Blowers. They hid their A K forty

seven's and fake bottom bags and posed as tourists. Unfortunately, they all got fucking drunk his ship on the flight over, and so they were really drunk when they arrived at the harrival arrivals call and they started a fight with customs and so the customs guys like said like fuck you, We're gonna search your bags now. And then they found the A K forty seven, which sparked this massive gunfight in the customs hall at the airport and say the

say shells. So again Mike and his men had overwhelming firepower, but they were also hammered. So they shot one of their own men to death and then killed one of the other soldiers. And this like running incompetent running gun battle that that ends when they hijack an Air India flight and forced the crew at gunpoint to fly them to South Africa. Oh my god, I have I part of me a little sympathetic for who among us has

not had big plans because you got too drunk. Right. Look, look they're they're racists and monsters, but they're still humans, right Like, yeah, yes, I I too have had getting drunk on a plane interfere with a plan and lead to a fight at customs that leads to you killing someone. Yeah. I mean if I had an a K forty seven, I might have hijacked an Air India flight. Like there's no way to know. You know, they don't stop you. They never cut you off on Air Emirates when you're drinking.

So yes, a lot of things can happen. Um, shout out, shout out to Air Emirates, shout out the open bar in the sky. So um. Yeah. So they were all arrested as soon as they landed in South Africa. And this is again apartheid. South Africa was like you crossed a line, Mike. Even we have to arrestue we're doing a buck ship to people, but we even we have

standards like come Jesus, dude. So he gets arrested and during his trial Hoary testified that the South African government had approved the coup and given him weapons, and this was almost certainly true, although the government denied it because obviously South Africa fucking loved coups um as long as they were, you know, the right kind of coups um. Yeah, the government denied it though. Mike was sentenced to ten years in prison, but he was released after just three.

After he was freed, a journalist asked him if he planned to retire. He responded, this is all the question

of opportunity. Mercenary opportunities now mainly exist in films and books, and yeah, as I told you, inconceivably, Mad Mike survived until February of this year, um, which is fucking wild when you talk to the mercenaries that came after him, though, generally say that Mike was one half of a holy duo of African mercenaries who kind of like inspired the whole modern modern field of mercenary dumb uh and the

other half. His other half was a guy named Bob Dinnard, a French imperialist who did a lot of the same kind of stuff as Mad Mike, but more quietly, competently and on behalf of France. In nineteen seventy seven, Bob Dinard led eighty mercenaries in an attempt to overthrow the communist government of Benin, which had recently nationalized all of their banks and their petroleum industry. Unfortunately, Bob timed things badly. The president wasn't home when Dinard's mercenary army reached his

pal us. A detachment of North Korean military advisors were at home, and they had heavy machine guns. So Bob's men were forced into a fighting retreat. But as we saw with Mad Mike Corey, uh, coups are addictive, and the very next year Bob Dinard hired another army to overthrow the government of the Comoros, a small island nation off of Africa's East coast. His fifty men brought brought sought off shotguns in a case of dompaign on Champagne.

They landed on the coast, attacked the president of the palace, murdered the president and installed his rival. Then they got drunk on Champagne. Uh So, yeah, most of these mercenary coups don't work out well, but some of them do, and they're very profitable when they do. Also, shout out to the to the expensive fancy champagne. I mean these guys knew how to party. Look yeah, I mean again, that is a G move, Like yeah, bringing a case of champagne with you to the coup is Yeah, that's

that's a G move. I yep. I don't want to interrupt. So I think your dog is like is he Is she humping something? She she she's not humping up thing. She's licking something. And I don't know. And I will not disrupt her in interactions. Leave her b I'm proud of her. I like, what's happening, and it gives you a free show while we record this episode. A show within a show is a show a show. Yes, Anderson has just performed a coup on behind the Bastards, taking

over attention, uh and spoilers. She also has a case of dom pairing on champagne and a sawd off shotgun. Yeah, she knows you're talking about her. It's so funny. She's like, my brother's talking about me. I hear him. She thinks of you as her brother probably yeah, so uh yeah. This all builds to the point that there's a long history of small groups of mercenaries overthrowing tiny African nations reinforced in both actual ship that happened and in fiction

like King Solomon's Minds. In the real world cases, western governments were generally involved, and almost always the South African government. The people who lived in these nations were never ever consulted. And all of this background brings me bridget to the story of Fernando Po. Have you ever heard of Fernando Po.

