Part One: The Dumbest Coup In World History

Robert is joined by Bridget Todd to discuss the Wonga Coup.

Footnotes:

1. Saving Sierra Leone, At a Price
2. Safety at a price: Military expertise for sale or rent
3. ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare, mercenary in Congo who later led a failed coup, dies at 100
4. An African adventure: Inside story of the wonga coup
5. Ely Calil, backer of a farcical coup plot, died on May 28th
6. A mercenary's tale
7. Understanding the Wonga Coup
8. The Wonga Coup
9. Simon Mann, freed dog of war, is demanding justice
10. The strange and evil world of Equatorial Guinea
11. The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs, and a Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in an Oil-Rich Corner of Africa

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Shit, damn it. Nope, bad Um. That's the introduction for
the podcast though, because we're recording. Welcome to Behind the Bastards,
the podcast that is not introduced very well, but often
include stories of terrible people. Uh today, my guest to
help me kind of rewright the ship. After that terrible

(00:23):
introduction is the inimitable Bridget Todd Bridget Hello, Hello, I'm
so happy to be here, and even though we're not
physically in the same place, I am happy to be
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

(00:43):
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,

(01:04):
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

(01:25):
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

(01:46):
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

(02:09):
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

(02:30):
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

(02:51):
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

(03:11):
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?

(03:33):
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,

(03:53):
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

(04:14):
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.

(04:35):
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

(04:55):
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

(05:15):
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

(05:36):
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

(05:57):
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

(06:20):
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,

(06:40):
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

(07:00):
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

(07:24):
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

(07:44):
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

(08:05):
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

(08:28):
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

(08:50):
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

(09:12):
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

(09:34):
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

(09:56):
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,

(10:18):
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,

(10:39):
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

(11:01):
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

(11:25):
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

(11:46):
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

(12:07):
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

(12:29):
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

(12:50):
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

(13:14):
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

(13:38):
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.

(14:02):
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

(14:24):
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.

(14:46):
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

(15:10):
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.

(15:32):
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

(15:53):
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

(16:16):
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

(16:38):
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

(16:59):
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.

(17:20):
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,

(17:42):
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,

(18:08):
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

(18:30):
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

(18:52):
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

(19:13):
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

(19:34):
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

(19:56):
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,

(20:18):
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

(20:38):
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

(20:58):
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

(21:20):
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

(21:42):
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

(22:04):
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

(22:28):
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

(22:49):
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,

(23:09):
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

(23:31):
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,

(23:52):
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

(24:14):
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

(24:37):
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.

(24:58):
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

(25:23):
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

(25:43):
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.

(26:05):
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

(26:28):
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

(26:48):
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

(27:11):
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

(27:34):
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.

(27:59):
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

(28:21):
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,

(28:43):
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

(29:06):
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

(29:28):
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

(29:49):
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

(30:09):
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.

(30:32):
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

(30:55):
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

(31:17):
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

(31:38):
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

(32:00):
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

(32:20):
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

(32:40):
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.

(33:01):
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

(33:22):
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

(33:43):
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.

(34:07):
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

(34:32):
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,

(34:54):
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,

(35:20):
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

(35:42):
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.

(36:05):
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

(36:27):
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,

(36:50):
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

(37:10):
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

(37:30):
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.

(37:51):
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

(38:12):
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

(38:36):
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

(39:00):
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

(39:22):
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

(39:44):
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

(40:05):
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

(40:27):
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

(40:48):
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.

(41:12):
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,

(41:35):
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

(41:57):
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

(42:19):
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

(42:40):
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

(43:01):
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

(43:22):
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.

(43:45):
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

(44:07):
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

(44:29):
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

(44:53):
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

(45:18):
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

(45:39):
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

(46:03):
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

(46:24):
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

(46:47):
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,

(47:07):
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,

(47:30):
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,

(47:50):
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

(48:11):
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,

(48:34):
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

(48:55):
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

(49:16):
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

(49:38):
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

(49:59):
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

(50:20):
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.

(50:43):
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.

(51:05):
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

(51:28):
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

(51:51):
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

(52:21):
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

(52:42):
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

(53:02):
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.

(53:23):
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

(53:43):
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.

(54:06):
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

(54:28):
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

(54:49):
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,

(55:12):
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

(55:33):
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

(55:55):
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

(56:15):
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

(56:36):
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

(56:57):
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

(57:17):
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

(57:39):
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

(58:00):
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

(58:24):
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

(58:47):
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

(59:09):
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

(59:31):
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,

(59:51):
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

(01:00:14):
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

(01:00:34):
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

(01:00:54):
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

(01:01:17):
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,

(01:01:40):
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.