Speaker 1: Shit, damn it. Nope, bad Um. That's the introduction for
Speaker 1: the podcast though, because we're recording. Welcome to Behind the Bastards,
Speaker 1: the podcast that is not introduced very well, but often
Speaker 1: include stories of terrible people. Uh today, my guest to
Speaker 1: help me kind of rewright the ship. After that terrible
Speaker 1: introduction is the inimitable Bridget Todd Bridget Hello, Hello, I'm
Speaker 1: so happy to be here, and even though we're not
Speaker 1: physically in the same place, I am happy to be
Speaker 1: here doing this socially distant podcast to you. We are
Speaker 1: very socially distant because you and I are almost as
Speaker 1: distant as we could possibly be while still being on
Speaker 1: the same continent. So that's very very responsible. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: you're You're on one side, I'm on the other. I'm
Speaker 1: in d c Um. We're all wearing our masks and
Speaker 1: freaking the funk out. You know, here are the nation's capital. Yeah,
Speaker 1: here in where I am. Uh, no one is wearing
Speaker 1: a mask and we all live in the woods. Um,
Speaker 1: but we are both coastal elites, so that's fun. Um.
Speaker 1: De Bridget, you are you are? You are a veteran podcaster.
Speaker 1: You were on my podcast early on in behind the
Speaker 1: Bastard's run. When we went to uh protest Nazis at
Speaker 1: the second Unite the Right rally in d C. That
Speaker 1: was fun. It was so fun. It was that was
Speaker 1: my first time I protested a lot of things in
Speaker 1: my life. That was my first time specifically protesting Nazis. Um,
Speaker 1: it was a good time. It was it was it
Speaker 1: was a little like um, it was a little it
Speaker 1: was a new experience, I'll put it that way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a good thing to have done. And speaking
Speaker 1: of good things to have done, Um, you know what's
Speaker 1: not a good thing to do? What's that attempt to
Speaker 1: overthrow the government of a sovereign nation for your own profit.
Speaker 1: That's a good thing to do. Know, that was such
Speaker 1: a good intro. I'm so proud, Thank you, thank cut. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what we're talking about today. We're talking specifically about
Speaker 1: we're talking about cups because coups are in the news. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm proud of that one too. Uh. You remember when
Speaker 1: I'm those guys tried to invade Venezuela and it didn't
Speaker 1: work out and one of them wound up lying in
Speaker 1: his own pa. Well, when that happened, I started getting
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of people hit me up on Twitter
Speaker 1: being like, you should do an episode about this, and
Speaker 1: we will someday. But there's just there's there's so many
Speaker 1: more dumb details that haven't come out yet. I'm certain
Speaker 1: that it would be silly to cover it right now.
Speaker 1: But also some folks reached out and said, like, you
Speaker 1: should cover something called the Wonga Coup, which was a
Speaker 1: coup in two thousand four in Equatorial Guinea that's generally
Speaker 1: seen as one of the worst coup attempts at of
Speaker 1: all time. So that's kind of what we're talking about today.
Speaker 1: But I fell down a rabbit hole researching it, and
Speaker 1: so mostly we're going to talk about like the whole
Speaker 1: weird and dumb history of white people trying to overthrow
Speaker 1: governments in Africa, um and usually being doing a really
Speaker 1: bad job of it. So that's today. Yeah, that ship
Speaker 1: never goes well, right, like it's it's always it always
Speaker 1: turns out badly. Yeah, yeah, and it's awesome because like
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter if the leader they're trying to overthrow
Speaker 1: is legitimately shitty or not. They always make the situation worse.
Speaker 1: And and given how bad some of the dictators are.
Speaker 1: It's kind of incredible that they managed to like, like,
Speaker 1: you've got a guy who like takes hands from people,
Speaker 1: um for fun, and then like they make it worse somehow.
Speaker 1: It's incredible. So that's today's podcast topic. Are you ready?
Speaker 1: Are you ready to dive into this bridget I'm ready.
Speaker 1: I'm locked and loaded. I'm stressed in let's do this, alright, alright, alright, alright,
Speaker 1: So I want to start by going back in time
Speaker 1: to what I think is the piece of fiction that
Speaker 1: is kind of the seed for this desire in the
Speaker 1: heads of some white dudes to carry out coups in Africa,
Speaker 1: because there's a single fictional book that really started this
Speaker 1: ball rolling, and it's a book called King's Solemn Minds.
Speaker 1: Have you ever heard of King Solomon's Minds? Oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: So this is um I read my dad read this
Speaker 1: to me when I was a kid. Uh, And it's
Speaker 1: like it was one of the big influences behind Indiana Jones,
Speaker 1: which should give you an idea of kind of like
Speaker 1: some of the themes that we can expect from King
Speaker 1: Solomon's Minds. And it was it was written by a
Speaker 1: fellow named h Writer Haggard and h writer Haggard is
Speaker 1: like the colonial fiction writer of the eighteen hundreds in
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds, UM and King Solomon's Minds is considered
Speaker 1: to be like the quintessential classic of British colonialist leadership.
Speaker 1: It's the first novel to star big game hunter and
Speaker 1: explorer Alan Quartermain, who was like kind of like the
Speaker 1: James Bond of the of the of of colonialism um.
Speaker 1: And in fact, in the movie League of Extraordinary Gentleman
Speaker 1: he was played by Sean Connery, So that's interesting. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: now I know, I know it. Yeah, he's like the
Speaker 1: and if you've never even read one of these books,
Speaker 1: you've been influenced by this guy because he's Alan Quartermain
Speaker 1: is like the arc type of like the British big
Speaker 1: game hunting like Safari dude, and like, yeah, like the
Speaker 1: guy in um fucking Jumanji, like the White Guy Hunter
Speaker 1: is based off of old Quartermain. Like that's just how
Speaker 1: they always do it. It's a very influential character and
Speaker 1: in King Solomon's Minds is generally regarded as the first
Speaker 1: example of a book in the Lost World genre of fiction.
Speaker 1: So you know those those kinds of books and movies
Speaker 1: where like a bunch of explorers or scientists find a
Speaker 1: loster forgotten city in some desolate chunk of the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm pretty familiar with that genre. Yeah, H Writer Haggard
Speaker 1: invented it. King Solomon's Minds is like the first example
Speaker 1: of that kind of book. I feel like, I feel
Speaker 1: like I can picture what this guy looks like, Like
Speaker 1: I'm picturing a safari hat, like maybe some like loose
Speaker 1: khaki pants of some kind. Yeah, very specific kind of
Speaker 1: facial hair. Yes, you you know you know everything about
Speaker 1: H Writer Haggard in his life now, Um. I mean
Speaker 1: you kind of get it by the name. Like if
Speaker 1: someone tells you there's a famous author named H Writer Haggard,
Speaker 1: you could probably guess, Oh, he wrote books about how
Speaker 1: colonialism is awesome, didn't he? Yeah? Um. So, the basic
Speaker 1: gist of the story is that a group of explorers,
Speaker 1: led by my own quartermain go on the search for
Speaker 1: a lost europe and who went missing looking for the
Speaker 1: fabled King Solomon's minds, and that's the big Biblical King Solomon.
Speaker 1: There's this rumor that he had these famous diamond minds YadA, YadA, YadA.
Speaker 1: Uh So they go off looking for these this white
Speaker 1: guy and these minds, and they wind up finding a
Speaker 1: lost African civilization that possesses tremendous wealth. The movie Congo,
Speaker 1: based off the Michael Crichton book of the same name,
Speaker 1: is the modern adaptation of this story. So yeah, and
Speaker 1: interestingly enough, for as racist as this book is, it's
Speaker 1: not as racist as you might assume. Um it. Actually
Speaker 1: it actually opens with the main character, Alan Quartermain going
Speaker 1: on an angry and angry rant about how the in
Speaker 1: word is never okay to use um and it's it's
Speaker 1: always So that's good, right, Like that's a step that's
Speaker 1: pretty progressive, I guess what you mean. Yeah. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: there's even an interracial relationship in it, although the black
Speaker 1: woman dating the white guy dies. Um, but like eight
Speaker 1: that's about as good as your credit kids from a
Speaker 1: white guy book. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't be expecting
Speaker 1: that from the eighteen hundreds, like a little interracial pairing.
