Africa's New King Solomon
Equatorial Guinea's Outrageous Sex Tapes Affair
“Gaius made advances to almost every well-known married woman in Rome; after inviting a selection of them to dinner with their husbands…whenever he felt so inclined, he would send for whoever pleased him best and leave the banquet in her company. A little later he would return, showing obvious signs of what he had been about, and openly discuss his bedfellow in detail, dwelling on her good and bad physical points and criticizing her sexual performance.” - Suetonius [Gaius Caligula, 36]
Note: Due to the nature of the subject matter, this entire article is what would be called “Not Safe for Work.” While this does not include any pornographic images or direct links to pornography, reader discretion is advised.
A legend has been born in Central Africa. The story started when the head of the tiny Spanish-speaking nation of Equatorial Guinea’s anti-corruption office, Baltasar Ebang Engonga, known as Bello for his good looks, was himself recently arrested for corruption. That itself would have been routine enough on the continent, but upon searching the office the agents found around four hundred CDs containing videos of Baltasar having sex with seemingly every prominent woman in the country- including the wife of the Police Chief, the wife of the Attorney General, the President’s younger sister, and the wives of around 20 cabinet members. Some are calling him Africa’s King Solomon. The videos soon began to be uploaded to the internet one at a time by an unknown party, and if the information is accurate, must have been clearly labeled because it seems as if he recorded himself having sex with almost every woman he has met, and many of them are not famous. The videos are with women of all types, in every position, and in every imaginable location, including government offices, outdoors, public bathrooms, hotels, private bedrooms, and the hospital.
The videos have been uploaded with labels such as “his pastor’s wife,” “brother’s wife,” “driver’s pregnant wife,” “cousin,” “his friend passed out drunk and then he had sex with his wife,” “his married lawyer,” “having sex with his doctor after going to the hospital while sick,” “white tourist,” “landlady,” “landlady’s daughter,” and so on. Some of the videos are various women with each other. Here is one list from the internet:
There are perhaps hundreds of videos left to be released. It is hard to verify the accuracy of the labeling, though some of the women are prominent within the country and others can be identified from the office picture above- only one so far has filed a formal complaint about the video being released, and she said the sex was consensual but that the recording was supposed to be deleted immediately.
The scandal is as comical as it is unbelievable; in one video he is on the phone presumably conducting official state anti-corruption business while filming a sex tape. In another his conquest is a woman in a hospital gown. There is also one in a tree and one in the middle of an empty street at night. Not to be outdone, his wife’s own sex tape with a different man was released, perhaps by her in revenge. This was later follow by another video of her with a second man.
The situation has been compared to the P. Diddy scandal, except that none of the women are underage, none appear drugged, and most clearly know they are being recorded, and so far there are no rumors that Engonga goes for men. In short, he is about as “unproblematic” as you can be while still making four hundred sex tapes, many of them with prominent married women. Still, he doesn’t appear to use any kind of prophylactic and as such God knows how many children he has fathered. The guy reminds me of a real version of Bill Brasky from the old Saturday Night Live sketches, where a group of drinking businessman would tell increasingly ridiculous stories about a man they know: “Bill Brasky is the father of every child in this town,” “Bill Brasky made me a videotape of him having sex with my wife and it was the most beautiful damn thing I ever saw…to Bill Brasky!”
The videos were rapidly spread on Telegram and Whatsapp, and the African public is in equal parts impressed, amused, and titillated. Searches at times surpassed interest in the US Presidential election, and the popularity has further led to an explosion of crypto and other internet scams trying to profit from the traffic. Currently, the videos can be easily found on Twitter, if one is willing to wade through the scams, though it is unclear if they will stay up: the videos occupy an uncertain middle ground in terms of policy, because the participants did not consent to them being uploaded, but it is a newsworthy matter that meets the standard of being of public interest. One way or another, despite the African continent’s socially conservative reputation, the public has not been shy about sharing and commenting on the videos, and African social media is ablaze with amusing content, including songs written in Egonga’s honor, men saying they want to visit Equatorial Guinea if the women are like this, women who would love to make a movie with him, and videos discussing every aspect of the situation.
