Thread by @ObtainerOf

*Thread*
Francisco Macias Nguema, the insane and brutal dictator who reduced the population of his country by 75% in 10 years

Macias as he was known by, was born in a small village in Spanish Guinea in 1924, his father was a witchdoctor who was murdered and his mother commit suicide.

He wanted a job in the government, but failed the civil service exam three times, nonetheless he was able to secure a job as a translator in a 1961 delegation to Franco's government in Madrid.

Back in Guinea he climbed in power quickly as a corrupt courtroom translator where he would lie in his translations to cause trials to swing one way or another. He eventually served as mayor of his hometown. It was around this time his mental instability started to show

In another delegation to Spain discussing the independence of Guinea, Macias became unhinged and went on a long rant about how Hitler's real goal was to liberate Africa from colonial powers and the war in Europe was an accident

His rise continued, but before running in the 1968 election for president of the newly independent nation, he went back to Madrid. Fearing that he was mentally unstable and insane he got a psychological evaluation. He was insane. Later that year he won the election

Once elected Macias began running a fairly standard autocratic regime, imprisoning and executing critics and solidifying his claim as dictator for life. After another secret trip to Spain for psychiatric help, Macias started behaving erratically, even for a dictator

This list of his strange behaviors is not in chronological order.
Macias did not want anyone leave Guinea so he mined the one road out of the country and banned the use of boats which stopped all fishing and lead to famine.

His paranoia of spies and traitors turned his army into a death squad that would murder entire villages if one person was accused of a crime. Most of his top advisors were murdered by him as well, usually through defenestration

Courts did exist, but defense teams were notorious for incriminating the suspects and recommending the death penalty to the judges

Macias banned the word "intellectual" and had everyone who wore glasses rounded up and executed. He also banned the wearing of shoes

He went on a stiff anti Spanish anti Catholic purge, making both punishable by death. He banned medicine. He Africanized his own name and cut ties with most other nations, except for North Korea, where he stayed great friends with Kim Il Sung

His wife and children were sent to live in North Korea and one of his Daughters lived there for many years. She eventually moved to South Korea and lives there to this day, insisting Korean culture is her native culture

On Christmas one year early in his reign, he had a few hundred political prisoners brought to the national soccer stadium where his soldiers wearing Santa hats gunned them down while "Those Were the Days" by Mary Hopkins played from the loudspeakers

Macias grew afraid of the capital and moved to a compound in his home town. When he left the city, he turned off the power plants and said he would use magic to power the country

On his compound he had a personal prison and part of his daily routine was personally executing prisoners. He performed blood magic learned from his father on his victims and reports say he was high on a cocktail of hallucinogenic drugs this entire time

He kept all the skulls of the people he killed and would use the skulls to beat more people to death. In his house he was known to reject his advisors so he could have meetings with ghosts and ghouls

Macias had a God complex and even made the motto of Equatorial Guinea "There is no other God than Macias Nguema". He had the chief of the Central Bank murdered and moved the country's entire reserves to his house, where he burned most of it

Ten years into his rule, the country had basically stopped working. What people were left were starving and Macias was overthrown by his nephew. He was executed at the infamous Black Beach Prison in 1979, by a group of Moroccan mercenaries as locals were too scared to shoot him

Before his rule the population of Guinea was somewhere over 200,000. Over 100,000 people fled the country despite the roads being mined and between 40-80 thousand were murdered by his regime. Equatorial Guinea has still not recovered from his reign

Thank you for reading, I know this thread was dark. There have been many mass murderers in history, but I highlighted Macias for how bizarre his actions were, some have dubbed him the "witchdoctor president". It is important to remember he was democratically elected.
-Indy