Malabo is the capital of Equatorial Guinea and the province of Bioko Norte. In 2018, the city had a population of approximately 297,000 inhabitants. Spanish is the official language of the city and of the country as well. Equatorial Guinean Pidgin is used as a language of wider communication across Bioko island.
About Malabo, Equatorial Guinea in brief
Malabo is the capital of Equatorial Guinea and the province of Bioko Norte. In 2018, the city had a population of approximately 297,000 inhabitants. Spanish is the official language of the city and of the country as well. Equatorial Guinean Pidgin is used as a language of wider communication across Bioko island, including Malabo. Ciudad de la Paz is a planned city under construction in mainland Equatoria which was designed to replace Malabo as the capital. In 1472, in an attempt to find a new route to India, the Portuguese navigator Fernão do Pó, encountered the island ofBioko, which he called Formosa. Later, the island was named after its discoverer, Fernando Pó. With the treaties of San Ildefonso in 1777 and El Pardo in 1778, during the reign of the Spanish King Charles III,. the Portuguese gave to the Spanish the islands of Fernando Po, Annobón, and the right to conduct trade in the mainland. In 1844, when Queen Isabel II of Spain ruled after the regency of her mother Maria Cristina and Baldomero Espartero, Spain let the UK know its desire to regain control of the colony and thus the island. The capital, Port Clarence, was renamed Santa Isabel, in honor of Fernando Isabel. The present name was given to the town in 1973 as part of the campaign of President Francisco Macguema to replace place names of European origin with African names, in this case honoring Malabo, Lopaka, Melaka, Bubi, and Bubi Ebuera.
Its last king was the last Bubi Moka, who surrendered to the Spaniards and claimed to represent the legitimate rule of Bubi Bubi. The population of the capital was increased by the arrival of slaves freed by the British. These freedmen were settled in Port Clarence before the establishment of Sierra Leone as a colony for freed slaves. They joined other migrants who arrived as free workers from Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Benin, Nigeria and Cameroon, and became the population group called Creole or fernandinos, whose language was Pichinglis, a Bantu-English Creole with some Spanish elements. The area stretched from the Niger Delta to the mouth of Ogüé River — in the current Gabon — and included, besides the islands, the islets of Corisco and Elobeyes. It took another decade to implement this direct control. Both factors helped change the attitude of Spain, in addition to internal reasons to change the capital to Port Clarence in 1855 and the island again took control of Port Clarence and the present capital, Malabo, in 1827. The name was chosen in honor. of the Duke of Clarence, who later became King William IV. Thus, on 25 December 1827, Port Clarence was founded on the ruins of a previous Portuguese settlement.
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This page is based on the article Malabo, Equatorial Guinea published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
