Evom Nguan

Martiniano Abaga Elé Ndoho, born in Bata in 1958, began singing in 1976 under the name Maelé, mostly in Fang, the language of his people. His early hits got generous airtime on Radio Bata and Radio Malabo and soon made him famous in neighbouring Gabon and Cameroon too. Those years were also those of the dictator Francisco Macías Nguema, and one of Maelé's biggest early songs was a song of praise to him, which won the Bata Music Festival in 1977. A year later he represented Equatorial Guinea at the World Festival of Youth and Students in Havana. In 1983 he travelled to France to record his first long-player, Evom Nguan, with arrangements by Toto Guillaume and Aladji Touré, and hits such as Andeme Ela, Bong ye o Kie-Ntem and Ayong. The album was a big success. Maelé coined and named his own rhythm, machacando, and became known as its king, and analysts have called him the greatest artist in the history of Equatoguinean music. His later life followed the country's politics closely. In the early 1990s his song Engóng criticised the government of Teodoro Obiang, and he left for Madrid in 1991; that year, on a tour of Gabon, he was the target of an attack allegedly orchestrated by the government. By the mid-1990s he had returned home and joined the ruling party. When he died in Madrid in 2017, the state honoured him with a posthumous medal. Evom Nguan, his first album, is the starting point of a career that tracked his country's turbulent history.