Bubi

The Bubi are the Bantu-speaking indigenous people of Bioko, a volcanic island in the Gulf of Guinea that Europeans called Fernando Pó. Their ancestors crossed from the mainland in waves, one tradition placing the main migration in the thirteenth century, and formed a society of feuding clans speaking Bube.

The Portuguese navigator Fernão do Pó sighted the island in 1472; in the seventeenth century Dutch and Portuguese traders ran slave-trading posts on its shores. As slaving intensified, the Bubi withdrew from the coast inland and, under the chief Molambo about 1700, began gathering their clans into a kingdom, which later rulers carried on into the early nineteenth century.

By the 1778 Treaty of El Pardo Portugal ceded the island to Spain, but the Spanish garrison withdrew by 1780, leaving the kingdom intact. From 1827 the British leased Port Clarence as an anti-slave-trade base, while Bubi rulers held the interior through the 1830s.