I have not. So It's an island off the west coast of Africa and it makes up the bulk of the nation we now call Equatorial Guinea UM and Fernando Po was colonized by Spain prior to the Great Scramble for Africa, but they never really did anything with it. Bastard Pod alumni Henry Morton Stanley called the island the pearl of the Gulf of Guinea, but stated that he would not pay a penny for it as it was

a jewel which Spain did not polish. So basically the Spanish like owned this place, but they never really did anything for it because there wasn't really anything to do. Like when white people went there, they always died because like they didn't have any immunity to the local diseases, and there wasn't any gold or anything that was generally considered to be super value valuable by white people on

Fernando Po. So it was kind of like a refueling station, but not much more for for Spain for most of the time that they controlled it. Um So, I'm gonna quote next from a book called The Wonga Coup by Adam Roberts for a picture of how Fernando Po fared

under colonialism. Quote. In nineteen thirty six, the British novelist Graham Green, who was generally fond of West Africa, dismissed the dreadful little Spanish island, where there existed a mild form of slavery that enabled a man to pawn his children. Towards the end of its two centuries of rules, Spain did little to improve the lives of those it ruled. The colonial power set up an economy based on cocoa plantations in a reasonable school system. Health campaigns reduced the

impact of tropical diseases, at least on Fernando Po. By the second half of the twentieth century, Equatorial Guineas were less poor than most Africans thanks to exports of cocoa, but few Spaniards settled, and Native Africans were denied political rights and economic chances. When independence loomed, the Spanish organized

hasty poles to find a new government. Spain under its own dictator, General Franco, was hardly qualified to promote democracy, and Equatorial Guinea was ill prepared when, in late nineteen sixty eight it became the hundred and twenty six member of the United Nations. After independence, things really went wrong. Its citizens were soon desperate to escape. A sleepy eyed

man mass Nuguema won the elections. The shy son of a reverend and a brutal witch doctor known as his saintly father, Massias did badly at Catholic mission schools, but took up jobs as a junior bureaucrat and a coffee farmer, jen then as a court interpreter, and subsequently as mayor of a small town. He became an influential leader within an important subgroup of the Fang, the country's most populous ethnic group, and was groomed for office by a few

Spaniards who believed he would serve their interests. So this isn't a great start for independence. For Equatorial Guinea and it's it's not going to be a great continuance. So I found another book called Double Paradox by Andrew Wedeman that explains that Macias largely wound up in power due to his ability to charm Spanish colonial officers. What him in notes that he impressed them with his willingness to treat other Guineans with contempt um, which is kind of

the same story as idi Amine. The British liked him because he was good at cracking down on other like Africans who tried to get independence from England um, and they were like, Okay, this guy we can probably trust. But it turns out that macy has hated Spain too due to having to lick their boots for years, and as soon as he was in power, he like fucked them over and took every action he could do uproot

any uproot any local industry that benefited Spanish companies. Uh. He formed a children's militia and used it to harass all the remaining white people out of Equatorial Guinea. And that doesn't necessarily sound too bad with the exception, but the problem is that like again, the whole economy of Equatorial Guinemy had been. Guinea had been based around these these cocoa plantations, and he kicks out everyone who knows how to operate and run them, um, and he nationalizes them.

