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From Plantation Workers to Wealthy Merchants: The Changing Status of Nigerian Immigrants in Equatorial Guinea

David Aworawo, Ph.D., Department of History and Strategic Studies, University of Lagos, Nigeria
d_aworawo@yahoo.com

The introduction of cocoa to Fernando Po from São Tomé in 1854 and its extensive cultivation in the Spanish – controlled island from the last quarter of the 19th century, made labor a crucial problem. Fernando Po is Equatorial Guinea’s major island which was merged with the mainland territory of Rio Muni by Spain to form Equatorial Guinea in the 1960s. The population of Equatorial Guinea has been consistently less than half a million since the 19th century. The country was therefore unable to meet the labor needs of the cocoa plantations. Recourse was made to labor recruitment from neighboring countries and by the 1940s Nigerians had become the most populous and important group of immigrants working in plantations across the tiny country. For more than half a century Nigerian migrant labor sustained the cultivation of cocoa in Equatorial Guinea, and by implication the country’s economy, cocoa being Equatorial Guinea’s major export commodity. By the mid-1990s, however, with the discovery and extensive exploitation of crude petroleum in Equatorial Guinea, plantation agriculture became quickly abandoned as earnings from agricultural products paled into insignificance compared to petro-dollar. Many Nigerian immigrants in Equatorial Guinea who had earned a living working on the farms had to change to other economic activities. The majority became traders and they have dominated the markets across the country since the 1990s the way they had sustained the farms before then. Our work examines the economic activities of Nigerian immigrants in Equatorial Guinea and their changing status since the last decade.