If you think this one's bad you should have seen his uncle -

There is no leader in the world who more deserves to be overthrown than Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the President of Equatorial Guinea for the last quarter of a century. By rights, his brutality, corruption and venality should not go unpunished; yet I doubt that the mercenaries who planned to overthrow him, and whom Sir Mark Thatcher is accused of having backed financially, were motivated by a burning ambition to bring democracy and clean government to the volcanoes of Fernando Poo and the jungles of Rio Muni.

On the contrary: I am sure that they knew that one venal dictator in Equatorial Guinea would be replaced by another: one who would owe his position to them. Since Equatorial Guinea is now the third largest oil exporter in Africa, there were wonderfully lush, quick fortunes to be made by mercenaries and their backers.

Equatorial Guinea is one of the least-known countries in the world, because of its small size and its insignificant population. It was, however, the scene of one of the greatest disasters to befall any country in the 20th century, proportionately as great as that which befell Cambodia, caused by the first president after its independence, Francisco Macias Nguema.

When I visited in 1986, it had not recovered from the trauma. Macias Nguema had killed or driven into exile a third of the population. His successor was his nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who is still president 25 years after his coup. He is less bizarre than his uncle, but is certainly no man of the people. In those days, they turned the electricity off whenever the President left the capital, as being no longer necessary. The telephone directory, a slim volume, had a fulsome, and obligatory, dedication to him.

He was not a friend of free speech: I was told by an expatriate in no uncertain terms that I had better not let on that I was a journalist, or they would cut me into pieces and throw me into the sea. People disappeared in Equatorial Guinea and no one dared ask any questions.

The only imported goods available in the market at the time were tinned sardines and pink champagne, of which there was a strangely plentiful supply, presumably left over from a summit of West African presidents that had just taken place in Malabo. Foreign aid at the time had reached 90 per cent of the gross national product of the country. It paid for the pink champagne, of course. I spent a pleasant and instructive afternoon in Malabo counting the different international aid agencies whose Toyota Land Cruisers passed me in the otherwise dead streets: I got up to 27 before I abandoned my count.

Equatorial Guinea had been the only Spanish colony in sub-Saharan Africa, and consisted of two parts: Rio Muni, on the mainland of Africa, and Fernando Poo (renamed Bioko), a volcanic island off the Cameroonian coast. For a time, the British occupied the island, and the original name of the capital was Clarence, later (under the Spanish) Santa Isabel and now (after independence) Malabo. The famous explorer and linguist Sir Richard Burton was consul there for a time, and detested it, calling his office "a plank-lined coffin containing a dead consul once a year". Before the advent of modern medicine, Fernando Poo really was a white man's grave.

In the last few decades of Spanish colonial rule, Equatorial Guinea flourished. By the time the world prevailed upon Spain to decolonise, it had the best medical services, the lowest death rate and the second highest per capita income of any sub-Saharan African country. The first president of the newly independent country soon changed all that. Macias Nguema, who in 1968 was democratically elected (like Mr Blair, though with a far higher percentage of the popular vote), turned into a paranoiac monster. The government and economy became a family affair, with most of the ministers coming from the same village; young Teodoro, the head of the National Guard, was only one of Macias's relatives among many to hold high office.

Macias, who had failed the entrance exams to the colonial civil service three times, was distinctly uneasy around educated people. Before long, he had killed everyone who wore spectacles, a sure sign, in his peculiar opinion, of superior educational accomplishment, and it was dangerous for any Guinean to own so much as a page of printed matter. Under Macias, forced labour akin to slavery was re-introduced, though it did not prevent cocoa production (the main export at the time) from declining by five sixths.

Declaring himself President for Life and the Unique Miracle, he also acted as chief judge who sentenced thousands to death. Trusting no one, he spent most of his time in his ancestral village of Mongomo, where he kept the national treasury under his bed or in suitcases in his hut. Half Pol Pot, half Mobutu, he insisted that all Guineans Africanise their names.

Teodoro did not overthrow his uncle, subsequently try him in a cinema in Malabo and have him executed, because he had a tender conscience, for he himself was a well-known torturer. Rather, he realised that a terrible fate would befall him if he did not act. In 1979, six members of the National Guard that he commanded, including one of his brothers, had gone to Macias in Mongomo to ask him to release some of the money in his suitcases to pay the men and officers of the National Guard, who had gone without wages for some time. Infuriated by their impertinence, Macias had them shot, whereupon Teodoro decided that a coup was the best form of defence. It was a case of execute lest thou be executed.