But rather than higher locals to run them, he brings in cheaper Nigerian workers to run the fields because he wants to make all of the profit it's from them. Um and yeah, so it's like he he completely uproots the entire economy overnight. Um and that is not a great thing to do, uh from an economics point of view. H Macy has also ordered the entire nation's retail sectors shut down and replaced it by a new network of state run stores. This left another fifteen thousand native retail

workers out of a job. The country each entered into a terrible recession, which was made worse by the fact that Macis gave his best friend monopoly on all international trade. Prices for food imports stared out of the budgets of most actual Guineons. It became impossible to import the spare parts for the machinery that made the nation run and

made its cocoa plantations function. The electrical grid failed and the roads were eaten by the jungle, So he just like what little the Spanish had done to set up you know, infrastructure, He just bulldozes and suddenly everyone's out of a job. No one has any money and no one can buy any food, um, which is not a great job. Up, I would say, I don't want to back seat dictator of Equatorial Guinea here. Yeah, it's bad.

Do you want to know? Yeah? And I and I really need you to take an ad break, But I don't know how to do a witty transition after that. So could you just like do an ad break? You know, who won't give their best friend a monopoly on all international trade that makes food import impossible and leads to widespread famine. Yeah, our sponsors won't do that. Maybe, I

mean historically we should probably just roll the ads. We're back uh And and yeah, we're talking about Equatorial Guinea and its first few years of independence, which don't go great. So the people of Equatorial Guinea could clearly see that a calamity had been visited upon them by their new leader, and Macy has deflected blame for it by claiming his

political opponents had attempted a coup. He launched a vicious terror camp paying against his own people, which sucked the economy up more uh and led to him confiscating the property of thousands upon thousands of citizens and putting it in the hands of himself. One third of the population was killed or fled the country in just a couple of years, um, which is a lot of the country. Uh. Yeah,

so that's not great. Uh. Macy has instituted a new set of internal travel restrictions to try and stop people from fleeing the country. Um. But the only way you can think of to do this was to create a massive series of burdensome checkpoints, and this made domestic trade impossible within the country itself. Mac has also ordered all ordered all ships, boats and canoes impounded, which destroyed the fishing industry overnight and ended the population's access to protein.

Mac has sold fishing rights to the Soviets instead and pocketed the money from this while his people starved. By the early nineteen seventies, Equatorial Guinea was a failed state by any reasonable definition of the term. The people who had once enjoyed at least a decent standard of living, we're starving and forced into subsistence agriculture. The state bureaucracy collapsed. Since there was no food to buy, government workers had to leave their posts in order to fill their bellies.

In order to stop the exodus, Macias ordered the only road out of the capital. Mind. Yeah, he's not good at leading a country. Uh not great. And again this

is the guy, Like it's one of those things. This is the guy who this guy only comes to power because Spain puts him in power because they're too lazy to like do a proper job of giving up this colony, so they just put the guy who's best at kissing acid in charge and he turns out to be a monster, which happens repeatedly in Africa in the period as colonialism, like, uh departs it, Like this is kind of what they

all did. I have a question, yea, yeah, please, I guess I feel like when it comes to dictators people, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. I am not a I'm not a dictatorship expert, but I feel like people are more willing to be okay with it if like the trains run on time, our roads are we

have food. It seems like having someone who is this shitty like being like making these kinds of changes that really fuck over the average person like that that that seems so different from what I from what I have come to, no one loved that dictators I guess I feel like my understanding is that, like, oh, when someone's a fucking ship head, people are willing to overlook it if they if their lives are either made better or not significantly changed. And it seems like in this case

their lives were made much worse. This is what gets us into like the truth of that is that in almost all dictatorships, you know, you get the odd exception, there's guys like Tito who like Tito was a monster. But yeah, I've spent a lot of time in former Yugoslavia and a lot of old people think back to Tito fondly because things went so shitty after his he died.

