Run your eyes down the map of the western coast of that continent until you come to Equatorial Guinea. Stop at the bend where part of the Atlantic Ocean curves inward and becomes the Bight of Biafra. You will note a chain of small islands; you will further observe that one of these is Fernando Poo. There, in the capital city of Santa Isobel, during the early 1970s, Captain Ernesto Tequilla y Mota carefully read and reread Edward Luttwak's Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook, and placidly went about following Luttwak's formula for a perfect coup d'etat in Santa Isobel. He set up a timetable, made his first converts among other officers, formed a clique, and began the slow process of arranging things so that officers likely to be loyal to Equatorial Guinea would be on assignment at least forty-eight hours away from the capital city when the coup occurred. He drafted the first proclamation to be issued by his new government; it took the best slogans of the most powerful left-wing and right-wing groups on the island and embedded them firmly in a tapioca-like context of bland liberal-conservatism. It fit Luttwak's prescription excellently, giving everybody on the island some small hope that his own interests and beliefs would be advanced by the new regime. And, after three years of planning, he struck: the key officials of the old regime were quickly, bloodlessly, placed under house arrest; troops under the command of officers in the cabal occupied the power stations and newspaper offices; the inoffensively fascist-conservative-liberal-communist proclamation of the new People's Republic of Fernando Poo went forth to the world over the radio station in Santa Isobel. Ernesto Tequilla y Mota had achieved his ambition-promotion from captain to generalissimo in one step. Now, at last, he began wondering about how one went about governing a country. He would probably have to read a new book, and he hoped there was one as good as Luttwak's treatise on seizing a country. That was on March 14.