Speaker 1: Of course she has to die in the end, of course. Yeah,
Speaker 1: um yeah. And h writer Haggard did repeatedly point out
Speaker 1: through his characters that a lot of European colonialist officers
Speaker 1: were horrible people. Alan Cortermain regularly notes that a lot
Speaker 1: of black africancy meats are more worthy of the word
Speaker 1: gentleman than British officials, so it's it's not the kind
Speaker 1: of racist you'd expect, but it's also simultaneously still one
Speaker 1: of the most racist books ever written for a very
Speaker 1: specific reason. Um see. The climax of the book comes
Speaker 1: when the explorers managed to finally okay the lost kingdom
Speaker 1: of Kuwana Land, which is a surprisingly well organized and
Speaker 1: advanced society that's completely cut off from the rest of
Speaker 1: the world by tall mountains in a wide desert. The
Speaker 1: kingdom is ruled by a cruel king, Twala, who maintains
Speaker 1: power by dint of horrific violence. The white explorers are
Speaker 1: able to get special treatment by convincing the natives that
Speaker 1: they're white men from the stars, basically magical gods, but
Speaker 1: they're horrified by the brutality of the king and his
Speaker 1: evil advisor, Gagool, who regularly burns innocent people as witches
Speaker 1: and traders. Um, yeah, I know, a yeah. So it
Speaker 1: becomes gradually clear that the current king earned his position
Speaker 1: by murdering his brother, the old King, and forcing his
Speaker 1: brother's wife an infant son, out into the desert to die.
Speaker 1: So there's a lot of the Lion King in this
Speaker 1: story too, Like it was clearly inspired by King Solomon's
Speaker 1: minds in a lot of ways. And anyway, it turns
Speaker 1: out that one of the porters that the white expedition
Speaker 1: team brought along, um, this guy named Umbopa is the
Speaker 1: royal child who got ex sild you know, decades earlier,
Speaker 1: and he was noted throughout the book is being better
Speaker 1: looking and more well spoken than the other Africans who
Speaker 1: like we're working for the expedition. So the white people
Speaker 1: decided to overthrow the king of Kuwana Land and put
Speaker 1: their friend Umboba on the front on the throne instead,
Speaker 1: And after a vicious battle that kills a lot of
Speaker 1: black people but no white people, they succeeded instituting regime
Speaker 1: change in Kuwana Land and they get to go home
Speaker 1: with pockets full of diamonds. So that's like the that's
Speaker 1: the story of Like you can you can draw a
Speaker 1: straight line from King Solomon's mind to the thinking that
Speaker 1: led us to war in Iraq if you really like
Speaker 1: it's not hard, yeah, just killing off black and brown
Speaker 1: people and like like coming back with your pockets full
Speaker 1: of diamonds. Yeah, that that fantasy and you make everything
Speaker 1: better by putting your one black friend in charge and
Speaker 1: like yeah, that's the whole like that's the story. Um.
Speaker 1: So I also have to say it really is very
Speaker 1: Lion King, this idea that you know, this guy was
Speaker 1: more handsome and like somehow better and then like he comes,
Speaker 1: he goes away, comes back like I want to be
Speaker 1: watched The Lion King. Now, yeah, there's some there's some
Speaker 1: of this in The Lion King for sure. Obviously it
Speaker 1: has a lot of influences, but there's there's there's pieces
Speaker 1: of h writer Haggard in that script. So um yeah,
Speaker 1: this book was a huge success, was like one of
Speaker 1: the biggest books of the nineteenth century period. Um And
Speaker 1: like I said, it inspired the whole Lost World genre.
Speaker 1: It inspired probably tens of thousands of particularly white British kids,
Speaker 1: but a lot of Americans too, to go to Africa
Speaker 1: and like overthrow fucking countries. Um And while he did,
Speaker 1: like absolutely this book inspired real world coups, it was
Speaker 1: also inspired by stuff that had happened earlier in the
Speaker 1: history of like African colonialism. Um. Cecil Rhodes is mercenary
Speaker 1: army with the British South Africa Company had conquered Zimbobwi
Speaker 1: and Zambia. The British East Africa Company, under the command
Speaker 1: of Mercenary Frederick Lugard, had conquered large chunks of East
Speaker 1: and West Africa uh and in all these places, local
Speaker 1: leaders were selected to rule based on their amended amenability
Speaker 1: to the desires of white Europeans, and for decades the
Speaker 1: whole story was repeated all over the continent. So H
Speaker 1: writer Haggard didn't come up with this idea obviously, but
Speaker 1: he created like this very classical and and and attractive
Speaker 1: fictional justification for it that helped, um helped solidify it
Speaker 1: in the heads of of white colonialists. Is like the
Speaker 1: way things ought to go. Um. So yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: that's cool. It's not cool, but it happened. It's not cool,
Speaker 1: it's funny. I really feel like in addition to the
Speaker 1: way that we understand, you know, um kind of American
Speaker 1: exceptionalism and the idea of like going to another country
Speaker 1: or another continent and like and like we're going to
Speaker 1: quote save them and then get rich in the process,
Speaker 1: I feel like I see that vibe reverberated in so
Speaker 1: many different ways, Like even the idea of like how
Speaker 1: white people have this idea that they're going to go
Speaker 1: to Africa and save the babies, and they post a
Speaker 1: picture of them like helping in Africa Instagram. Like the
Speaker 1: entire kind of gross vibe. I feel like it's sort
Speaker 1: of established as a blueprint in this work. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: really is. And it's like right down to the fact
Speaker 1: that this would actually be I think a less unsettling
Speaker 1: novel King Solomon's Minds if h writer Haggard had been
Speaker 1: super hatefully racist. Um, but he's like you see part
Speaker 1: of like a lot of the horror that comes from
Speaker 1: like attempts even as particularly in the modern day, like
Speaker 1: when we we talked about that lady, that white girl
Speaker 1: in Africa who like ran that baby killing clinic. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: fucking wild, yeah wild. And it's um, it's always it's
Speaker 1: always sketchier and often more dangerous when the person doing
Speaker 1: this stuff is like super woke about it, right, And
Speaker 1: that's kind of what's so scary about King Solomon's Minds
Speaker 1: is that it's this white guy being like, oh, these
Speaker 1: white dudes in Africa are doing horrible things. I know,
Speaker 1: the right thing. White dudes in Africa should be doing, Like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you totally hit on something that it's sort
Speaker 1: of like scary. If someone is evil and racist, I
Speaker 1: get it, I understand it. I know where they're coming from. Cool.
Speaker 1: If they have a mentality that they are righteous or
Speaker 1: that they're like the fact that this person probably thought
Speaker 1: he was like doing something good like that is so
Speaker 1: much scarier. And I feel like has such a more
Speaker 1: a bigger capacity for evil when you think that you're righteous. Yep.
Speaker 1: And and the person we will eventually get to who
Speaker 1: carries out this possibly the worst planned coup in all
Speaker 1: of history, is like the Patriot, well the archetype, at
Speaker 1: least of of that kind of person. So uh. As
Speaker 1: the eighteen hundreds turned into the nineteen hundreds in the
Speaker 1: world wars came and went, Europeans in particular and white
Speaker 1: folks in general gradually started to accept that, on balance,
Speaker 1: colonialism had at least been a problem amatic idea uh Europe.
Speaker 1: Europe gradually began to release their active or their captive
Speaker 1: African colonies from their chains, and since there was no
Speaker 1: profit in doing this, colonies were generally let go in
Speaker 1: the laziest way possible, slap dash elections were held, and
Speaker 1: as a general rule, men were left in charge who
Speaker 1: colonialists thought would be trusted to rule in a manner
Speaker 1: beneficial to European economic interests. One example of this would
Speaker 1: be former British military sergeant Idi Amine, who we we
Speaker 1: did an episode about, you know you, just like we
Speaker 1: gotta leave this country. It's there's no money in like
Speaker 1: actually setting up a functional government before we go. So like, uh,
Speaker 1: this guy is good at beating people up and likes us.
Speaker 1: Let's put him in charge. Nothing will go wrong. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So obviously, sometimes these newly freed local people's made decisions
Speaker 1: that white folks thought were dangerous. Since the militaries of
Speaker 1: states like Great Britain and Belgium could no longer be
Speaker 1: used to enforce order directly, they often turned to mercenaries
Speaker 1: to do so. These modern datacendants of Alan Quartermain and
Speaker 1: his companions regularly used their superior military training and access
Speaker 1: to firepower to carry out their own coups. Mad Mike
Speaker 1: core is probably the patron saint of this kind of guy.
Speaker 1: He was originally a British soldier born in Calcutta and
Speaker 1: raised on a steady diet of novels by h writer
Speaker 1: Haggard and his fellow adventure writers. Mad Mike joined the
Speaker 1: British Army, but by the nineteen sixties the Empire was
Speaker 1: in steep decline and the colonies he'd been raised to
Speaker 1: help control we're flying free. So Mad Mike became a mercenary.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty one, he he traveled to the Congo
Speaker 1: to fight Moishi Shamba, who wanted to create a breakaway
Speaker 1: nation by leading the Congo's wealthiest territory and secession. Now
Speaker 1: this was all, in reality a plot by rich Belgian
Speaker 1: business owners in the CIA to ensure that black Africans
Speaker 1: didn't have the opportunity to control a huge chunk of
Speaker 1: their continents wealth. Like this breakaway chunk of the Congo
Speaker 1: was more friendly to Belgian economic interests, and the Congo
Speaker 1: at that point was controlled by the socialist leader who
Speaker 1: they later assassinated. We did an episode on that, Patrice
Speaker 1: lamumba Um. But yeah, so the whole attempt failed. The
Speaker 1: secession attempt failed, and two of Mike's men were allegedly
Speaker 1: cannibalized in the attempt, But he didn't lose the bug
Speaker 1: for trying to like lead coups in African nations. A
Speaker 1: couple of years later, Shambay was elected Prime Minister of
Speaker 1: the Congo under shady read. The CIA put him in
Speaker 1: power circumstances and Shambay angled himself as an anti communist fighter,
Speaker 1: but he was really just a tyrant, unhappy Congolese people
Speaker 1: revolted against Shamba, backed by the U. S. S R.