But like, as a general rule, particularly when you're talking about like dictators who like come into power with a lot of popular support, it's popular support from one specific group of people, and it's one specific group of people

who does well. You know, in Germany's case, we all know what that specific group of people was, and in in in Equatorial Guinea's case, there is a specific group of people the largest ethnic group in the country are the Fang, which is like the same tribe that he is a member of, and they do pretty well under

this um because they get preferential treatment. They're able to like they kick out like like he they like he executes genocides against like the Igbo and a couple of other different tribal people's in Equatorial Guinea, and all of their stuff gets given to like members of his tribe. So like the largest most Equatorial Guinea ands suffer, but the largest single group of them does pretty well because they're able to take shipped from the other people who

are suffering. And that's kind of the story of dictatorships. That's really what happens. And we talk about what people talk about things going well, it's more often that like no, no, your specific group was the group that things went pretty well for because the guy in charge stole things from everyone else to give to you, like yeah, um, And

that's kind of what happens in Equatorial Guinea. Is like the Fang do all right, at least at first, the Fang do all right because he's just taking shipped from everybody else and giving it to them. One Swedish researcher who managed to sneak into Equatorial Guinea during this period called it the Dako of Africa. Everyone else just called it Death's waiting Room, a name that became more relevant when Macias banned Western medicine, leading to a resurgence of

leprosy among other illnesses. As his nation crumbled, Mass lost his mind. He began seeing coup plotters in every corner, and he executed people almost as random and an attempt to keep them at bay. During one Christmas mass execution at a sports stadium in the capital, Malabo, Palace, guards shot a hundred and fifty people to death while the song those were the days my friend played on an endless loop, which is one of the most nightmarish things

I can imagine. Yeah, yeah, yeah um. One survivor of the horror later wrote, quote no food in the shops, no water, no electricity, no kerosene for the lamps, and night we walked in blackness. Yes, for eleven years we walked in blackness. Uh. The Wonga cou by Adam Roberts goes on to note quote nightclubs include in schools. Closed missionaries were chased from the country. Masist like Paul pot and Cambodia launched a campaign against the educated, and they

began to disappear. He banned the word intellectual once finding a minister who used it at a cabinet meeting. He called educated people the greatest problem facing Africa today. They are polluting our climate with foreign culture. He declared himself President for life, then renamed the island part of the country after himself. He adopted new titles, each more eccentric than the last major General of the armed forces, Great Maestro of Popular Education, Science and Traditional Culture, the only

Miracle of Equatorial Guinea. He ordered teachers and priests to promote his cult of personality. School Children chanted that Macis alone had freed the country from imperial Spanish rule. The sanctuary of every church was to show his portrait. Priests read out messages venerating the insecure. Presidents such as God created Equatorial Guinea thanks to Macias. Without Macist, Equatorial Guinea would not exist. Some of the people were nominally Christian,

but he eventually forced church's shut. So he's not not great. I keep making that point, right, Like he had kids chanting the ship at school. Yeah, it's it's it's bad. It goes bad in Equatorial Guinea and Macie for an example of how bad it goes Macias was almost certainly a cannibal. But that's not even really worth talking about because the fact that he ate people was like one of the least shitty things about him, Like he's he's like, yeah, you know, is bad, but it's like, well, he eats people,

but there's so many other things. That's what we have, so many other problems. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So he was so good at killing basically everyone, um who didn't agree with him or like him, that there was basically no organized society and Equatorial guinety Guinea for a rebellion to even form. In If there was ever a nation in desperate need of a foreign backed coup, it was Equatorial Guinea. And unfortunately the coup they got was not the one

they deserved. Uh. And again, like if you're talking about, like, as I think we've established, it's always problematic to talk about foreign coups to overthrow governments, But this is the guy who it's like, yeah, if you're gonna justify a coup, it's against a guy like this, and it still doesn't work out. So the man behind this coup was not a grizzled mercenary. Instead, it was a former journalist and

novelist named Frederick Forsyth. Now, Frederick had reported to for the BBC during the Nigerian Civil War, and he knew a number of mercenaries as a result of his reporting work in Africa. But the early nineteen seventies he transitioned out of journalism and into a very successful career as a fiction author. His most famous book was probably The Day of the Jackal, which made him wealthy, and there's a movie made out of the Day of the Jackal. Um. There's a movie's made out of a lot of his books,

