10 Maddest People Ever To Be In Charge Of A Country

The rule of Francisco Macías Nguema, President for Life of Equatorial Guinea, was characterised by such levels of hysterical brutality it became known as the 'Dachau of Africa'. He would order the executions of entire families and even villages, even one time having them killed en masse in a football stadium while the song 'Those Were The Days' played over the loudspeakers. One Christmas Eve he added some seasonal jollity to his firing squad fetish when he had the gunmen dress as Santa Claus while mowing down his victims.

Nguema was terrified by the idea anyone might be more clever than him. Considering he resorted to keeping his country's treasury on the mud floor of his shed, there were a lot of people smarter than Nguema. At one point his persecution of intellectuals led to the word 'intellectual' being banned. Eventually a third of Equitorial Guinea's population was murdered or driven out by Nguema's regime.

Towards the end of his rule a raging drug habit had him hallucinating and shouting at dead victims. He tried to make himself God by banning Christian worship and hanging pictures of himself in every church. Nguema was overthrown, tried for genocide and executed in 1979 during a military coup by his nephew, who turned out to be not much better.