In 1992, 13 years after the coup, oil was discovered offshore, and suddenly Equatorial Guinea - or more precisely, the family of Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo - was rich. Equatorial Guinea now produces more than one barrel of oil per day per inhabitant. But the president has remained more or less faithful to the political principles bequeathed to him by his uncle.

It was stated officially in 2003 that he was in permanent communication with God, and that he could therefore kill anyone he chose without having to answer to anyone. It is true that the rest of the world has forced him to have elections now and again, but he usually wins them with handsome majorities, gaining somewhere between 98.3 and 99.99 per cent of the votes. Perhaps the fact that one opposition leader, Severo Moto Nsa, was sentenced to 101 years' imprisonment helped voters decide which way to vote, especially as the ballot was not secret. And, as the nephew of the Unique Miracle put it with admirable forthrightness, "Anyone who doesn't vote for me is low class."

It is ironic that the president should be so morally outraged by the attempt upon his regime by mercenaries. His presidential guard is composed entirely of Moroccans, because he does not trust Guineans: and the Moroccans guard him not from idealism, but because they are paid to do so. Indeed, Moroccan mercenaries guard more than one West African tyrant. Obiang Nguema doesn't object to mercenaries as such: only to those who would overthrow him and deprive his family of the spoils of the Ministry of Mines and Petrol.

Equatorial Guinea is a concentrated distillate of all the woes of post-colonial Africa. It is all there: the corruption, the nepotism, tribalism, brutality, megalomania and - underlying everything else - the wounded amour propre and brittle self-esteem. And indeed, it must be a sign of the marginal importance of Africa to the rest of the world that a country, a third of whose population either fled or was killed by a presidential maniac, should be so completely unknown even to the well-informed.

give me what you've got then. Remember I don't deny that terrible things, the worst things imaginable, have happened in Africa. I'm a white African. My father was imprisoned in the infamous Nyayo House torture dungeons in Kenya by dictator Daniel arap Moi. I weep for the continent I love. But I believe there are many, many good people on it, and your proposal of wholescale extermination is offensive. Anyway, if you can give me a cogent explanation for your final solution for the African problem, I will be happy to hear it.

It may be your home, but Africa has been a s**thole of genocide and tribal atrocities for a long, LONG time. Uganda, Somalia, Rwanda, Sudan.........good God, man, how many examples of mass butchery and moral emptiness and darkness do you need ????

I am absolutely, positively convinced that the world would be a far better place if the continent of Africa.....and most of the middle east.........were totally depopulated. It won't happen in my lifetime, but these are peoples who have given ZIP to mankind except misery and heartache (especially to each other).

Defend it all you will......but I'll never set foot in that sewer. As poorly as you obviously think of me for my opinion, just look around your lovely continent at the two legged animals who live there, and just think of the horrors they have inflicted on each other for hundreds of years. THEN come talk to me, sport.

Up to a point Lord Propertius.

Scoop was written with Abyssinia in mind. The dogs of war includes a capital city of Clarence, which just happens to have been the former name of EG's capital. And it begins with a massive discovery of mineral wealth.

I stand corrected -- you are, of course, quite right.

The details in the story about Obiang and his family and the strange goings on in the upper echelons of eq's government are still strikingly similar to some of the descriptions of the jackson family in Waugh's novels.

COPPER

"It may be your home, but Africa has been a s**thole of genocide and tribal atrocities for a long, LONG time. Uganda, Somalia, Rwanda, Sudan.........good God, man, how many examples of mass butchery and moral emptiness and darkness do you need ???? "

or you could say...

It may be your home, but Europe has been a s**thole of genocide and tribal atrocities for a long, LONG time. Germany, USSR, the Ottoman Empire, Ireland.........good God, man, how many examples of mass butchery and moral emptiness and darkness do you need ????

Apparently we needed one more example of mass butchery and moral emptiness and darkness, because then you give us this:

"I am absolutely, positively convinced that the world would be a far better place if the continent of Africa.....and most of the middle east.........were totally depopulated. It won't happen in my lifetime, but these are peoples who have given ZIP to mankind except misery and heartache (especially to each other)."

When you are qualified to denounce moral emptiness, come talk to me then, sport.

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