Mandji is as beautiful and perfect as a tourist poster. But it is also a rubbish dump of history.
A few bungalows are being built in the expectation of tourism. But tourists do not come. And the bungalows decay, even before being finished, while their owners leave for France or Spain in search of better economic opportunities.
There are countless logs stuck in the flat, siliceous beaches of Mandji—plastic-tagged and iron-chained trunks that fell from the ships transporting tropical wood to Europe.
There are plastic sandals that somebody lost in Libreville and half-carved canoes where white crabs climb.

There are hundreds of cartons of cheap Spanish wine and rusty tin cans of cheap Spanish beer—the material evidence of the enduring relationship between colonialism, poverty and alcoholism.
There is a fishing boat that got stranded a few years ago in the shallow waters off of Mandji.
There is an abandoned lighthouse, in whose vicinities we found a German bottle of gin that won a gold medal in Vienna in 1873.

There is a minuscule island where a French family used to cohabit with thousands of rats. They fished and sold the fish in Gabon for some time, and then they died or left. The remains of their hut must still be there under the canopy.

Some people slowly return to Mandji, but this is still the island of abandonment.
During the 1970s, the first president of the independent republic of Equatorial Guinea, Macías Nguema, went insane and killed tens of thousands. Mandji lost nine in ten inhabitants, who fled to neighbouring Gabon. Their wooden houses rot away and in their patios grew ceiba and palm-trees.

The end of the colony could have been the time of the Benga, an occasion for them to revive the old prosperity and independence stifled by foreign rule. But it was not.
A handful of Spanish colonists built bungalows in Mandji during the first half of the 20th century, only to be closed down after the independence of Equatorial Guinea in 1969.
Spanish colonialism invested little in education, industry or infrastructures. It was a colonialism of churches and forts – such as those constructed in Spain during the Middle Ages in the lands taken from the Muslims. The same idea of civilization, the same ruins.

Catholic missionaries founded a church in 1885 recycling the stones from the old Portuguese fort. The building was burnt down in 1933 and nature, once again, regained the space stolen by humans. A new church was built nearby, but was also abandoned and left overgrown. A neat row of breadfruit trees flanks the entrance to the mission and keeps the jungle at bay.
Along with the church, the camp of the Colonial Guard was the other conspicuous symbol of the Spanish occupation of the island. It was built over the Dutch settlement—itself constructed over an Iron Age site—and soon underwent the same fate of the prehistoric village and the trading outpost.

American Presbyterians founded a mission in 1856 in the place of Ebanguesimba with the permission of Spain—since 1843 the nominal owner of Mandji. The missionaries were expelled in 1924 and again in 1957. Their wooden churches and houses crumbled in the forest only to be rebuilt and crumble once again. Only the church of Elongo survives, restored and kept by the Benga. But the mission compound is deserted, with empty buildings lashed by the ocean’s winds.
The Benga thrived and multiplied. More Europeans came and established factories. The 19th century is one of wealth and prosperity, but it was fleeting. When Spain undertook the effective colonization of Equatorial Guinea, the Benga were resettled and international commerce faded away. By 1940, the time of prosperity was gone. Only pleasant memories survived, along with places in the jungle defined by scattered chinaware, chamber pots, iron bed frames and broken bottles.

The Benga, a Bantu group, arrived from the continent in 1700. They found seven Portuguese men on the island and nobody else. Not a small number, though, compared with the tiny isle of Annobon, ruled by a lonely Portuguese captain, in charge of hundreds of slaves – an isle for one to go mad.
In the mid-17th century, the Portuguese superseded the Dutch and established a slave depot and a fort. These were soon abandoned and like so many structures swallowed by the forest. Only the coconut trees that they planted along the beaches of Mandji survived, blended with the local vegetation.
The Dutch tried to settle and establish plantations in the interior of the island. They failed, leaving a few clay pipes behind and grasslands where the forest would not grow again.
During three centuries, Dutch, Portuguese, French and British used the island as a base to trade with a continent where they dared not step, cloaked as it was in tales of cannibalism and warlike tribes. From the island they purchased slaves first, then ivory and wood.
The Portuguese arrived in Mandji in 1471 and they found it empty, covered by dense forest, inhabited only by monkeys and crocodiles. They described it as unfit for human occupation, called it Corisco (“Lightning”), and left.

The story begins over a thousand years ago, during the Iron Age. Powerful lords ruled the estuary of the Muni and were buried in the island with many axes, pots, hoes and spears. There is no equal in the rainforest belt of Equatorial Africa of such a hierarchical and technologically complex society before the 15th century. Most of the island was densely settled: prehistoric rubbish—sherds, flints and iron implements—turns up almost everywhere. Five hundred years later civilization collapsed for unknown reasons.
Mandji is a place of perpetual abandonment. It seems as if culture were doomed to fail here.
The formation of the island is due to landslides from the Continent, provoked by the great stream of the river Muni, and to the subsidence of the calcareous soil that united it to the land a few million years ago. The island itself discarded by Africa.
In the mouth of the river Muni, the frontier between Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, there is a small island called Mandji.
And it is a rubbish dump of history.