Speaker 1: And the Cuban government. Se Guevara got involved, and obviously
Speaker 1: these guys weren't super great either. So basically you just
Speaker 1: had kind of and this is like the story of
Speaker 1: Africa in a lot of the Cold War, you have
Speaker 1: like Soviet imperialists on one side being like, we'll give
Speaker 1: you guns if you do the thing we like, and
Speaker 1: you have capitalist imperialists on the other side going like,
Speaker 1: we'll give you guns if you do the thing that
Speaker 1: we like. And Mad Mike Core and his fellow mercenaries
Speaker 1: made a lot of money by just kind of standing
Speaker 1: in the middle and shooting at whoever had the most
Speaker 1: cash or shooting for whoever had the most cash. Um
Speaker 1: For years, the Congo Wars provided white combat veterans with
Speaker 1: steady employment. Mad Mike was a World War Two veteran.
Speaker 1: A lot of these guys were World War two veterans,
Speaker 1: and like they were just guys who, like after the
Speaker 1: war ended, they couldn't do anything else but kill people.
Speaker 1: And a number of them were actually Nazi military veterans.
Speaker 1: That was even in like the French Foreign Legion had
Speaker 1: a lot of Nazi military veterans because they were like,
Speaker 1: all I know how to do is kill people. And
Speaker 1: the French Foreign Legions like, will you help us kill
Speaker 1: people who aren't white in Africa? And they were like absolutely,
Speaker 1: as long as I'm killing so uh now, Mad Mike.
Speaker 1: Uh again, it's probably the most famous of these guys,
Speaker 1: and he he among other things, he was renowned for
Speaker 1: telling black mercenaries who attempted to join his mercenary army
Speaker 1: that he only hired white women or white men. Uh.
Speaker 1: He earned a colorful reputation for, among other things, shooting
Speaker 1: the toes off of a fellow mercenary who had raped
Speaker 1: a woman in the field. Um And as a general rule, uh,
Speaker 1: Mad Mike soldiers were kind of rough customers. You might say, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would say they sound like rock customers. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: shoot shot the toes off a man, I mean, you know.
Speaker 1: So as the fighting in the Congo War on Mad
Speaker 1: Mike wound up on the side of Mobotu sesse Ciccu,
Speaker 1: the Congo's longest lived dictator. Uh Moboto also patterned himself
Speaker 1: as an anti communist fighter, which was enough to earn
Speaker 1: the allegiance of the CIA and of Mad Mike. In
Speaker 1: order to help Mobot stay in power and fight against rebels,
Speaker 1: he put together a commando army of Irish mercenaries, the
Speaker 1: Wild Geese. Here's how the Washington Post recalled their service
Speaker 1: in the obituary they wrote for Mad Mike earlier this year.
Speaker 1: This guy fucking had the longest life. Like, sorry, and
Speaker 1: I went a million years. I never would have thought
Speaker 1: that you were going to say he died earlier this year. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was a hundred years old. Like, get incredible, um quote,
Speaker 1: I believe we have a great mission here, he told
Speaker 1: a fellow mercenary. According to a history of the Simba
Speaker 1: Rebellion by John Hopkins, professor Piero guil Jas, the Africans
Speaker 1: have gotten used to the idea that they can do
Speaker 1: whatever they like to us Whites, that they can trample
Speaker 1: on us and spit on us. So that's that's the
Speaker 1: kind of fella Mike is dubbed the White Giants. Mr
Speaker 1: Horrors men spelled swept through the country, mowing down untrained
Speaker 1: and outnumbered Seemba forces who believed that witchcraft made them impervious.
Speaker 1: Two bullets in total. The mercenary unit was paid about
Speaker 1: three thousand dollars a month by US authorities, according to
Speaker 1: a Post report, and backed by what The New York
Speaker 1: Times described as an instant air force created by the
Speaker 1: c i A. So can way back up to the
Speaker 1: White Giants just for like one second that needed. It's
Speaker 1: it's actually the reason why they were called giants is
Speaker 1: actually pretty sad. It's because they all grew up in
Speaker 1: wealthier western countries and had access to a lot of
Speaker 1: protein and milk and stuff like that when they were
Speaker 1: growing up, and folks in the cong go Uh tended
Speaker 1: to be malnourished, in large part due to the fact
Speaker 1: that the Belgian colonialists who had owned them had starved
Speaker 1: the entirety of Central Africa for decades prior to this point,
Speaker 1: and so people in the Congo tended to be smaller,
Speaker 1: and white mercenaries tended to be very large. Well that's up, Jesus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not great. It's not great. The world. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: the white giants or the wild geese, whatever you wanna
Speaker 1: call them, killed a shitload of people. Mike himself bragged
Speaker 1: to journalists, quote, killing communist is like killing vermin. Killing
Speaker 1: African nationalists is as if one is killing an animal.
Speaker 1: My men and I have killed between five thousand and
Speaker 1: ten thousand Congo rebels in the twenty months that I've
Speaker 1: spent in the Congo. But that's not enough. There are
Speaker 1: twenty million Congolees, you know, and I assumed that about
Speaker 1: half of them at one point or another were rebels
Speaker 1: whilst I was down there. This is interesting to me
Speaker 1: for a couple of reasons. One of them is that, uh,
Speaker 1: the generation prior to Mike, King Leopold of Belgium had
Speaker 1: killed fully half of the population of the Congo. And
Speaker 1: here you have another white guy generation later being like,
Speaker 1: if we just got rid of another half, yeah, pretty
Speaker 1: bad people, pretty bad. And Matt Mike is perfectly embodies
Speaker 1: the fact that a lot of the men who were
Speaker 1: responsible for fighting the Nazis would have been perfectly happy
Speaker 1: with Nazism if Hitler had just picked slightly different white
Speaker 1: people to fight. Oh yeah, I have to It's funny
Speaker 1: that you say this, I feel like I have to
Speaker 1: like tell, like admit something. When I was young, I
Speaker 1: thought that there was just like white people. I had
Speaker 1: no idea that there was like in like these white
Speaker 1: people don't like that white people. I thought it was
Speaker 1: just white people. And when we found that out, it
Speaker 1: was like a big sort of galaxy brained thing for me.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize that white people could have problems with
Speaker 1: other white people. That was like a whole um new
Speaker 1: understanding of how white people function. For me, it's we're fascinating.
Speaker 1: There's this thing going on. I mean it's been going
Speaker 1: on for a long time within like Nazi circles, but
Speaker 1: it's it's hitting the internet. Nazis now, well, we're like
Speaker 1: in depictions of Mussolini, they'll depict him as a black man.
Speaker 1: And the reason is because there's a chunk of white
Speaker 1: people who think that Italians are still who still think
Speaker 1: Italians aren't white. It's it's pretty wide the time. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, that's like the racism equivalent of still using
Speaker 1: my Space, like like we've moved on having like a
Speaker 1: hot mail email. Yeah, yeah, that's hot mail for Nazis
Speaker 1: is calling like Italians non white um so, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Mike killed a lot of people. Mike and has been
Speaker 1: were good enough at killing to ensure that the regime
Speaker 1: of Mbuto say Ciccu was established and allowed to persist
Speaker 1: for thirty brutal years. Mabot spent the time robbing the
Speaker 1: Congo blind, providing no social services, building no infrastructure, and
Speaker 1: torturing unknown numbers of Congolese people who complained about any
Speaker 1: of this. The CIA was fine with all of it, because, again,
Speaker 1: Maboto was not a communist. Now, um Mad Mike's success
Speaker 1: made him in to a mini celebrity, and he was
Speaker 1: indeed a colorful character, and one interview he told a
Speaker 1: Post reporter quote, I think I'd like to have been
Speaker 1: born in the time of Sir Francis Drake. Yes, out sailing,
Speaker 1: robbing the Spaniards, and when you brought the booty back
Speaker 1: to Queen Elizabeth, you knelt before her and she made
Speaker 1: you a night. You were respectable even though you were
Speaker 1: a thief. So yep, yep, that's the guy he is.
Speaker 1: So Unfortunately for Mad Mike, Mike and a lot of
Speaker 1: other people, it turns out that coups are kind of addictive.
