DONATO, PRESIDENT … IN EXILE

By the time it became better known, no one remembered that small-town story, which deserves to be told, since they are its beginnings.

Don Donato was a well-educated young man, young through the years, and like some of his generation, in the early eighties he managed to travel to Ukraine, where he graduated as one of the best pilots of his class.

Shortly after he returned to Guinea, and fate wanted him to end up driving a taxi to survive, while foreign pilots were in charge of these services in all the planes of the companies that operated in the country.

We met Don Donato Obiang Ada for the first time on the day of the Popular Revolt against the Franco Cfa in Central Africa and West Africa organized by civil organizations and especially merchants throughout the continent.

The Cfa Franc, the colonial FIAT currency, was the main symbol of French colonial oppression in Africa; a very bitter symbol for France and for Africa.

The peoples demanded forceful changes, since the economic crisis had forced unemployment in countries such as Cameroon, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, and political tensions did not improve the situation.

Many young people, like Donato, were forced to immigrate to rural areas and return to the villages of their parents, while in urban areas the worst that corruption and disorder can bring to a young society took hold.

Together with their families, life in the interior of the country was calmer.

In the interior of the country, Equatorial Guinea and in the middle of the jungle, the information reached the destination later than in urban areas.

That is why that afternoon, when the Revolt became more violent, and many vandals took advantage of the situation to initiate a series of looting of the defenseless population; and just leaving his farm and hunting something to feed his large family, Donato was intercepted by a group of young people in a violent attitude and very agitated, and what is said is that he tried to convince them that all this, whatever they wanted could be solved without aggression, at least in Equatorial Guinea. 

There he was, alone with his machete, when those bands of agitators forced him to choose, either Revolt or Death.

At that precise moment he stopped being Donato and became Don Donato.

Those young people, about twenty, were not taller or bigger or stronger than him, nor were they foreigners, they were all Guineans.

Here begins the story Don Donato, of how life changed.