actually flesh with cash. Forsyth looked out at the sad case of Tutorial Guinea and decided he was in a position to do something about Masias. He sat down with a mercenary friend of his and from his flattened Camden, the two painstakingly plotted out a coup that would overthrow Masias from power. The basic idea was to hire several dozen former soldiers from Nigeria and paid them to capture or kill the mad dictator and replace him with a

b Afrian politician who seemed amenable. The whole thing took about five months to plan, and the affair was largely an excuse for the now wealthy Forsyth to live out his fantasies of being an international man of mystery. In a later interview with Adam Roberts, he explained, quote, I originally postulated a question to myself, would it be possible for a group of paid and bought for mercenaries to

toppal the Republic? I thought, if the republic were weak enough and power concentrated in one tyrant, then in theory yes. I looked around and saw Fernando po and every story about the country was gruesome. I didn't go there myself, but I met businessmen and others who had been there, and they told me this place was weird. So I decided it could be done. If you storm the palace. Well, it wasn't really a palace. It was the old Spanish

colonial governor's mansion. Probably by sunrise you could take over, provided you have a substitute African president, and announced it was an internal coda. I began to and I began to explore the world of black market arms. Where do you get a shipload of black market arms. I knew nothing about it, so I dug around. I discovered the capital was either Prague, where Omnipole, the communist arms dealer was, but for that the client had to be cleared by Moscow.

Otherwise it was Hamburg. So off I went. I penetrated under subterfuge using the South African name and developed my theme. I attended conferences of black market freelance criminals and learned about the curious end user certificates to identify those who are entitled to use and buy weapons how they're forged

or purchased from corrupt African diplomats. So Forsyth will claim to this day usually that he was just writing a book about how to carry out a coup, and the fact that someone attempted a coup in this country based on his book was completely separate from it. But also sometimes in interviews he'll admit that, like, oh, yeah, I was. I. I was carrying out a coup from the beginning, and I just wrote a book about it later. Um yeah, So let me ask you then, who who is the

bastard here? If you like, which one of these people as the bastard? They're both bastards. I do think in a way macis is like it's tough because like obviously he's a monster who kills tens of thousands of people. But also there's something that's like almost a little bit more unsettling to me about a guy who's just like a rich novelist being like, my bet, I could overthrow

this country. It seems easy enough, like like that that's his that he's not like they always throw in some like little gibe about how, oh, it seems like the dictators really bad there, but when you get a chance to like read long interviews with them, like that's a sentence, and then the rest of it is like, yeah, it

really seems easy and fun. And I was interested in this and this and this, like the whole The fact that a terrible dictator was in charge of Equatorial Guinea was like three percent of why they did it was it seemed fun. So I have one more question in your life, in your do you feel like how what percentage of ship like that do you feel like comes

down to, oh, it was it seemed fun. I do feel like when you hear about all the terrible ship that goes on in our world, so often it comes down to like, oh, we wanted, like, yeah, we wanted the money, you want to control whatever, whatever, But also wouldn't it be fucking fun? Like I do feel like a lot of these guys are are are doing this because they want the excitement and the fun. Yeah. No, no, no,

not at all. And like one of the problems that we're gonna have to tackle if we're ever going to have a more peaceful society is how to how to give young young men in particular and really young white men and most particular though it's all young men like something to do that is exciting and feels meaningful and might kill them, but doesn't involve them fucking up other people's lives. Um, because a lot of us need that.

