BBPP: Bubi Tribe

by Colleen Truelsen, 1999 Caldera Expedition participant

Its original name, bestowed by a Portuguese sailor in 1472, was Formosa (the beautiful). When noted English explorer Henry M. Stanley saw it in 1884, the natural beauty of Bioko Island, to him, was "extraordinary ... the pearl of the Gulf of Guinea."

With its towering volcanic peaks, thick, green-velvet blanket of lush rainforests and distinctive black sand beaches, Bioko is indeed a picture of tropical paradise. And to that paradise, some 3,000 years ago, fighting brutal surf in hand-dug canoes, came the original inhabitants -- the Bubi tribe.

Isolated on their island, they formed a society, language and religion that was theirs alone, different from their mainland Bantu relatives and left to develop, undisturbed. Even slave-hunting, resource-hungry Europeans were intimidated by the Bubi's legendary savagery, more likely to take their vessels to the comparatively easy trading and slaving offered on the mainland West Africa shoreline. "A savage and cruel people live there," wrote a Portuguese explorer in the mid 1700's. But if they had openly welcomed the white men in huge vessels, the Bubi most likely would have found themselves shackled in the bowels of those boats, bound for New World plantations.

The Bubi were distrustful -- perhaps their kind god Rupe, watching from high atop 10,000-foot Pico Basile, warned them of explorers and traders true motives? The slaughter of an entire English crew by a Batete Bubi tribe in 1810 is among the more dramatic stories of their responses to infiltrators.

Who are the Bubi?

Protected and watched over by Rupe, harassed by malevolent spirits permitted to bring disease and adversity to the physical world, the Bubi were, and are today, people living in harsh beauty where they raise families, try to make a living, sing, dance and cope with politics and the changing world around them.

Just like the rest of us.

You can link today to yesterday and the Bubi's ancient traditions, history and beliefs here:

BBPP employs over four dozen people of Bubi heritage in conservation work.

Conservation and the Bubi Tribe

Author's note: How can we be sure of the Bubi history that we have? We can and we can't: Artifacts are quickly swallowed by the efficient recyling of the equatorial rainforest. And as the Bubi mayor of Malabo has been quoted as saying, "The Bubi have no grandparents," the older people of the tribe slain during the murderous regime of Fang dictator Macias Nguema from 1968 until his overthrow by current President Teodoro Obiang Mbasogo in 1979.

Relying on oral legends, linguistic studies, conjecture and parallel histories of other tribes, various authors and scholars have written not very many books on Bioko and the Bubi, most of them in Spanish, as that was the country of final ownership before 1968 independence.

Much of this article was taken from the book "Los Bubis En Fernando Poo," by Father Antonio Aymemi (Imprenta de Galo Saez, Madrid, 1942). Father Aymemi was a Spanish Catholic missionary who lived on the island ministering to "his beloved Bubis" from 1894 until his death in Sept. 29, 1941. This dedicated priest learned the Bubi language, tried to understand the reasons behind their rituals, recorded their stories and left behind written history, hoping that not only the rest of the world but the children of the Bubi would be able to remember their traditions and beliefs.

Other outstanding and recommended English-language works that contribute to the study of the Bubi are:

-- From Slavery to Neoslavery: The Bight of Biafra and Fernando Poo in the Era of Abolition - 1827, 1930, by Ibrahim K. Sundiata (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.)

-- Equatorial Guinea: Colonialism, State Terror, and the Search for Stability, by Sundiata, (Westview Press Inc., 1990)

--Small is Not Always Beautiful, The Story of Equatorial Guinea, Max Liniger (C. Hurst & Co., 1988)