Comics Without Captions: Can a cartoonist help unseat a dictator?

Self-portrait, Ramón Esono Ebalé.

In August 2014, two activists from Equatorial Guinea arrived in Washington, DC, hoping to piggyback on publicity generated by the US-Africa Leaders Summit, a gathering of African heads of state hosted by President Barack Obama. The official agenda included a roundtable with Fortune 500 companies and a White House performance by Lionel Richie. But for Ramón Esono Ebalé and Tutu Alicante, the occasion was a soft opening of sorts for a comic book taking shots at one of the event’s most prominent guests: President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, the longest-serving dictator in Africa. The book, La Pesadilla de Obi, or Obi’s Nightmare, was illustrated by Esono and written by an anonymous collaborator based in the capital, Malabo. Alicante’s role was to help them find an audience. Over the course of three days, Esono and Alicante passed out 300 English copies of the book to aides and bureaucrats on the summit’s fringes, hoping to push conversations about authoritarianism and human-rights abuses above the din of billion-dollar investment initiatives and strategic partnerships.

A far more important book launch still awaits Esono. If all goes according to plan, residents of far-flung towns in Equatorial Guinea’s forested interior will soon get to read the book’s Spanish version, the first graphic novel ever to be imported in any significant number into the country. The trick for Esono and his distributors—a network of individuals who intend to hand-deliver copies one at a time—is to avoid being caught.

Obi’s Nightmare is a satirical day-in-the-life that imagines what it would be like for Obiang himself, accustomed to unbridled control of his country’s economy, to wake up as an unemployed, witless husband in one of Malabo’s dreary slums. Early on in the book, drunk after a debaucherous party in the presidential palace, a clownish Obi drifts to sleep, then awakens to the shrieks of his angry wife, who dispatches him with a kick in the rear to stand in line for water at the neighborhood pump.

For Esono, who was not yet two when Obiang seized power in a coup in 1979, comics are the best and perhaps only avenue to undermine a dictator who has ruled over his country for close to forty years. Whether you want to read or not, whether you’re literate or not, Esono says, images can’t be ignored. Esono hasn’t lived in Equatorial Guinea since 2011. Instead, he has become a gadfly of the internet age, taking the political pulse of his country from some 5,000 miles away, in exile, in Asunción, Paraguay, and circulating his cartoons and commentary on Facebook.

Equatorial Guinea is made up of a cluster of volcanic islands off the coast of Cameroon and a swath of mainland tropical forest carved from the coastline of Gabon, in West Africa. Like an asterisk on the fringes of the French and British empires, it is all that remains of Spain’s grandiose eighteenth-century plans for colonizing West Africa. All the islands put together make up a country about the size of Massachusetts, with a population of 800,000—fewer inhabitants than Jacksonville, Florida.

But Equatorial Guinea is also sub-Saharan Africa’s third largest oil exporter, trailing only Nigeria and Angola. And oil, more than anything else, has helped cement Obiang’s tenure as the continent’s longest-standing ruler. Oil comprises close to 90 percent of Equatorial Guinea’s GDP, and has given Obiang powerful allies among Washington lobbyists and CEOs in Houston and Madrid. Oil has bought the cooperation of bankers and financed a long-running campaign to burnish Obiang’s image abroad; it has paid for the services of foreign mercenaries who advise the president on security; and most importantly, it has allowed Obiang to anchor himself at the center of a vast web of patronage that controls the national economy. With Obi...