Speaker 1: In nearly nineteen eighties, sixty two year old mad Mike
Speaker 1: Hory led forty men in an attempt to overthrow the
Speaker 1: socialist Resume regime of the Seychelles and reinstall an old
Speaker 1: pro capitalist president. The plan was comical. Mike's men dressed
Speaker 1: as rugby players with a drinking club named Ye ancient
Speaker 1: order of froth Blowers. They hid their A K forty
Speaker 1: seven's and fake bottom bags and posed as tourists. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: they all got fucking drunk his ship on the flight over,
Speaker 1: and so they were really drunk when they arrived at
Speaker 1: the harrival arrivals call and they started a fight with
Speaker 1: customs and so the customs guys like said like fuck you,
Speaker 1: We're gonna search your bags now. And then they found
Speaker 1: the A K forty seven, which sparked this massive gunfight
Speaker 1: in the customs hall at the airport and say the
Speaker 1: say shells. So again Mike and his men had overwhelming firepower,
Speaker 1: but they were also hammered. So they shot one of
Speaker 1: their own men to death and then killed one of
Speaker 1: the other soldiers. And this like running incompetent running gun
Speaker 1: battle that that ends when they hijack an Air India
Speaker 1: flight and forced the crew at gunpoint to fly them
Speaker 1: to South Africa. Oh my god, I have I part
Speaker 1: of me a little sympathetic for who among us has
Speaker 1: not had big plans because you got too drunk. Right. Look,
Speaker 1: look they're they're racists and monsters, but they're still humans,
Speaker 1: right Like, yeah, yes, I I too have had getting
Speaker 1: drunk on a plane interfere with a plan and lead
Speaker 1: to a fight at customs that leads to you killing someone. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean if I had an a K forty seven,
Speaker 1: I might have hijacked an Air India flight. Like there's
Speaker 1: no way to know. You know, they don't stop you.
Speaker 1: They never cut you off on Air Emirates when you're drinking.
Speaker 1: So yes, a lot of things can happen. Um, shout out,
Speaker 1: shout out to Air Emirates, shout out the open bar
Speaker 1: in the sky. So um. Yeah. So they were all
Speaker 1: arrested as soon as they landed in South Africa. And
Speaker 1: this is again apartheid. South Africa was like you crossed
Speaker 1: a line, Mike. Even we have to arrestue we're doing
Speaker 1: a buck ship to people, but we even we have
Speaker 1: standards like come Jesus, dude. So he gets arrested and
Speaker 1: during his trial Hoary testified that the South African government
Speaker 1: had approved the coup and given him weapons, and this
Speaker 1: was almost certainly true, although the government denied it because
Speaker 1: obviously South Africa fucking loved coups um as long as
Speaker 1: they were, you know, the right kind of coups um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the government denied it though. Mike was sentenced to ten
Speaker 1: years in prison, but he was released after just three.
Speaker 1: After he was freed, a journalist asked him if he
Speaker 1: planned to retire. He responded, this is all the question
Speaker 1: of opportunity. Mercenary opportunities now mainly exist in films and books,
Speaker 1: and yeah, as I told you, inconceivably, Mad Mike survived
Speaker 1: until February of this year, um, which is fucking wild
Speaker 1: when you talk to the mercenaries that came after him, though,
Speaker 1: generally say that Mike was one half of a holy
Speaker 1: duo of African mercenaries who kind of like inspired the
Speaker 1: whole modern modern field of mercenary dumb uh and the
Speaker 1: other half. His other half was a guy named Bob Dinnard,
Speaker 1: a French imperialist who did a lot of the same
Speaker 1: kind of stuff as Mad Mike, but more quietly, competently
Speaker 1: and on behalf of France. In nineteen seventy seven, Bob
Speaker 1: Dinard led eighty mercenaries in an attempt to overthrow the
Speaker 1: communist government of Benin, which had recently nationalized all of
Speaker 1: their banks and their petroleum industry. Unfortunately, Bob timed things badly.
Speaker 1: The president wasn't home when Dinard's mercenary army reached his
Speaker 1: pal us. A detachment of North Korean military advisors were
Speaker 1: at home, and they had heavy machine guns. So Bob's
Speaker 1: men were forced into a fighting retreat. But as we
Speaker 1: saw with Mad Mike Corey, uh, coups are addictive, and
Speaker 1: the very next year Bob Dinard hired another army to
Speaker 1: overthrow the government of the Comoros, a small island nation
Speaker 1: off of Africa's East coast. His fifty men brought brought
Speaker 1: sought off shotguns in a case of dompaign on Champagne.
Speaker 1: They landed on the coast, attacked the president of the palace,
Speaker 1: murdered the president and installed his rival. Then they got
Speaker 1: drunk on Champagne. Uh So, yeah, most of these mercenary
Speaker 1: coups don't work out well, but some of them do,
Speaker 1: and they're very profitable when they do. Also, shout out
Speaker 1: to the to the expensive fancy champagne. I mean these
Speaker 1: guys knew how to party. Look yeah, I mean again,
Speaker 1: that is a G move, Like yeah, bringing a case
Speaker 1: of champagne with you to the coup is Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's a G move. I yep. I don't want to interrupt.
Speaker 1: So I think your dog is like is he Is
Speaker 1: she humping something? She she she's not humping up thing.
Speaker 1: She's licking something. And I don't know. And I will
Speaker 1: not disrupt her in interactions. Leave her b I'm proud
Speaker 1: of her. I like, what's happening, and it gives you
Speaker 1: a free show while we record this episode. A show
Speaker 1: within a show is a show a show. Yes, Anderson
Speaker 1: has just performed a coup on behind the Bastards, taking
Speaker 1: over attention, uh and spoilers. She also has a case
Speaker 1: of dom pairing on champagne and a sawd off shotgun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: she knows you're talking about her. It's so funny. She's like,
Speaker 1: my brother's talking about me. I hear him. She thinks
Speaker 1: of you as her brother probably yeah, so uh yeah.
Speaker 1: This all builds to the point that there's a long
Speaker 1: history of small groups of mercenaries overthrowing tiny African nations
Speaker 1: reinforced in both actual ship that happened and in fiction
Speaker 1: like King Solomon's Minds. In the real world cases, western
Speaker 1: governments were generally involved, and almost always the South African government.
Speaker 1: The people who lived in these nations were never ever consulted.
Speaker 1: And all of this background brings me bridget to the
Speaker 1: story of Fernando Po. Have you ever heard of Fernando Po.
Speaker 1: I have not. So It's an island off the west
Speaker 1: coast of Africa and it makes up the bulk of
Speaker 1: the nation we now call Equatorial Guinea UM and Fernando
Speaker 1: Po was colonized by Spain prior to the Great Scramble
Speaker 1: for Africa, but they never really did anything with it.
Speaker 1: Bastard Pod alumni Henry Morton Stanley called the island the
Speaker 1: pearl of the Gulf of Guinea, but stated that he
Speaker 1: would not pay a penny for it as it was
Speaker 1: a jewel which Spain did not polish. So basically the
Speaker 1: Spanish like owned this place, but they never really did
Speaker 1: anything for it because there wasn't really anything to do.
Speaker 1: Like when white people went there, they always died because
Speaker 1: like they didn't have any immunity to the local diseases,
Speaker 1: and there wasn't any gold or anything that was generally
Speaker 1: considered to be super value valuable by white people on
Speaker 1: Fernando Po. So it was kind of like a refueling station,
Speaker 1: but not much more for for Spain for most of
Speaker 1: the time that they controlled it. Um So, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote next from a book called The Wonga Coup by
Speaker 1: Adam Roberts for a picture of how Fernando Po fared
Speaker 1: under colonialism. Quote. In nineteen thirty six, the British novelist
Speaker 1: Graham Green, who was generally fond of West Africa, dismissed
Speaker 1: the dreadful little Spanish island, where there existed a mild
Speaker 1: form of slavery that enabled a man to pawn his children.
Speaker 1: Towards the end of its two centuries of rules, Spain
Speaker 1: did little to improve the lives of those it ruled.
Speaker 1: The colonial power set up an economy based on cocoa
Speaker 1: plantations in a reasonable school system. Health campaigns reduced the
Speaker 1: impact of tropical diseases, at least on Fernando Po. By
Speaker 1: the second half of the twentieth century, Equatorial Guineas were
Speaker 1: less poor than most Africans thanks to exports of cocoa,
Speaker 1: but few Spaniards settled, and Native Africans were denied political
Speaker 1: rights and economic chances. When independence loomed, the Spanish organized
Speaker 1: hasty poles to find a new government. Spain under its
Speaker 1: own dictator, General Franco, was hardly qualified to promote democracy,
Speaker 1: and Equatorial Guinea was ill prepared when, in late nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight it became the hundred and twenty six member
Speaker 1: of the United Nations. After independence, things really went wrong.
