Malabo

Malabo is the capital city of Equatorial Guinea. located on the northern coast of Bioko Island (formerly Fernando Poo[?]. It has a population of approximately 38,000.

The city was first founded by the British in 1827, who leased the island from Spain during the colonial period. Named Port Clarence, it was used as a naval station in the effort to suppress the slave trade. Many newly freed slaves were also settled there, prior to the establish of Sierra Leone as a colony for freed slaves. While many of them later relocated to Sierra Leone, some of their descendants, called Fernandinos[?], can still be found in Malabo and the surrounding area, where they constitute a distinct ethnic group, speaking their own Afro-Portuguese pidgin dialect.

When the island reverted to complete Spanish control, Malabo was renamed Santa Isabel. It was chosen to replace the mainland town of Bata as the capital of the country in 1969, and was renamed Malabo in 1973 as part of President Macie Nguema Biyogo[?]'s campaign replace European place names with African ones.

During his "reign of terror," Nguema Biyogo suppressed the country's Bubi[?] minority, which formed the majority on Bioko Island (then called Fernando Poo), and brought many of his own tribespeople, the Fang[?] to Malabo. In the final years of his rule, when Equatorial Guinea was sometimes known as the "Auschwitz of Africa," much of the city's population fled as, indeed, did much of the country's. Malabo has yet to recover from the scars of that period.