Cocoa, coffee and wood in the Spanish colonisation of Equatorial Guinea

Elgorriaga property. Equatorial Guinea. Basupü district.

Coffee, cocoa and timber were the three great products of the colony. Cocoa began to be exploited in Fernando Poo from the 1880s, initially by rich Creoles (from Sierra Leone), who ended up being displaced by Spanish settlers. The main problem was labour, which was normally brought in by forced from Liberia, Nigeria and the continental part of the colony, depending on the period, by hunting down and enslaving the labour.

Something similar happened with the timber farms on the continent as from the 1920s. But the natives of the territory also worked on commercial crops on small farms: the Bubis of the island worked with cocoa from the early twentieth century, initially driven by the Claretian Missionaries; those from the continent worked with coffee as from the thirties.