How, though, did this happen? We can’t be sure how “Bello” can get almost any woman, no matter who she is married to, to have sex with him on video, but this seems to be an indication of the extremely decadent nature of Equatorial Guinea’s tiny ruling class. Besides the government releasing relatively generic statements about how this shames the country’s “reputation,” we are so far unable to learn how well known this was among the country’s largely related political and economic leaders, but it couldn’t have been much of a secret. Perhaps some of the husbands were fooled, but women talk, and they’re not all sleeping with the same prominent man without comparing notes. There must have been at least vague knowledge that he was accumulating a sort of sex scandal weapon of mass destruction. Even for a country where the Vice President, the President’s son, has had assets seized for corruption abroad and been called “the playboy prince of Central Africa” and a “jet setting kleptocrat” this scandal is next-level.
One is left to wonder if, as an anti-corruption investigator, he was taking men’s wives as payments to keep them out of the “Black Beach” prison- one of the most notorious In Africa and by extension the world- that he himself now inhabits. One would almost imagine an aspect of it could be a blackmail operation, except that his own face is featured the most prominently. Still, there is certainly a power to possessing a video of yourself having sex with a man’s wife- they say you can feel confident in a meeting if you imagine the other person naked, just imagine if you had a sex tape you made with his wife. At the same time, many of the women appear to be from the lower orders [one is labeled as a waitress in the bathroom of the restaurant she works at,] or at least outside of the country’s political life, so there is more than just politics to this, and it isn’t speculation to say the man must be what we in the West would call a sex addict. Honestly, though no one has talked about this, belief in magic remains widespread on the African continent and it isn’t too far-fetched to imagine that he is thought to have magical powers by women and their husbands, and that this in some way relates to all the women giving in to his every desire, whether that be him having magical charm, blessing them with his manhood, or something else. In a way, a guy who can get the hot wives of the entire ruling class to make sex tapes with him must be in possession of some arcane powers.
Before this started, Engonga was considered a possible heir to his uncle, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the world’s longest serving President. Is the release of the videos a power play from within the ruling family, or someone trying to discredit the entire ruling class? Were they truly leaked after discovery during the raid, or was it some sort of fail-safe for if Engonga was arrested? Were they discovered by accident, or was the entire corruption raid to produce this result? The one thing we can be sure of is that no matter how tightly the media is controlled, this scandal is not being put away, and further, for the first time in decades, something has put tiny Equatorial Guinea, “on the map,” and it is their quite large anti-corruption minister.
This entire scandal makes at least a bit more sense if one understands the history of Equatorial Guinea. The country is largely known, to the extent it is known at all, by people interested in maps for its small size and unusual geographic configuration, and by lovers of trivia as the only Spanish-speaking country in Africa. Similar to neighboring Gabon, it has one of Africa’s highest GDPs per capita due to extremely concentrated oil wealth. In contrast to Gabon, Equatorial Guinea’s rulers have been less extravagant and much more brutal, but these things are relative.
To go back into history, Bioko, formerly known as Fernando Po after the Portuguese navigator who discovered it, was a rare West African island that was already inhabited when the Portuguese arrived- you can see the island from the mainland on a clear day, though John Gunther notes there are rarely clear days in this region. In the 18th century Spain acquired the island and the shoreline which now constitutes the mainland. The decrepit Spanish Empire had little use for the mainland colony, but they did exploit the island for plantations, managing it similar to the Canary Islands. Fernando Po had one of the most unhealthy “climates” in West Africa, and the entire region was known as being a death sentence for those without resistance to malaria and other diseases, though there have been great improvements in the ability to treat and prevent tropical diseases over the last two centuries. In Inside Africa, Gunther only makes quick notes about the island’s state in the 1950’s, saying that it is “dreary and unkempt” and “the kind of place where officials will still be lounging in pajamas at 8 PM.” He also says the famed British explorer and statesmen Sir Richard Burton was made the consul of the island from 1861-1865, and the legend is that it was because he was so difficult to deal with that his superiors hoped he would die during the posting [34.]
Due in part to all the people dying, the Spanish relied on contract laborers from neighboring countries to work the cocoa fields. Perhaps the only time what was then called Spanish Guinea made international headlines was when it was discovered that the Americo-Liberian ruling class of Liberia- themselves famously the descendants of freed slaves- had been capturing indigenous people and sending them to Fernando Po as slaves. Gunther called the 1931 report “One of the most horrifying official documents I have ever read” and quotes the US Secretary of State Henry Stimson as saying, “It would be tragically ironic if Liberia whose existence was dedicated to the principle of liberty should succumb to practices so closely akin to those which its founders sought forever to escape” [44.] That is indeed exactly what they did.
