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Malabo sits on Bioko Island in the Gulf of Guinea, a volcanic island that the Portuguese discovered in 1472 and named Fernando Poo. Britain established a base here in 1827 to suppress the slave trade, calling the settlement Port Clarence. Spain renamed it Santa Isabel in 1855. After independence in 1968, the first president renamed it Malabo in 1973 after the last Bubi king. Four names for the same harbour town: each one imposed from outside, each one testifying to how many competing interests have passed through this island without ever quite resolving its identity.

The Cathedral of Santa Isabel, begun in 1897 and completed in 1916, is the city's most dramatic building: a Spanish colonial twin-tower structure in cream and ochre that sits on the main square with a confidence the rest of the colonial architecture is too modest to match.

Oil was discovered offshore in the 1990s and within a decade had doubled the city's population and brought construction that changed the skyline considerably. The benefits of that oil wealth distributed themselves unevenly, as they tend to.