Equatorial Guinea

Equatorial Guinea, officially the Republic of Equatorial Guinea, is a country on the west coast of Central Africa and the only Spanish-speaking country in Africa, formerly the colony of Spanish Guinea, with a 2025 population of 1,853,559, over 85 percent of whom are members of the Fang people; its capital, since January 2026, is Ciudad de la Paz, while Bata remains the largest city. The country comprises the mainland region of Rio Muni, bordered by Cameroon and Gabon, and an insular region of Bioko Island and Annobon in the Gulf of Guinea. Spanish explorers arrived in the fifteenth century and the territory became Spanish Guinea during the Scramble for Africa; it gained independence in 1968 under the dictatorship of President Francisco Macias Nguema, who was overthrown in a 1979 coup by his nephew Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, still president today under a government widely characterized as a dictatorship. Since the mid-1990s Equatorial Guinea has become one of Sub-Saharan Africa's largest oil producers and one of the richest countries per capita in Africa, though this wealth is extremely unevenly distributed; the country's government is described as authoritarian and has one of the world's worst human rights records, while Spanish remains the main official language alongside French and, since 2010, Portuguese.