It's not all of us, but like fun. I mean, I I've I've I've bought multiple plane tickets to war zones that I would be lying if I said that a part of it wasn't Like, yeah, that sounds like fun, like like going through that experience. Now, I didn't try to overthrow no countries, but it is a thing you have to grapple with. Yeah, well, if you lived in Washington, d C. There's a very obvious avenue available to you and that is join an illegal dirt biking because you

don't wear a helmet, you don't have insurance. Your head is so close to the pavement it's dangerous. But yeah, it's not you're not you're not overthrowing anything, you know. Yeah, we need to somehow make rugby more high stakes, yeah, or have one of those. Yeah, there's there's it's tough. Like maybe we could just pick like one of the states we don't like and let anyone who wants to go go fight a war there, like we just declare,

I don't know, let's say here, um Florida, Iowa, Florida, Florida. Yeah, that's the state Florida. Yeah, of course Florida. Florida is a war now. And if you really need that in your life, you can go to Florida and you can have your war in Florida. We'll call it Warida. It'll be it'll be fine. Very little will actually change about daily life and most of that state. In Iowa. He didn't mean it. He didn't mean it Iowa. He he meant for I meant it. We love your corn Iowa,

We love your corn Iowa. We need a war state to to get some of this energy out of people. Paintball is not doing it for folks. Um. So yeah, yeah, So this fucking fiction author Frederick Forsyth like starts quote unquote researching his book uh and at the same time, a group of mercenaries led by his friend that he planned this book with, get hired um and like they they they charter a boat and they like start sailing uh through like to Equatorial Guinea to carry out a coup.

Now this doesn't work out. They don't even get to land end the British intelligence catches onto them and Gibraltar and tips off Spanish authorities who arrest them in the Canary Islands. The coup gets called off um and it

never actually happens. But the very next year, Frederick Forsyth published another book called The Dogs of War, about a group of European mercenaries who carry out a coup against a brutal island dictator, and the book bore a striking resemblance to all of the planning for the failed nineteen seventy three coup, and like very little of the book actually involved any action or fighting or the coup itself. Almost all of it was just a detailed step by step guide to how to Like, here's how we go

about getting end users cer certificates. Here's how we go about buying weaponry. Here's how we go about transporting that weaponry. Here's how we charted the boat. Here's how we hired all these mercenaries. Like it's it's famously still seen today, is like a step by step guide for how to carry out a coup. Um and rumors began to swirl after this that Frederick forsythe Sythe had attempted to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea and then written a fictionalized

account of his act Um. In nineteen eighty the book was made into a movie with Christopher Walkin. Um Yeah. In two thousands six, Frederick Forsyth all but admitted to an interviewer that he had in fact planned and failed to execute a coup to overthrow Masius. His book became a hit among mercenaries, in particular in Bob Denard's successful coup off of the coast of East Africa, all of the men he's carried into battle had copies of the French translation of The Dogs of War in their back pocket.

Um so again, they're like, that's part of why I started this with like King Solomon's Minds is that like The Dogs of War is really like the modern retelling of that. We're like, okay, we're just gonna make this all about the coup um. That's the real money shot. So yeah, that's cool, that's cool. Yeah, I think that's who I like that. I also think it just goes to show you, like what like culture, like books and movies and all of that really makes a difference of

like how things play out. You know. I think you could you could easily be like, oh, it's just a book, it was just a book, but clearly that's not the case. I think that these things really matter and they can really make an imprint on how things go down in history. Yeah.

I think this has inspired me to write a book about how a fictional cult fins off the f d A and the Mountains of Idaho and use the proceeds from that book to buy a compound in the mountains of Idaho and then launch a health and beauty network that gets the FDA brought down on us. Are you currently trying to start a cult that and I misremembering this, you know most of the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, more or less, you know, I mean, I told him he could, like,

it's fine, start a cult. Why not if you sign off as long as no dogs are harmed, it's fine almost certainly, not probably. And on that note, Robert, it's break time. Oh it is. Yeah. Well, speaking of coup's, here's a product coup that was not your best work, but along with some services. Yeah that wasn't that didn't work out. Great, we are back, okay, So yeah. Mass Protect remained in power until August of nineteen seventy nine,

