Schedule

As of January 2024, the little-known nation of Equatorial Guinea (West/Central Africa) is the world’s longest running dictatorship. A five decade-long history of politically motivated violence, combined with pervasive African discourses that link power and wealth with occult practices, makes people live in a permanent state of anxiety. Given the traditionalist streak of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema’s brand of authoritarianism, women are susceptible to routinized forms of violence that range from gender prejudice to systematic sexual exploitation. Guineana women cope with their vulnerability by telling stories that make their experiences graspable and communicable. These stories, however, are changing. Previously featuring ‘traditional’ elements such as witchcraft passed down through the generations and sex pacts with demon mermaids, women’s stories now focus on acts of direct bodily harm such as kidnappings and ritual vivisections for the purpose of cannibalism allegedly practiced by ambitious politicians. Building on ethnographic material collected over a span of ten years and two long-term periods of anthropological fieldwork in Malabo, the Equatoguinean capital, my presentation seeks to understand how and why women’s stories are changing. It suggests that as political instability and economic precarity have increased over the past decade, preexisting fears toward the prospect of occult aggression have resulted in factual episodes of untold violence, subsequently turning women’s coping narratives into shocking cautionary tales about the dangers of mingling with ruthless ‘big men’.