People & Culture

Stand almost anywhere in Gabon and you are close to the equator, which crosses the country near its geographic centre. What sets Gabon apart on a continent already generous with wilderness is how much of it remains under trees, since more than 88 percent of the national territory is rainforest, one of the highest forest cover ratios found anywhere on earth. At the heart of that green mass runs the Ogooue, Gabon's principal river, rising over the border in the Republic of Congo and cutting west across the country before emptying into the Atlantic, gathering the drainage of most of the nation as it goes. The Ogooue basin shaped everything that follows here, deciding who could move where, who controlled trade routes, and which peoples ended up on the coast and which stayed in the deep interior. Gabon also holds a piece of scientific history that almost no other country can claim, and that most guidebooks skip entirely. In May 1972 a technician at a nuclear fuel processing plant at Pierrelatte in France noticed something wrong during a routine mass spectrometry check, since uranium arriving from Gabon showed 0.717 percent of the isotope uranium-235, slightly below the 0.720 percent found in every other terrestrial rock, meteorite and lunar sample ever measured. France's atomic energy commission traced the anomaly back through the supply chain to an ore processing plant near Franceville, and from there to the uranium mine at Oklo, where some samples showed uranium-235 depleted to as little as 0.29 percent, a depletion that only made sense if the uranium had already undergone fission. It had. Somewhere between 1.7 and 2 billion years ago, natural conditions of ore concentration and groundwater moderation allowed self-sustaining nuclear fission chain reactions to run in Gabonese rock without any human hand involved, operating intermittently for a few hundred thousand years at an average output under 100 kilowatts. Oklo remains the only place on the planet known to have done this naturally, and it was found only because someone in France was paying attention to a number two thousandths of a percentage point off. Long before uranium or any written record, the forests of Gabon were home to communities including the Babongo, the Baka and the Bakoya, forest hunter-gatherer peoples whose presence in the region is attested from the Upper Pleistocene, tens of thousands of years ago, and who are still often grouped under the blanket label Pygmy, a term many of them reject in favour of their own names. These were semi-nomadic communities that built an intimate working knowledge of the equatorial forest, including an extensive pharmacy of medicinal plants. Beginning around 500 BC, Bantu-speaking farmers moving south and east out of what is now Cameroon began arriving in the region, leaving pottery and tool evidence at sites such as Njole in central Gabon, with Bantu communities well established by the last centuries BC and expanding through the first millennium AD. The newcomers pushed the earlier forest peoples further into the deep interior over time, though contact between the two never stopped, and it still shows today in shared ritual and medicinal knowledge. Along the coast, the Myene-speaking peoples, including the Mpongwe of the Gabon estuary and the Orungu around Cape Lopez, turned command of the waterways into political and commercial power. Around 1700 the Orungu clans consolidated into a kingdom centred on Cape Lopez and the Ogooue delta, an elective monarchy of roughly twenty clans that used its position at the river mouth to control what moved between the interior and the sea. From the 1760s into the 1840s that meant control of the Atlantic slave trade, since captives taken in wars and social exile in the interior were sent down the Ogooue to coastal barracoons to await Brazilian and Cuban ships, and by 1788 outside observers put annual embarkation from Gabon and Cape Lopez at around five hundred people, with the kingdom taxing and warehousing the traffic as a fiscal monopoly through its commercial peak from about 1810 to 1850. After the formal renunciation of the slave trade in 1853 and the cession of Cape Lopez to France in 1862, the royal networks that had depended on slaving income unravelled, trade shifted to ivory, timber and palm products, and the French administration formally dissolved the Orungu monarchy in 1927. European contact had arrived earlier, in the form of Portuguese traders in the fifteenth century, the first confirmed Europeans on this coast. They gave the territory its modern name, from gabao, the Portuguese word for a hooded cloak, roughly the shape the Komo River estuary traces near what is now Libreville. Later arrivals corrupted the word into Gabon, and it stuck. The capital's own founding carries a specific and sobering story. In 1846 the Brazilian slave ship L'Elizia, carrying captives out of the Congo coast, was intercepted near Loango by the French navy. Fifty-two of the freed people were resettled in 1849 on the site that became Libreville, and that same year, following the establishment of the French Second Republic, the settlers held an election and chose one of their own, a former slave named Mountier, as mayor. The city's name, meaning free town in French, deliberately echoes Freetown in Sierra Leone, itself founded for freed and formerly enslaved people, and it belongs to the same small family of West and Central African cities, Freetown and Monrovia among them, founded as havens from the very trade that had built the region's coastal fortunes. French colonisation followed close behind. Between 1875 and 1885 the Italian-born explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza traced the Ogooue from the coast to its source and pushed on toward the Congo basin, establishing French treaties and authority along the way, and Franceville, in the upper Ogooue, was founded under his push in 1880. Gabon was attached to the French Congo in 1886, and by 1910 stood as one of four colonies making up French Equatorial