when a coup finally unseated him. No Europeans were involved. Instead, the culprit was his nephew, Obiang, who Macias had put in charge of notorious Black Beach Prison, where regime enemies and random people were tortured to death. Obiang was spurred into action when his uncle's mismanagement got so bad that the army could no longer pay wages. When representatives of the military asked the president for money, Maci has had them all executed, including some officers who were members of

the royal family. This spirit Obiang into action, and a brief civil war was the result. Obiang obviously had the support of most of the military. His uncle resisted for a time than largely largely to Cuban and North Korean officers who backed up his forces, but eventually Macias was forced out of his palace and into a small jungle village named Mongomo. There he hid the entire national treasury somewhere between sixty and a hundred and fifty million dollars

in what is generally described as a wooden hut. Obiang attacked, and in the battle that followed, the hut was set on fire and the entire nation's foreign currency reserves were incinerated. Masius fled again, but he was eventually arrested and brought back to the capital of Mlabo. Obiang took over from his uncle and convened a court in Mlabo's largest building, the Old Cinema. The former dictator was hung from a

cage attached to the ceiling. He and a number of flunkeys were charged with genocide, mass murder, treason, and a litany of other crimes, and may have been the first time in history that a head of state was actually charged with genocide anywhere in the world. Macias was quickly convicted and executed, and evidence that inconveniently implicated his nephew Obiang and regime crimes was ignored by the court. In a better world, this would have been the start of

a period of healing for Equatorial Guinea. But we live in this world and things only went from bad is slightly less bad, but still more or less the same. And I'm gonna quote now from the book Double Paradox quote. If anything, the plundering worsened as international aids started to flow in and efforts to rehabilitate the exports sector began. Obiong and his inner circle, most of whom were either members of his immediate family or fellow klansmen, grabbed whatever

they could. Companies seeking government contracts and concessions were informed that they had to pay bribes and kickbacks to senior officials. The amounts demanded were often so high that many would be investors quit the country soon after arriving. Obiong privatized Macias estate farms, but then either took them over himself or gave them to his henchman. Petty corruption among street

level bureaucrats continued unabated. The one time thugs and killers of the Macist era thus morphed into a new regime of tropical gangsters, under which the Equatorial guineaon economy remained a ruin. According to one visitor, the economy is dead and corruption is the game. By early n things had become so bad that the I m F announced it was suspending all aid and would lead the cut leave

the country to its own crumbling devices. In Equatorial Guinea might have continued to just kind of be a tiny, dirt poor kleptocracy if not for a small Texas based oil and gas company, Walter International. In nineteen ninety one, they stuck. They struck oil off the coast of Equatorial Guinea, revealing a massive field of extremely high quality crude. In short order, the we nation was producing three hundred and fifty thousand barrels of oil a day, worth more than

six billion dollars a year. The fields and Equatorial Guinea actually produced enough oil to make it the highest per capita producer of fuel on the planet. And this could have literally made every single person in the tiny country rich. That is, of course, not what happened. Obiang and his family took all the profits they should not have been able to. The nineteen The nineteen seventy seven four in corrupt Practices Act made it illegal for US companies to

make direct payments to foreign officials. Instead, they had to pay royalties to official government accounts so the money could be used for the benefit of the people. Obion got around this by having oil companies like Exxon Mobile deposit their payments in a series of offshore accounts owned by

himself and his family members. This was at best on the verge of being illegal, but ex On Mobile, Hess and Marathon were happy to play along and risk Congressional centure for the simple fact that Guineon oil was the cheapest on Earth. Obiang charged them about half of what other governments in the area were paid for their oil. This would have been a terrible deal for the people of his country, but none of the money was going

to them anyway. Now On paper, the Guinean economy grew by leaps and bounds in the late nineteen nineties, topping sixty per year, which is almost an impossible rate. Very little of that growth, though, reached the normal people. In two thousand two, Equatorial Guinea spent less money than any other country on Earth, save a rack on healthcare. No country on the planet spent less money on education. The

average lifespan, and Equatorial Guinea was fifty years. On paper, Guineans should have been receiving at least about six thousand dollars a year per person and income, which would have put the country in line with Chile, but all of