Speaker 1: Its citizens were soon desperate to escape. A sleepy eyed
Speaker 1: man mass Nuguema won the elections. The shy son of
Speaker 1: a reverend and a brutal witch doctor known as his
Speaker 1: saintly father, Massias did badly at Catholic mission schools, but
Speaker 1: took up jobs as a junior bureaucrat and a coffee farmer,
Speaker 1: jen then as a court interpreter, and subsequently as mayor
Speaker 1: of a small town. He became an influential leader within
Speaker 1: an important subgroup of the Fang, the country's most populous
Speaker 1: ethnic group, and was groomed for office by a few
Speaker 1: Spaniards who believed he would serve their interests. So this
Speaker 1: isn't a great start for independence. For Equatorial Guinea and
Speaker 1: it's it's not going to be a great continuance. So
Speaker 1: I found another book called Double Paradox by Andrew Wedeman
Speaker 1: that explains that Macias largely wound up in power due
Speaker 1: to his ability to charm Spanish colonial officers. What him
Speaker 1: in notes that he impressed them with his willingness to
Speaker 1: treat other Guineans with contempt um, which is kind of
Speaker 1: the same story as idi Amine. The British liked him
Speaker 1: because he was good at cracking down on other like
Speaker 1: Africans who tried to get independence from England um, and
Speaker 1: they were like, Okay, this guy we can probably trust.
Speaker 1: But it turns out that macy has hated Spain too
Speaker 1: due to having to lick their boots for years, and
Speaker 1: as soon as he was in power, he like fucked
Speaker 1: them over and took every action he could do uproot
Speaker 1: any uproot any local industry that benefited Spanish companies. Uh.
Speaker 1: He formed a children's militia and used it to harass
Speaker 1: all the remaining white people out of Equatorial Guinea. And
Speaker 1: that doesn't necessarily sound too bad with the exception, but
Speaker 1: the problem is that like again, the whole economy of
Speaker 1: Equatorial Guinemy had been. Guinea had been based around these
Speaker 1: these cocoa plantations, and he kicks out everyone who knows
Speaker 1: how to operate and run them, um, and he nationalizes them.
Speaker 1: But rather than higher locals to run them, he brings
Speaker 1: in cheaper Nigerian workers to run the fields because he
Speaker 1: wants to make all of the profit it's from them.
Speaker 1: Um and yeah, so it's like he he completely uproots
Speaker 1: the entire economy overnight. Um and that is not a
Speaker 1: great thing to do, uh from an economics point of view.
Speaker 1: H Macy has also ordered the entire nation's retail sectors
Speaker 1: shut down and replaced it by a new network of
Speaker 1: state run stores. This left another fifteen thousand native retail
Speaker 1: workers out of a job. The country each entered into
Speaker 1: a terrible recession, which was made worse by the fact
Speaker 1: that Macis gave his best friend monopoly on all international trade.
Speaker 1: Prices for food imports stared out of the budgets of
Speaker 1: most actual Guineons. It became impossible to import the spare
Speaker 1: parts for the machinery that made the nation run and
Speaker 1: made its cocoa plantations function. The electrical grid failed and
Speaker 1: the roads were eaten by the jungle, So he just
Speaker 1: like what little the Spanish had done to set up
Speaker 1: you know, infrastructure, He just bulldozes and suddenly everyone's out
Speaker 1: of a job. No one has any money and no
Speaker 1: one can buy any food, um, which is not a
Speaker 1: great job. Up, I would say, I don't want to
Speaker 1: back seat dictator of Equatorial Guinea here. Yeah, it's bad.
Speaker 1: Do you want to know? Yeah? And I and I
Speaker 1: really need you to take an ad break, But I
Speaker 1: don't know how to do a witty transition after that.
Speaker 1: So could you just like do an ad break? You know,
Speaker 1: who won't give their best friend a monopoly on all
Speaker 1: international trade that makes food import impossible and leads to
Speaker 1: widespread famine. Yeah, our sponsors won't do that. Maybe, I
Speaker 1: mean historically we should probably just roll the ads. We're
Speaker 1: back uh And and yeah, we're talking about Equatorial Guinea
Speaker 1: and its first few years of independence, which don't go great.
Speaker 1: So the people of Equatorial Guinea could clearly see that
Speaker 1: a calamity had been visited upon them by their new leader,
Speaker 1: and Macy has deflected blame for it by claiming his
Speaker 1: political opponents had attempted a coup. He launched a vicious
Speaker 1: terror camp paying against his own people, which sucked the
Speaker 1: economy up more uh and led to him confiscating the
Speaker 1: property of thousands upon thousands of citizens and putting it
Speaker 1: in the hands of himself. One third of the population
Speaker 1: was killed or fled the country in just a couple
Speaker 1: of years, um, which is a lot of the country. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's not great. Uh. Macy has instituted a new
Speaker 1: set of internal travel restrictions to try and stop people
Speaker 1: from fleeing the country. Um. But the only way you
Speaker 1: can think of to do this was to create a
Speaker 1: massive series of burdensome checkpoints, and this made domestic trade
Speaker 1: impossible within the country itself. Mac has also ordered all
Speaker 1: ordered all ships, boats and canoes impounded, which destroyed the
Speaker 1: fishing industry overnight and ended the population's access to protein.
Speaker 1: Mac has sold fishing rights to the Soviets instead and
Speaker 1: pocketed the money from this while his people starved. By
Speaker 1: the early nineteen seventies, Equatorial Guinea was a failed state
Speaker 1: by any reasonable definition of the term. The people who
Speaker 1: had once enjoyed at least a decent standard of living,
Speaker 1: we're starving and forced into subsistence agriculture. The state bureaucracy collapsed.
Speaker 1: Since there was no food to buy, government workers had
Speaker 1: to leave their posts in order to fill their bellies.
Speaker 1: In order to stop the exodus, Macias ordered the only
Speaker 1: road out of the capital. Mind. Yeah, he's not good
Speaker 1: at leading a country. Uh not great. And again this
Speaker 1: is the guy, Like it's one of those things. This
Speaker 1: is the guy who this guy only comes to power
Speaker 1: because Spain puts him in power because they're too lazy
Speaker 1: to like do a proper job of giving up this colony,
Speaker 1: so they just put the guy who's best at kissing
Speaker 1: acid in charge and he turns out to be a monster,
Speaker 1: which happens repeatedly in Africa in the period as colonialism, like,
Speaker 1: uh departs it, Like this is kind of what they
Speaker 1: all did. I have a question, yea, yeah, please, I
Speaker 1: guess I feel like when it comes to dictators people,
Speaker 1: I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. I am not
Speaker 1: a I'm not a dictatorship expert, but I feel like
Speaker 1: people are more willing to be okay with it if
Speaker 1: like the trains run on time, our roads are we
Speaker 1: have food. It seems like having someone who is this
Speaker 1: shitty like being like making these kinds of changes that
Speaker 1: really fuck over the average person like that that that
Speaker 1: seems so different from what I from what I have
Speaker 1: come to, no one loved that dictators I guess I
Speaker 1: feel like my understanding is that, like, oh, when someone's
Speaker 1: a fucking ship head, people are willing to overlook it
Speaker 1: if they if their lives are either made better or
Speaker 1: not significantly changed. And it seems like in this case
Speaker 1: their lives were made much worse. This is what gets
Speaker 1: us into like the truth of that is that in
Speaker 1: almost all dictatorships, you know, you get the odd exception,
Speaker 1: there's guys like Tito who like Tito was a monster.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I've spent a lot of time in former
Speaker 1: Yugoslavia and a lot of old people think back to
Speaker 1: Tito fondly because things went so shitty after his he died.
Speaker 1: But like, as a general rule, particularly when you're talking
Speaker 1: about like dictators who like come into power with a
Speaker 1: lot of popular support, it's popular support from one specific
Speaker 1: group of people, and it's one specific group of people
Speaker 1: who does well. You know, in Germany's case, we all
Speaker 1: know what that specific group of people was, and in
Speaker 1: in in Equatorial Guinea's case, there is a specific group
Speaker 1: of people the largest ethnic group in the country are
Speaker 1: the Fang, which is like the same tribe that he
Speaker 1: is a member of, and they do pretty well under
Speaker 1: this um because they get preferential treatment. They're able to
Speaker 1: like they kick out like like he they like he
Speaker 1: executes genocides against like the Igbo and a couple of
Speaker 1: other different tribal people's in Equatorial Guinea, and all of
Speaker 1: their stuff gets given to like members of his tribe.
Speaker 1: So like the largest most Equatorial Guinea ands suffer, but
Speaker 1: the largest single group of them does pretty well because
Speaker 1: they're able to take shipped from the other people who
Speaker 1: are suffering. And that's kind of the story of dictatorships.