Equatorial Guinea has no tradition of liberty, and the Liberian slave scandal is just one small part of its horrifying history. At the time of decolonization, the Spanish promoted an unimpressive and unintelligent politician named Francisco Macias Nguema to power believing that he would be easy to control. Unfortunately for everyone, he quickly went insane. There were 145 days of peace after independence before he was set off by seeing a Spanish flag still flying from a building and the nation become a horror show. Nguema executed 10 of his first 12 ministers and replaced them with his nephews and other members of his small tribe. The country fell into an orgy of violence and stopped functioning as he hoarded all of the country’s foreign exchange and took to kidnapping foreigners and holding them for ransom in order to get funding. Himself having failed civil service exams three times, he banned the word “intellectual” and shut down all the newspapers, libraries, and Catholic mission schools, making all education indoctrination, except that he didn’t have any beliefs to indoctrinate people into.
In 1977 the foreign researcher Robert af Klinteberg visited the capital Malabo and described it as a “ghost town” where everything was closed and nothing was available. In his report, Klinteberg described Equatorial Guinea as the “cottage industry Dachau of Africa” and claimed that out of a population of 300,000, at least 50,000 had been killed an 125,00 had fled the country. Nguema, meanwhile, was addicted to bhang, a traditional cannabis drink, and iboga, a psychedelic which is now sometimes used for addiction treatment. He fled to his home village on the mainland with a huge quantity of cash which he buried under his floor- letting much of the cash rot in the ground- as well as the country’s pharmaceutical stockpile. He began collecting human skulls [The Fate of Africa, Martin Meredith, 239-243.] In short, Equatorial Guinea went through something like a miniature version of the Khmer Rouge, except without ideology or any real plan to ultimately improve society.
In 1979, Nguema was overthrown by his nephew Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. The family couldn’t decide if they should put him on trial or in a psychiatric ward, but ultimately tried him for 80,000 murders, though he was “only” found guilty on 500 counts. He blamed Obiang, who had been director of prisons, for the deaths. Ultimately, no local soldier would join a firing squad because Nguema was believed to have supernatural powers, so he was executed by a Moroccan firing squad. Obiang Nguema still rules Equatorial Guinea 45 years later. While he isn’t insane, Equatorial Guinea has remained a brutal kleptocracy with no human rights. It is no exaggeration to say that since independence Equatorial Guinea has been ruled like the Imperial Rome described by Tacitus, except that it is no great power and instead is just a forgotten little hellhole.
The one bright spot for Equatorial Guinea has been that oil was discovered in the late ‘90s. However, besides some infrastructure projects designed to impress foreign visitors, and perhaps more importantly as opportunities for graft, very little has been spent to develop the economy or improve the lives of the public, instead simply enriching the ruling class of Nguema’s extended family and his small Ensangui tribal clan. The oil is said to already be running low and there is no other good source of revenue. The rulers have only planned for their own futures.
Though Equatorial Guinea is sometimes described as a “pariah” state, they have faced few consequences for the complete lack of human liberty. The US government’s “Freedom House”- which admittedly is a hack organization designed to malign disfavored countries- gives Equatorial Guinea a freedom ranking of 5, compared to Africa’s most famous small totalitarian state, Eritrea, which has a 3. Afghanistan under the Taliban is ranked as having the same amount of civil liberties, but gets a 1 for political rights compared to Equatorial Guinea’s 0, despite that Equatorial Guinea does hold regular sham elections. '
It bears considering why Equatorial Guinea has been allowed to get away with this, and I think there are two primary reasons. The first is its linguistic isolation and Spain’s lack of interest in Africa. Many Africans, even those with little education, speak at least 3 languages: their tribal language, a regional language, and a colonial language, and the well-educated commonly know a 4th language. However, there is little reason for Africans to know Spanish, which limits interest in, and communication with, Equatorial Guinea. Further, few monolingual Spanish speakers are in a financial position to visit Africa as tourists, so there isn’t any body of people who choose to visit the country because it is the one where they know the language. Not a lot of foreigners see Equatorial Guinea, though they are allowed to visit if so inclined and the country does have natural beauty and wildlife.
The second thing which I believe has helped the Nguema regime is that though Central Africa is profoundly unstable, it is internally unstable, as opposed to the Red Sea region which has international conflicts. This means that unlike Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea is not heavily militarized and has not needed to align with anyone in order to get military equipment. There is a territorial dispute with Gabon over one of their islands, but it is not near to becoming an armed conflict. In a way, it is almost surprising that Equatorial Guinea has not been “Ledeen Doctrined,” however it is such a small and crappy country you could probably overthrow the government with oldschool “Gunboat Diplomacy” and it wouldn’t even show other countries that “we mean business.” One way or another, Equatorial Guinea’s authoritarian government has not been put under external threat. Despite claiming that human rights are the key foreign policy priority, the Biden Administration has even worked to improve relations with the country, fearing that the China may build a naval base there to get a foothold in West Africa. Amusingly, one donation of infant formula and first aid supplies was described by the army as being worth $24,000, an amount of money the US Military would waste on a shiny garbage can. Regardless, cooperation is increasing and it doesn’t appear to be based on any requirements to improve human rights or democracy.
