This Dictator Executed Anyone Who Wore Glasses

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]Did you know that one dictator killed a third of his entire country's population in just 11 years? In 1968, Francisco Macías Nguema became the first president of Equatorial Guinea. What followed was one of Africa's most forgotten genocides. Macías was consumed by paranoid delusions. He believed intellectuals were plotting against him, so he banned the word intellectual entirely. Anyone caught wearing glasses was executed on site. He thought glasses meant they could read and think too much. He turned the national stadium into a killing field. Thousands were marched in and never came out. Macías banned fishing in a coastal nation. He destroyed schools and hospitals. He even banned money at one point. His reign of terror lasted 11 years. Out of 300,000 people, he murdered over 100,000.

[00:00:49]Families were wiped out. Children were orphaned. Entire villages disappeared.

[00:00:54]The world barely noticed this tiny African nation's suffering. When he was finally overthrown in 1979, the country was a graveyard. Francisco Macías Nguema had turned his homeland into hell on earth.