Speaker 1: That's really what happens. And we talk about what people
Speaker 1: talk about things going well, it's more often that like no, no,
Speaker 1: your specific group was the group that things went pretty
Speaker 1: well for because the guy in charge stole things from
Speaker 1: everyone else to give to you, like yeah, um, And
Speaker 1: that's kind of what happens in Equatorial Guinea. Is like
Speaker 1: the Fang do all right, at least at first, the
Speaker 1: Fang do all right because he's just taking shipped from
Speaker 1: everybody else and giving it to them. One Swedish researcher
Speaker 1: who managed to sneak into Equatorial Guinea during this period
Speaker 1: called it the Dako of Africa. Everyone else just called
Speaker 1: it Death's waiting Room, a name that became more relevant
Speaker 1: when Macias banned Western medicine, leading to a resurgence of
Speaker 1: leprosy among other illnesses. As his nation crumbled, Mass lost
Speaker 1: his mind. He began seeing coup plotters in every corner,
Speaker 1: and he executed people almost as random and an attempt
Speaker 1: to keep them at bay. During one Christmas mass execution
Speaker 1: at a sports stadium in the capital, Malabo, Palace, guards
Speaker 1: shot a hundred and fifty people to death while the
Speaker 1: song those were the days my friend played on an
Speaker 1: endless loop, which is one of the most nightmarish things
Speaker 1: I can imagine. Yeah, yeah, yeah um. One survivor of
Speaker 1: the horror later wrote, quote no food in the shops,
Speaker 1: no water, no electricity, no kerosene for the lamps, and
Speaker 1: night we walked in blackness. Yes, for eleven years we
Speaker 1: walked in blackness. Uh. The Wonga cou by Adam Roberts
Speaker 1: goes on to note quote nightclubs include in schools. Closed
Speaker 1: missionaries were chased from the country. Masist like Paul pot
Speaker 1: and Cambodia launched a campaign against the educated, and they
Speaker 1: began to disappear. He banned the word intellectual once finding
Speaker 1: a minister who used it at a cabinet meeting. He
Speaker 1: called educated people the greatest problem facing Africa today. They
Speaker 1: are polluting our climate with foreign culture. He declared himself
Speaker 1: President for life, then renamed the island part of the
Speaker 1: country after himself. He adopted new titles, each more eccentric
Speaker 1: than the last major General of the armed forces, Great
Speaker 1: Maestro of Popular Education, Science and Traditional Culture, the only
Speaker 1: Miracle of Equatorial Guinea. He ordered teachers and priests to
Speaker 1: promote his cult of personality. School Children chanted that Macis
Speaker 1: alone had freed the country from imperial Spanish rule. The
Speaker 1: sanctuary of every church was to show his portrait. Priests
Speaker 1: read out messages venerating the insecure. Presidents such as God
Speaker 1: created Equatorial Guinea thanks to Macias. Without Macist, Equatorial Guinea
Speaker 1: would not exist. Some of the people were nominally Christian,
Speaker 1: but he eventually forced church's shut. So he's not not great.
Speaker 1: I keep making that point, right, Like he had kids
Speaker 1: chanting the ship at school. Yeah, it's it's it's bad.
Speaker 1: It goes bad in Equatorial Guinea and Macie for an
Speaker 1: example of how bad it goes Macias was almost certainly
Speaker 1: a cannibal. But that's not even really worth talking about
Speaker 1: because the fact that he ate people was like one
Speaker 1: of the least shitty things about him, Like he's he's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, is bad, but it's like, well, he eats people,
Speaker 1: but there's so many other things. That's what we have,
Speaker 1: so many other problems. Yeah, yeah, yeah, So he was
Speaker 1: so good at killing basically everyone, um who didn't agree
Speaker 1: with him or like him, that there was basically no
Speaker 1: organized society and Equatorial guinety Guinea for a rebellion to
Speaker 1: even form. In If there was ever a nation in
Speaker 1: desperate need of a foreign backed coup, it was Equatorial Guinea.
Speaker 1: And unfortunately the coup they got was not the one
Speaker 1: they deserved. Uh. And again, like if you're talking about, like,
Speaker 1: as I think we've established, it's always problematic to talk
Speaker 1: about foreign coups to overthrow governments, But this is the
Speaker 1: guy who it's like, yeah, if you're gonna justify a coup,
Speaker 1: it's against a guy like this, and it still doesn't
Speaker 1: work out. So the man behind this coup was not
Speaker 1: a grizzled mercenary. Instead, it was a former journalist and
Speaker 1: novelist named Frederick Forsyth. Now, Frederick had reported to for
Speaker 1: the BBC during the Nigerian Civil War, and he knew
Speaker 1: a number of mercenaries as a result of his reporting
Speaker 1: work in Africa. But the early nineteen seventies he transitioned
Speaker 1: out of journalism and into a very successful career as
Speaker 1: a fiction author. His most famous book was probably The
Speaker 1: Day of the Jackal, which made him wealthy, and there's
Speaker 1: a movie made out of the Day of the Jackal. Um.
Speaker 1: There's a movie's made out of a lot of his books,
Speaker 1: actually flesh with cash. Forsyth looked out at the sad
Speaker 1: case of Tutorial Guinea and decided he was in a
Speaker 1: position to do something about Masias. He sat down with
Speaker 1: a mercenary friend of his and from his flattened Camden,
Speaker 1: the two painstakingly plotted out a coup that would overthrow
Speaker 1: Masias from power. The basic idea was to hire several
Speaker 1: dozen former soldiers from Nigeria and paid them to capture
Speaker 1: or kill the mad dictator and replace him with a
Speaker 1: b Afrian politician who seemed amenable. The whole thing took
Speaker 1: about five months to plan, and the affair was largely
Speaker 1: an excuse for the now wealthy Forsyth to live out
Speaker 1: his fantasies of being an international man of mystery. In
Speaker 1: a later interview with Adam Roberts, he explained, quote, I
Speaker 1: originally postulated a question to myself, would it be possible
Speaker 1: for a group of paid and bought for mercenaries to
Speaker 1: toppal the Republic? I thought, if the republic were weak
Speaker 1: enough and power concentrated in one tyrant, then in theory yes.
Speaker 1: I looked around and saw Fernando po and every story
Speaker 1: about the country was gruesome. I didn't go there myself,
Speaker 1: but I met businessmen and others who had been there,
Speaker 1: and they told me this place was weird. So I
Speaker 1: decided it could be done. If you storm the palace. Well,
Speaker 1: it wasn't really a palace. It was the old Spanish
Speaker 1: colonial governor's mansion. Probably by sunrise you could take over,
Speaker 1: provided you have a substitute African president, and announced it
Speaker 1: was an internal coda. I began to and I began
Speaker 1: to explore the world of black market arms. Where do
Speaker 1: you get a shipload of black market arms. I knew
Speaker 1: nothing about it, so I dug around. I discovered the
Speaker 1: capital was either Prague, where Omnipole, the communist arms dealer was,
Speaker 1: but for that the client had to be cleared by Moscow.
Speaker 1: Otherwise it was Hamburg. So off I went. I penetrated
Speaker 1: under subterfuge using the South African name and developed my theme.
Speaker 1: I attended conferences of black market freelance criminals and learned
Speaker 1: about the curious end user certificates to identify those who
Speaker 1: are entitled to use and buy weapons how they're forged
Speaker 1: or purchased from corrupt African diplomats. So Forsyth will claim
Speaker 1: to this day usually that he was just writing a
Speaker 1: book about how to carry out a coup, and the
Speaker 1: fact that someone attempted a coup in this country based
Speaker 1: on his book was completely separate from it. But also
Speaker 1: sometimes in interviews he'll admit that, like, oh, yeah, I was. I.
Speaker 1: I was carrying out a coup from the beginning, and
Speaker 1: I just wrote a book about it later. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: So let me ask you then, who who is the
Speaker 1: bastard here? If you like, which one of these people
Speaker 1: as the bastard? They're both bastards. I do think in
Speaker 1: a way macis is like it's tough because like obviously
Speaker 1: he's a monster who kills tens of thousands of people.
Speaker 1: But also there's something that's like almost a little bit
Speaker 1: more unsettling to me about a guy who's just like
Speaker 1: a rich novelist being like, my bet, I could overthrow
Speaker 1: this country. It seems easy enough, like like that that's
Speaker 1: his that he's not like they always throw in some
Speaker 1: like little gibe about how, oh, it seems like the
Speaker 1: dictators really bad there, but when you get a chance
Speaker 1: to like read long interviews with them, like that's a sentence,
Speaker 1: and then the rest of it is like, yeah, it
Speaker 1: really seems easy and fun. And I was interested in
Speaker 1: this and this and this, like the whole The fact
Speaker 1: that a terrible dictator was in charge of Equatorial Guinea
Speaker 1: was like three percent of why they did it was
Speaker 1: it seemed fun. So I have one more question in
Speaker 1: your life, in your do you feel like how what
Speaker 1: percentage of ship like that do you feel like comes
Speaker 1: down to, oh, it was it seemed fun. I do
Speaker 1: feel like when you hear about all the terrible ship
Speaker 1: that goes on in our world, so often it comes
Speaker 1: down to like, oh, we wanted, like, yeah, we wanted
Speaker 1: the money, you want to control whatever, whatever, But also
Speaker 1: wouldn't it be fucking fun? Like I do feel like
Speaker 1: a lot of these guys are are are doing this
Speaker 1: because they want the excitement and the fun. Yeah. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: not at all. And like one of the problems that
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to tackle if we're ever going to
Speaker 1: have a more peaceful society is how to how to
Speaker 1: give young young men in particular and really young white
Speaker 1: men and most particular though it's all young men like
Speaker 1: something to do that is exciting and feels meaningful and
Speaker 1: might kill them, but doesn't involve them fucking up other
Speaker 1: people's lives. Um, because a lot of us need that.