It was into this tinpot dictatorship that a promising young nephew of the President, Baltasar Ebang Engonga became the Minister of Education in 1998 after attaining degrees in economics and finance at the University of Malabo. It is widely reported in the media that his father is the current head of the Economic and Monetary Union of Central Africa [CEMAC], though strangely their website contains no references to him ever having held any position there. Ultimately, Engonga was able to get this position as the head of the National Financial Investigation Agency, where he was thought to be angling to inherit the Presidency, though the current Vice President, the one who had assets seized abroad, was considered the favorite even before this scandal.
It is not obvious what a chief financial crimes investigator does in a country where everything is corrupt- Equatorial Guinea is 172 out of 180, tied with North Korea, on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, though it it is questionable how freely one can conduct that survey in such a nation. It is certainly the case that some amount of theft is expected from all officials. In most cases he may just be another person to bribe with public money. It is possible that he looked into the most egregious cases, but more likely that such a job is entirely political and previously gave him near total control over almost everyone else in government for as long as he could stay in the game. It must have been a well organized power play when he was himself charged with embezzlement and had his office raided on October 25th, it being alleged that he had moved massive amounts of money to the Cayman Islands. It was then that the CDs were discovered.
We have to assume the sex tapes had some relation to his “anti-corruption” work, if only that he figured having videos of their wives going down on him, he couldn’t go down without the entire ruling class coming down with him. It would have been high level government agents involved in the raid, and from there the tapes should have been closely guarded or destroyed if that was the intention. It is probably safe to assume that the President or Vice President wanted these tapes to be released, though there must have been a better way to remove Engonga as a competitor. The alternative is that someone is seeking to discredit the entire ruling class in the hopes of genuinely improving the country,
On the surface, the government has sought to contain the scandal. Most notably, they gave telecom providers 24 hours to find a ways to stop people from sharing the videos, something which is not possible in the modern era. The government made them prevent image sharing over Whatsapp and other chat apps, but this largely just inconvenienced the public and forced people onto WiFi for their phone data needs. Many feel the government just wants a pretense to crack down on social media- and that this goal could be the entire reason the tapes were released. The government has not found a good way to punish Engonga over the tapes, because it is quite obvious the women know they are being filmed and are enjoying themselves, and he was already in prison at the time the videos were uploaded so is not seen as liable for their public release.
Amusingly, part of the government’s plan to stop all of this office sex is to put surveillance cameras in government offices, but if we have learned anything about the ruling class of Equatorial Guinea, it seems likely that they won’t care and this will just result in security officials releasing tapes of office sex that those surveillance cameras record. The Attorney General released a statement about the “integrity” of the government and public servants, wherein he pretends that Equatorial Guinea is not a tinpot dictatorship lacking a facade, saying, “Ethics and respect are fundamental in our administration, and we will not allow irresponsible behavior to compromise public trust. Responsibility and professionalism must be the pillars of our work as servants of the state.” He also expressed concern about the public health risks if Engonga has a venereal disease, which is comical being as Engonga is said to have made a sex tape with the Attorney General’s wife and isn’t seen using a condom in a single video so perhaps the Attorney General should be getting himself tested. Regardless, Engonga could be prosecuted for endangering public health if he is found to have a venereal disease- which he must- though that just brings more attention to the situation as opposed to leaving him in a hole forever over the corruption charges. It is common for men to “disappear” once they are imprisoned in Equatorial Guinea.
We may never see old Baltasar again, but there is no denying the scandal’s impact across Africa. It has been the most pronounced in Nigeria, which is Africa’s largest media market and which has a free but irresponsible press and some of the world’s most entertaining newspapers. The Nigerian actress Sarah Martins was but one of many Nigerians commenting, making an Instagram post which included things such as, like saying that he is “skilled, very soft, and very much in charge in bed…top-notch energy and is in tune with every woman’s mood…that Equatorial Guinea guy is every woman’s dream man… he’s a full spec, make we no lie.” Martins also speculated that while some women just wanted to make a sex tape, others were perhaps given to him as a settlement to clear their husbands bad records from the system- if that is the case, none of these women appear to have been morally conflicted based on what we can see in the tapes. This brings up another important point, which is that the scandal has implications for the different ways in which men and women are viewed. One Twitter user argued,
“The fact that the Equatorial Guinea officer was able to sleep with 6 out of the 8 female workers in his office is exactly why I will never wife up a career woman. I strongly believe that A woman’s money should always come from her man.”