that money went to Obiang and his family instead. A two thousand three radio program declared him the country's god, who can decide to kill anyone without being called to account and without going to hell, because it is God himself with whom he is in permanent contact, who gives him his strength. So this guy is not really a big improvement from macis is kind of the point that I'm making. Yeah, I think that's clear. So by the early two thousands, though, Equatorial Guinea was what you might

call a coup plotter's paradise. It has this horrible, unpopular dictator who's a global pariah, and there's a huge amount of oil that's just been discovered there. And best of all, the War on Terror has just started, and the invasion of Iraq has caused a situation whereby it suddenly really really easy to justify overthrowing a foreign dictator in order to get at his oil. The Spanish government very much wanted access to Equatorial guineas fuel because they were piste off.

They'd given up this country and not known that it was filled with oil. Uh. And they even had a ringer from Equatorial Guinea who they felt they could trust to replace Obiong and give them access. All that Spain needed was a mercenary ambitious enough to risk torture and execution in Black Beach Prison for a chance at a massive pay day. And in Part two, we're all going to meet this mercenary, South Africa's equivalent of Eric Prince, a fellow named Simon Man. Yeah. Boy, so that's where

we end in part one. I can't I'm I'm like Gripps to my seat. I can't wait to to meet this new this new bastard. Yeah, it's gonna be exciting and everybody's gonna have a fun time learning about him. Um, but first people should have a fun time learning about you. Bridget Todd. You have a new podcast, There Are No Girls on the Internet, uh, and that is about to launch on the I Heart Radio network, which which galls dropped day. Oh it is July seven, so please subscribe

listen all of that stuff. Can we talk about that transition for a second though it was lawless. I was. I was almost like in awe of it. It was, I really was, Can I say one more thing before we before we move away from that? You can say as many things like I'm gonna say this the things I've spent a lot of time in South Africa, and I will say that like I will never I will never pretend to be an expert on the history or

the country or the people. But the one thing that was very clear to me from spending a lot of time in South Africa was that I think that like the people there are like traumatized by how shitty all the shitty experiences they've had with a government, and that I think it lasts today. I was very um. It was interesting to see how that ship like doesn't go away. It's just as kind of like passed on the generations.

And so as someone who spent a lot of time in South Africa, all this ship you're saying, I'm like, oh ship, Yeah that makes sense. People are fucking traumatized. So yeah, I love I loved my time there, but I just was really um a place where you know, I just feel like even today, I see the reverberations of the people really deserved better. Yeah, Yeah, that's kind

of like the only real conclusion. And you can make because both sides in this, if you want to look at them, the sides are just so shitty, Like the dictators of Equatorial Guinea are awful. All the people who try to overthrow them are just trying to get rich and just equally shitty. And there's there's at no point does anyone involved give a shit about the people who live in Equatorial Guinea. And that's like, yeah, it's it's a bummer. That's not good. It's not it's really not

bad and not good. So speaking of things that are bad and not good, go back out into the world or coursed inside, and you can go to our website to find our sources, which are under the episode description behind the Bastards dot com where you could follow Robert on Twitter and a right okay, where you could follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Bastard's Pod or you could buy a a face mask or a T shirt or a cell phone case or lug or or whatever

they've decided to sell on Tea Public today. Yeah, are these face masks cure COVID nineteen face masks are going to be on sale soon. UM, you can help us. F d A approved written right on the front. U. So yeah, help us, help us thumb an eye in the f d a's face, and UM get rated in a mountaintop compound in Idaho. Uh. That's the dream. That's my dream, and it should be your dream too. Is there information about how folks can enjoin the cult? Uh? Not yet. UM. Yeah, the cult is in your heart.

The cult is in your heart. You know you'll find it in your heart. Um. As long as you, you know, want to fight the f d A on a mountaintop in Idaho, that's really all it takes. That's the episode. I think that's the episode.