Speaker 1: It's not all of us, but like fun. I mean,
Speaker 1: I I've I've I've bought multiple plane tickets to war
Speaker 1: zones that I would be lying if I said that
Speaker 1: a part of it wasn't Like, yeah, that sounds like fun,
Speaker 1: like like going through that experience. Now, I didn't try
Speaker 1: to overthrow no countries, but it is a thing you
Speaker 1: have to grapple with. Yeah, well, if you lived in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. There's a very obvious avenue available to you
Speaker 1: and that is join an illegal dirt biking because you
Speaker 1: don't wear a helmet, you don't have insurance. Your head
Speaker 1: is so close to the pavement it's dangerous. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not you're not you're not overthrowing anything, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we need to somehow make rugby more high stakes, yeah,
Speaker 1: or have one of those. Yeah, there's there's it's tough.
Speaker 1: Like maybe we could just pick like one of the
Speaker 1: states we don't like and let anyone who wants to
Speaker 1: go go fight a war there, like we just declare,
Speaker 1: I don't know, let's say here, um Florida, Iowa, Florida, Florida. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the state Florida. Yeah, of course Florida. Florida is
Speaker 1: a war now. And if you really need that in
Speaker 1: your life, you can go to Florida and you can
Speaker 1: have your war in Florida. We'll call it Warida. It'll
Speaker 1: be it'll be fine. Very little will actually change about
Speaker 1: daily life and most of that state. In Iowa. He
Speaker 1: didn't mean it. He didn't mean it Iowa. He he
Speaker 1: meant for I meant it. We love your corn Iowa,
Speaker 1: We love your corn Iowa. We need a war state
Speaker 1: to to get some of this energy out of people.
Speaker 1: Paintball is not doing it for folks. Um. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So this fucking fiction author Frederick Forsyth like starts quote
Speaker 1: unquote researching his book uh and at the same time,
Speaker 1: a group of mercenaries led by his friend that he
Speaker 1: planned this book with, get hired um and like they
Speaker 1: they they charter a boat and they like start sailing
Speaker 1: uh through like to Equatorial Guinea to carry out a coup.
Speaker 1: Now this doesn't work out. They don't even get to
Speaker 1: land end the British intelligence catches onto them and Gibraltar
Speaker 1: and tips off Spanish authorities who arrest them in the
Speaker 1: Canary Islands. The coup gets called off um and it
Speaker 1: never actually happens. But the very next year, Frederick Forsyth
Speaker 1: published another book called The Dogs of War, about a
Speaker 1: group of European mercenaries who carry out a coup against
Speaker 1: a brutal island dictator, and the book bore a striking
Speaker 1: resemblance to all of the planning for the failed nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three coup, and like very little of the book
Speaker 1: actually involved any action or fighting or the coup itself.
Speaker 1: Almost all of it was just a detailed step by
Speaker 1: step guide to how to Like, here's how we go
Speaker 1: about getting end users cer certificates. Here's how we go
Speaker 1: about buying weaponry. Here's how we go about transporting that weaponry.
Speaker 1: Here's how we charted the boat. Here's how we hired
Speaker 1: all these mercenaries. Like it's it's famously still seen today,
Speaker 1: is like a step by step guide for how to
Speaker 1: carry out a coup. Um and rumors began to swirl
Speaker 1: after this that Frederick forsythe Sythe had attempted to overthrow
Speaker 1: the government of Equatorial Guinea and then written a fictionalized
Speaker 1: account of his act Um. In nineteen eighty the book
Speaker 1: was made into a movie with Christopher Walkin. Um Yeah.
Speaker 1: In two thousands six, Frederick Forsyth all but admitted to
Speaker 1: an interviewer that he had in fact planned and failed
Speaker 1: to execute a coup to overthrow Masius. His book became
Speaker 1: a hit among mercenaries, in particular in Bob Denard's successful
Speaker 1: coup off of the coast of East Africa, all of
Speaker 1: the men he's carried into battle had copies of the
Speaker 1: French translation of The Dogs of War in their back pocket.
Speaker 1: Um so again, they're like, that's part of why I
Speaker 1: started this with like King Solomon's Minds is that like
Speaker 1: The Dogs of War is really like the modern retelling
Speaker 1: of that. We're like, okay, we're just gonna make this
Speaker 1: all about the coup um. That's the real money shot.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that's cool, that's cool. Yeah, I think that's
Speaker 1: who I like that. I also think it just goes
Speaker 1: to show you, like what like culture, like books and
Speaker 1: movies and all of that really makes a difference of
Speaker 1: like how things play out. You know. I think you
Speaker 1: could you could easily be like, oh, it's just a book,
Speaker 1: it was just a book, but clearly that's not the case.
Speaker 1: I think that these things really matter and they can
Speaker 1: really make an imprint on how things go down in history. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think this has inspired me to write a book
Speaker 1: about how a fictional cult fins off the f d
Speaker 1: A and the Mountains of Idaho and use the proceeds
Speaker 1: from that book to buy a compound in the mountains
Speaker 1: of Idaho and then launch a health and beauty network
Speaker 1: that gets the FDA brought down on us. Are you
Speaker 1: currently trying to start a cult that and I misremembering this,
Speaker 1: you know most of the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, more
Speaker 1: or less, you know, I mean, I told him he could, like,
Speaker 1: it's fine, start a cult. Why not if you sign
Speaker 1: off as long as no dogs are harmed, it's fine
Speaker 1: almost certainly, not probably. And on that note, Robert, it's
Speaker 1: break time. Oh it is. Yeah. Well, speaking of coup's,
Speaker 1: here's a product coup that was not your best work,
Speaker 1: but along with some services. Yeah that wasn't that didn't
Speaker 1: work out. Great, we are back, okay, So yeah. Mass
Speaker 1: Protect remained in power until August of nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: when a coup finally unseated him. No Europeans were involved. Instead,
Speaker 1: the culprit was his nephew, Obiang, who Macias had put
Speaker 1: in charge of notorious Black Beach Prison, where regime enemies
Speaker 1: and random people were tortured to death. Obiang was spurred
Speaker 1: into action when his uncle's mismanagement got so bad that
Speaker 1: the army could no longer pay wages. When representatives of
Speaker 1: the military asked the president for money, Maci has had
Speaker 1: them all executed, including some officers who were members of
Speaker 1: the royal family. This spirit Obiang into action, and a
Speaker 1: brief civil war was the result. Obiang obviously had the
Speaker 1: support of most of the military. His uncle resisted for
Speaker 1: a time than largely largely to Cuban and North Korean
Speaker 1: officers who backed up his forces, but eventually Macias was
Speaker 1: forced out of his palace and into a small jungle
Speaker 1: village named Mongomo. There he hid the entire national treasury
Speaker 1: somewhere between sixty and a hundred and fifty million dollars
Speaker 1: in what is generally described as a wooden hut. Obiang attacked,
Speaker 1: and in the battle that followed, the hut was set
Speaker 1: on fire and the entire nation's foreign currency reserves were incinerated.
Speaker 1: Masius fled again, but he was eventually arrested and brought
Speaker 1: back to the capital of Mlabo. Obiang took over from
Speaker 1: his uncle and convened a court in Mlabo's largest building,
Speaker 1: the Old Cinema. The former dictator was hung from a
Speaker 1: cage attached to the ceiling. He and a number of
Speaker 1: flunkeys were charged with genocide, mass murder, treason, and a
Speaker 1: litany of other crimes, and may have been the first
Speaker 1: time in history that a head of state was actually
Speaker 1: charged with genocide anywhere in the world. Macias was quickly
Speaker 1: convicted and executed, and evidence that inconveniently implicated his nephew
Speaker 1: Obiang and regime crimes was ignored by the court. In
Speaker 1: a better world, this would have been the start of
Speaker 1: a period of healing for Equatorial Guinea. But we live
Speaker 1: in this world and things only went from bad is
Speaker 1: slightly less bad, but still more or less the same.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote now from the book Double Paradox quote.
Speaker 1: If anything, the plundering worsened as international aids started to
Speaker 1: flow in and efforts to rehabilitate the exports sector began.