Another pointed out that while Engonga was what you could call a super-cheater, that he is only one man while all of these women are cheating on their husbands:
“A man cheated on his wife with 400 women. In other words 400 women cheated on their husbands.
It was just a man that cheated on his wife Vs 400 women that cheated on their Husbands You sef reason this matter. FEAR WOMEN.”
Though it isn’t clear that all of the women are married- the original report said there were tapes with “the most diva and influential single women in Equatorial Guinea”- it is hard to escape the conclusion that this scandal shows that the one man is a sex addict and filthy stomp-around, whereas seemingly every woman in Equatorial Guinea is willing to be filmed cheating on her husband- including Engonga’s own wife.
The crown for commentary on this issue goes to a Nehru Odeh writing for PM News. In an article titled “Leaked Video: The secret love life of Baltasar Engonga's wife revealed!” this vivid author begins with a Bible verse before proceeding to review the situation and videos with rich language and flair. Some choice quotes,
“Baltasar Ebang Egonga and his beautiful wife are two of a kind. They are indeed a study in mutually assured destruction. Not only are they on a war path, given their antagonistic intimate propensities and inclinations, they have taken their warfare to a different level…
They have indeed danced naked in the marketplace. While one threw the first salvo with his record-record breaking more than 400 videos and sexcapades with over 300 women in different intimate trysts such as the office, home, beach etc, the other, whom many thought was innocent and a victim, has dropped a bomb akin to the one that ended the Second World War…
What then is the secret love life of Baltasar’s wife? If you watched her video with the eyes of a marksman you would notice that Baltasar may be a ‘stud’ with other women, he is nowhere near his wife and unable to satisfy her, as far as lovemaking is concerned. Perhaps that explains why she has flings with other men.
Although this woman allegedly has six children for her husband, she pined daily for a more practical and experimental, hands-on intimacy that Baltasar couldn’t give her.”
This is a normal Nigerian newspaper by the way, this is what is getting printed in their media. The story has become unavoidable across Africa, becoming a rare thing which has united the public:
For now, Baltasar awaits his fate, though his prospects are not good given what passes for a legal system in Equatorial Guinea and the fact that he almost definitely did actually embezzle the money as well as humiliate everyone who might be in charge of overseeing the case. The videos continue to be released one by one as the ruling class reels under this enormous embarrassment, all of them shamed by the works of one incorrigible poonhound. It’s strange, but while this amuses and excites Africa and the world, in tiny Equatorial Guinea it still seems as if it is the best chance they have had in decades to throw off their decadent and oppressive ruling class. Most men in Equatorial Guinea can barely afford to keep one wife, while the man in charge of fighting corruption is making 400 sex tapes, in a bizarre parallel to the country’s economic inequality. He also basically cucked the entire ruling class, which is bound to lower public respect for the government among the masses of men who have never had a video of their wife having sex with another man released on the internet. We may never truly know how and why this happened, but I don’t think the African public will be forgetting about Baltasar Ebang Engonga anytime soon. He is already a modern legend.
Thank you for reading! The Wayward Rabbler is written by Brad Pearce. If you enjoyed this content please subscribe and share. My main articles are free but paid subscriptions help me a huge amount. I also have a tip jar at Ko-Fi. I am a regular contributor at The Libertarian Institute. My Facebook page is The Wayward Rabbler. You can see my shitposting and serious commentary on Twitter @WaywardRabbler.
I realized almost immediately after publishing that I learned about this from a BBC story and to my eternal shame failed to make a joke about how its a BBC story in the porn acronym sense
I'm rather uncomfortable about this. Maybe I should have felt assured by my moral rectitude and probity, and perhaps even pity for the people and the forlorn prospects for their country.
Instead I feel envious that the man boned 400 ruling class "ladies", all married, all consenting, and that he did it so well that he's panegyrized by women.
I greatly enjoyed the report, and I needed the tone change from what I usually read.
"... failed to make a joke about how its a BBC story in the porn acronym sense"
Yeah, a BBC gag was low hanging fruit. :-)