Bio
| Bioko (Fernando Póo) | ||
|---|---|---|
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| Waters | Gulf of Guinea | |
| Geographical location | 3 ° 30 ′ N , 8 ° 42 ′ E | |
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| length | 70 km | |
| width | 32 km | |
| surface | 2 017 km² | |
| Highest elevation |
Pico Basilé 3012 m |
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| Residents | 334.463 (2015) 166 inhabitants / km² |
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| main place | Malabo | |
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Bioko is an island in the Gulf of Guinea . Her name was formerly Fernando Póo , from 1973 to 1979 Macías Nguema Byogo , after the dictator at the time, Francisco Macías Nguema . The majority of the inhabitants belong to the Bantu people of the Bubi , but the ruling minority belongs to the catch .
Politically, Bioko belongs to Equatorial Guinea , whose capital Malabo (formerly Santa Isabel) is on the north coast of the island. Important communities of Biokos are, besides Malabo, Rebola , Luba , Baney , Riaba and Ureka .
geography
Bioko has an area of 2017 km² and more than 300,000 inhabitants. The island is located 4 ° north and 8 ° east about 40 km off the coast of Cameroon ; When the view is clear (after rain), the Cameroon Mountain is easy to see. From Malabo to Bata (city) on the equatorial Guinean mainland Mbini it is about 160 nautical miles (290 km) in a south-southeast direction.
Until the end of the last ice age , Bioko formed the end of a peninsula that was connected to the mainland of today's Cameroon. It was separated from mainland Africa about 10,000 years ago by the rise in sea levels.
Two volcanic mountains divide the island into a northern and a southern part, to which the two provinces Bioko Norte and Bioko Sur correspond. The Pico Basilé (fr. Santa Isabel ) in the north reaches an altitude of 3012 m.
In Moka , environmentalists are primarily trying to preserve the diversity of the monkey species. These include in particular the endangered species of monkey the drill .
history
Bioko had been the home of the boys for a long time . For Europe, the island was discovered in 1472 by the Portuguese navigator Fernão do Pó , whose name it carried until 1973. But it was not colonized for a long time. In 1778 the island was first claimed by Spain, which made a first attempt at colonization through a slave trading station . However, this failed in 1781 and until the 1860s there was not even a Spanish representative on the island.
From 1827, Britain's interest in the island increased. By 1835 the British had developed a base on Fernando Poo for the fight against the slave trade . In 1841 it was one of the starting points for a great British expedition to Niger, which ultimately failed. At this time, runaway or freed slaves, immigrants from Sierra Leone and Europeans formed the Fernandinos , who were already trading in palm oil with the Bubi in the 1840s.
In the 1860s, the Spanish interest in his property briefly revived, around 600 people from Cuba were brought into the country, but here too the attempt at colonization failed. From 1868 on there was an administrative presence on the island, albeit at a very reduced level at the beginning. At the turn of the century, Spain's commitment increased significantly, in 1904 Spain subjugated the Bubi and thus achieved complete rule over the island.
From 1916 to 1919 there were 6,000 soldiers and 12,000 members of the German protection force of Cameroon on the island. Most of the German officers, however, soon left their troops at the urging of the Entente in order to be interned in Spain until the end of the war. There are therefore still Equatorial Guineans with German ancestors and family names, as well as places with German names, e.g. B. Frauendorff .
In 1963 the island received autonomy within the Spanish colonial empire. When it gained independence in 1968, it was merged with Rio Muni (now Mbini ) to form Equatorial Guinea. The Grupo Nacionalista Bubi 1 de Abril (Group of Bubi Nationalists April 1st) is striving for the island's independence from Equatorial Guinea .
economy
In the north-east of the island there are facilities for processing the extremely large oil deposits immediately off the coast, which help the country's political leadership caste to achieve enormous wealth.
Cocoa , coffee , sugar cane , bananas and other tropical fruits are grown in the fertile coastal plain .
Others
Bioko is the setting for Frederick Forsyth's novel The Dogs of War .
Under the old name Fernando Póo , the island is an important location in the Illuminatus trilogy of novels ! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Flags of the World - Group of Bubi Nationalists 1st April
- ^ Donald G. McNeil Jr .: Precursor to HIV Was in Monkeys for Millennia . The New York Times. 2010. Retrieved September 17, 2010.
- ↑ Bioko Biodiversity Protection Program ( Memento from March 3, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Drill (Mandrillus leucophaeus) ( Memento from July 14, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) on ARKIVE (English)
- ↑ a b c Ibrahim Sundiata: From slaving to neoslavery: the bight of Biafra and Fernando Po in the era of abolition, 1827-1930 , 1996, ISBN 0299145107 , pp. 3-8