500 Ekuele

Equatorial Guinea's brief experiment with the Ekuele — introduced in 1975 after the country abandoned the Peseta Guineana — coincided almost exactly with the most brutal phase of Francisco Macías Nguema's dictatorship. The currency reform was largely cosmetic, a nationalist gesture while the economy was collapsing from mass forced labor, the expulsion of foreign workers, and the near-total destruction of the cocoa sector that had previously made the territory one of Africa's wealthier colonial economies.

Thomas De La Rue produced the series to a competent technical standard, but the issuing authority, Banco Popular, was itself a political instrument with no meaningful independence. The Ekuele series was short-lived; after Macías was overthrown and executed in 1979, the country adopted the CFA Franc.