Speaker 1: Obiong and his inner circle, most of whom were either
Speaker 1: members of his immediate family or fellow klansmen, grabbed whatever
Speaker 1: they could. Companies seeking government contracts and concessions were informed
Speaker 1: that they had to pay bribes and kickbacks to senior officials.
Speaker 1: The amounts demanded were often so high that many would
Speaker 1: be investors quit the country soon after arriving. Obiong privatized
Speaker 1: Macias estate farms, but then either took them over himself
Speaker 1: or gave them to his henchman. Petty corruption among street
Speaker 1: level bureaucrats continued unabated. The one time thugs and killers
Speaker 1: of the Macist era thus morphed into a new regime
Speaker 1: of tropical gangsters, under which the Equatorial guineaon economy remained
Speaker 1: a ruin. According to one visitor, the economy is dead
Speaker 1: and corruption is the game. By early n things had
Speaker 1: become so bad that the I m F announced it
Speaker 1: was suspending all aid and would lead the cut leave
Speaker 1: the country to its own crumbling devices. In Equatorial Guinea
Speaker 1: might have continued to just kind of be a tiny,
Speaker 1: dirt poor kleptocracy if not for a small Texas based
Speaker 1: oil and gas company, Walter International. In nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 1: they stuck. They struck oil off the coast of Equatorial Guinea,
Speaker 1: revealing a massive field of extremely high quality crude. In
Speaker 1: short order, the we nation was producing three hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty thousand barrels of oil a day, worth more than
Speaker 1: six billion dollars a year. The fields and Equatorial Guinea
Speaker 1: actually produced enough oil to make it the highest per
Speaker 1: capita producer of fuel on the planet. And this could
Speaker 1: have literally made every single person in the tiny country rich.
Speaker 1: That is, of course, not what happened. Obiang and his
Speaker 1: family took all the profits they should not have been
Speaker 1: able to. The nineteen The nineteen seventy seven four in
Speaker 1: corrupt Practices Act made it illegal for US companies to
Speaker 1: make direct payments to foreign officials. Instead, they had to
Speaker 1: pay royalties to official government accounts so the money could
Speaker 1: be used for the benefit of the people. Obion got
Speaker 1: around this by having oil companies like Exxon Mobile deposit
Speaker 1: their payments in a series of offshore accounts owned by
Speaker 1: himself and his family members. This was at best on
Speaker 1: the verge of being illegal, but ex On Mobile, Hess
Speaker 1: and Marathon were happy to play along and risk Congressional
Speaker 1: centure for the simple fact that Guineon oil was the
Speaker 1: cheapest on Earth. Obiang charged them about half of what
Speaker 1: other governments in the area were paid for their oil.
Speaker 1: This would have been a terrible deal for the people
Speaker 1: of his country, but none of the money was going
Speaker 1: to them anyway. Now On paper, the Guinean economy grew
Speaker 1: by leaps and bounds in the late nineteen nineties, topping
Speaker 1: sixty per year, which is almost an impossible rate. Very
Speaker 1: little of that growth, though, reached the normal people. In
Speaker 1: two thousand two, Equatorial Guinea spent less money than any
Speaker 1: other country on Earth, save a rack on healthcare. No
Speaker 1: country on the planet spent less money on education. The
Speaker 1: average lifespan, and Equatorial Guinea was fifty years. On paper,
Speaker 1: Guineans should have been receiving at least about six thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a year per person and income, which would have
Speaker 1: put the country in line with Chile, but all of
Speaker 1: that money went to Obiang and his family instead. A
Speaker 1: two thousand three radio program declared him the country's god,
Speaker 1: who can decide to kill anyone without being called to
Speaker 1: account and without going to hell, because it is God
Speaker 1: himself with whom he is in permanent contact, who gives
Speaker 1: him his strength. So this guy is not really a
Speaker 1: big improvement from macis is kind of the point that
Speaker 1: I'm making. Yeah, I think that's clear. So by the
Speaker 1: early two thousands, though, Equatorial Guinea was what you might
Speaker 1: call a coup plotter's paradise. It has this horrible, unpopular
Speaker 1: dictator who's a global pariah, and there's a huge amount
Speaker 1: of oil that's just been discovered there. And best of all,
Speaker 1: the War on Terror has just started, and the invasion
Speaker 1: of Iraq has caused a situation whereby it suddenly really
Speaker 1: really easy to justify overthrowing a foreign dictator in order
Speaker 1: to get at his oil. The Spanish government very much
Speaker 1: wanted access to Equatorial guineas fuel because they were piste off.
Speaker 1: They'd given up this country and not known that it
Speaker 1: was filled with oil. Uh. And they even had a
Speaker 1: ringer from Equatorial Guinea who they felt they could trust
Speaker 1: to replace Obiong and give them access. All that Spain
Speaker 1: needed was a mercenary ambitious enough to risk torture and
Speaker 1: execution in Black Beach Prison for a chance at a
Speaker 1: massive pay day. And in Part two, we're all going
Speaker 1: to meet this mercenary, South Africa's equivalent of Eric Prince,
Speaker 1: a fellow named Simon Man. Yeah. Boy, so that's where
Speaker 1: we end in part one. I can't I'm I'm like
Speaker 1: Gripps to my seat. I can't wait to to meet
Speaker 1: this new this new bastard. Yeah, it's gonna be exciting
Speaker 1: and everybody's gonna have a fun time learning about him. Um,
Speaker 1: but first people should have a fun time learning about you.
Speaker 1: Bridget Todd. You have a new podcast, There Are No
Speaker 1: Girls on the Internet, uh, and that is about to
Speaker 1: launch on the I Heart Radio network, which which galls
Speaker 1: dropped day. Oh it is July seven, so please subscribe
Speaker 1: listen all of that stuff. Can we talk about that
Speaker 1: transition for a second though it was lawless. I was.
Speaker 1: I was almost like in awe of it. It was,
Speaker 1: I really was, Can I say one more thing before
Speaker 1: we before we move away from that? You can say
Speaker 1: as many things like I'm gonna say this the things
Speaker 1: I've spent a lot of time in South Africa, and
Speaker 1: I will say that like I will never I will
Speaker 1: never pretend to be an expert on the history or
Speaker 1: the country or the people. But the one thing that
Speaker 1: was very clear to me from spending a lot of
Speaker 1: time in South Africa was that I think that like
Speaker 1: the people there are like traumatized by how shitty all
Speaker 1: the shitty experiences they've had with a government, and that
Speaker 1: I think it lasts today. I was very um. It
Speaker 1: was interesting to see how that ship like doesn't go away.
Speaker 1: It's just as kind of like passed on the generations.
Speaker 1: And so as someone who spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: in South Africa, all this ship you're saying, I'm like,
Speaker 1: oh ship, Yeah that makes sense. People are fucking traumatized.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I love I loved my time there, but
Speaker 1: I just was really um a place where you know,
Speaker 1: I just feel like even today, I see the reverberations
Speaker 1: of the people really deserved better. Yeah, Yeah, that's kind
Speaker 1: of like the only real conclusion. And you can make
Speaker 1: because both sides in this, if you want to look
Speaker 1: at them, the sides are just so shitty, Like the
Speaker 1: dictators of Equatorial Guinea are awful. All the people who
Speaker 1: try to overthrow them are just trying to get rich
Speaker 1: and just equally shitty. And there's there's at no point
Speaker 1: does anyone involved give a shit about the people who
Speaker 1: live in Equatorial Guinea. And that's like, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: a bummer. That's not good. It's not it's really not
Speaker 1: bad and not good. So speaking of things that are
Speaker 1: bad and not good, go back out into the world
Speaker 1: or coursed inside, and you can go to our website
Speaker 1: to find our sources, which are under the episode description
Speaker 1: behind the Bastards dot com where you could follow Robert
Speaker 1: on Twitter and a right okay, where you could follow
Speaker 1: us on Twitter and Instagram at Bastard's Pod or you
Speaker 1: could buy a a face mask or a T shirt
Speaker 1: or a cell phone case or lug or or whatever
Speaker 1: they've decided to sell on Tea Public today. Yeah, are
Speaker 1: these face masks cure COVID nineteen face masks are going
Speaker 1: to be on sale soon. UM, you can help us.
Speaker 1: F d A approved written right on the front. U.
Speaker 1: So yeah, help us, help us thumb an eye in
Speaker 1: the f d a's face, and UM get rated in
Speaker 1: a mountaintop compound in Idaho. Uh. That's the dream. That's
Speaker 1: my dream, and it should be your dream too. Is
Speaker 1: there information about how folks can enjoin the cult? Uh?
Speaker 1: Not yet. UM. Yeah, the cult is in your heart.
Speaker 1: The cult is in your heart. You know you'll find
Speaker 1: it in your heart. Um. As long as you, you know,
Speaker 1: want to fight the f d A on a mountaintop
Speaker 1: in Idaho, that's really all it takes. That's the episode.
Speaker 1: I think that's the episode.