Africa, governed from Brazzaville for the decades that followed. It was into this colonial Gabon that Albert Schweitzer arrived in 1913, fresh from his medical degree, to found a hospital at Lambarene on the Ogooue. He spent most of the next fifty years there, and the work earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952, cementing an international reputation as a selfless humanitarian. That reputation has not gone unexamined. Contemporaries and later critics, the journalists James Cameron and Gerald McKnight among them, accused him of running the hospital as an autocratic and paternalistic operation that treated African staff and patients as permanent juniors, a relationship he himself once described as elder brother to younger. The scholar Ali Mazrui offered a sharper label, benevolent racism, meaning a racial paternalism wrapped in genuine altruism. Both things are true at once, and a visitor to Lambarene today stands in the middle of that unresolved argument rather than outside it. Gabon reached independence on 17 August 1960, with Leon Mba, already the territory's leading political figure, becoming the new republic's first president the following year. Mba proved one of France's most reliably loyal allies among the newly independent African states, a loyalty tested on 18 February 1964 when the Gabonese military moved against him in a coup driven by resentment of his increasingly autocratic and pro-French rule. France answered under a defence treaty signed in 1960, and within about forty-eight hours French troops had reversed the coup and reinstalled Mba, a textbook illustration of what critics came to call Francafrique. Mba died in 1967 and was succeeded by Omar Bongo, who held the presidency for forty-two years, into 2009, making him for a time the world's longest-serving head of state. Bongo declared a one-party state in 1968, was returned to office repeatedly under that system, and only permitted multiparty politics from the early 1990s, while Gabon's uranium and oil kept the country central to French strategic interest. Oil, developed at scale under his rule, transformed the economy, since at its production peak in 1997 the country pumped some 370,000 barrels a day, and oil still accounts for around half of GDP and roughly eighty percent of exports. The result is one of Africa's higher figures for GDP per capita, cited in recent years at somewhere between 8,000 and 11,000 United States dollars depending on the measure, several times the sub-Saharan average, sitting alongside a Gini coefficient near 39 and close to a third of the population living below the poverty line. The wealth is real, and so is its uneven distribution. Gabon's spiritual life includes a tradition found almost nowhere else. Bwiti is an initiatory religion rooted in animism and the veneration of forest spirits and ancestors, later layered with elements of Christian liturgy, and now recognised as one of the country's principal religions alongside Christianity and Islam. Central to Bwiti initiation is the ritual consumption of the root bark of Tabernanthe iboga, a forest shrub whose name derives from a Tsogho word meaning to heal, and which contains ibogaine, a powerful psychoactive alkaloid. Initiation rites typically run three to seven days and involve fasting, purification, repetitive music and the induced visionary state the root produces, and those who complete it may keep using iboga through their lives for healing and spiritual purposes. It is treated in Gabon as a serious and structured religious practice rather than as a tourist experience to be consumed casually. On 30 August 2002 President Omar Bongo created thirteen national parks in a single stroke, setting aside 2,837,128 hectares, close to eleven percent of Gabon's land area, under a new national parks agency. It was one of the more decisive conservation acts by any African government of its era, and it is the reason a visitor can see what they can see in Gabon today. That visitor might stand on the sand at Loango National Park, where forest elephants and buffalo commonly walk the beach and, in the rainy season between November and April, hippos have been photographed riding the Atlantic surf between estuary and river, the sight that gave Loango its fame, though careful accounts note it is a rare piece of luck rather than a scheduled event. They might walk into Lope National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2007 where rainforest meets the last relict grass savanna left over from an ice age fifteen thousand years past, alongside some 1,800 petroglyphs left by the peoples who passed through the Ogooue valley, and one of the densest forest elephant populations recorded anywhere in Africa. Further east, in Ivindo National Park, the Ivindo River drops over Kongou Falls, a cataract some 3.2 kilometres wide and up to 56 metres high, among the highest volume waterfalls on the continent. Near Libreville, a short boat ride across the estuary reaches Pointe Denis, inside Pongara National Park, where beach and palm line offer the easiest first taste of coastal Gabon. Up the Ogooue at Lambarene, Schweitzer's hospital compound still stands and now houses a museum to his work, with the argument over his legacy left for the visitor to weigh in person. Back in the capital, the Marche du Mont-Bouet in Libreville's third arrondissement remains the country's largest market, a working and unpolished cross-section of daily commerce. And to the northwest, the granite peaks of Crystal Mountains National Park hold, by the estimate of a number of botanists, the greatest plant diversity found anywhere in Africa. None of this asks to be consumed quickly. The forest closes back over the petroglyphs at Lope the same way it closed over the Orungu warehouses at Cape Lopez, and a Bwiti initiate's relationship with iboga is not a photo opportunity. Moving through Gabon's history well means slowing down enough to let a market, a waterfall or a hospital ward tell you what it is, rather than what a brochure needs it to be.