The Incomplete Conquest of Spanish Guinea 1471-1910

Authors

Pual Guajardo

Keywords

Fernando Po, conquest, resistance, equatorial guinea, encounters

Abstract

Mary Henrietta Kingsley, the famous early female explorer of Africa, once remarked that an appointment to the Equatoguinean island of Fernando Po was “equivalent to execution, only more uncomfortable.”1 Similarly, historian Randall Fegley remarked that Port Clarence, which became the capital of Equatorial Guinea, was known as “death’s waiting room.”2 When we think of the Spanish Empire, we usually envision the empire that decimated the Aztecs and the Incas, not a regime that failed to conquer and colonize an island one-fifth the size of Hawaii. Yet, for more than 400 years, the small indigenous community of Fernando Po quietly defied European conquest. While historians have analyzed Equatorial Guinea, they have yet to connect the country to the historical framework of the incomplete conquest. This paper challenges the myth that wealthier, larger, and more powerful European countries naturally conquered smaller, weaker, and poorer countries. This essay also expands the historiography of the incomplete conquest by examining Native resistance on the African island of Fernando Po and introduces new connections into Equatoguinean history. The primary lens used to examine the incomplete conquest of Equatorial Guinea are encounters: Portuguese, Spanish, and British explorers all wrote about the country from 1400-1900, and this paper contextualizes and examines a number of these travelogs and written accounts.

Recommended Citation

Guajardo, Pual (2023) "The Incomplete Conquest of Spanish Guinea 1471-1910," The Thetean: A Student Journal for Scholarly Historical Writing: Vol. 52: Iss. 1, Article 4.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/thetean/vol52/iss1/4