Gabon

From the rainforest hunter-gatherers and the Bantu migrations of the Ogooué basin, through the Atlantic and slave trades of the Myènè coast, the founding of Libreville and French Equatorial Africa, to independence in 1960 and the long Bongo era ended by the coup of 2023.

Gabon straddles the equator on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa, a heavily forested country drained by the Ogooué River. Its earliest inhabitants were rainforest hunter-gatherers — the Babongo and related peoples — followed over the first millennium BCE and after by Bantu-speaking farmers and ironworkers whose movements left some 1,800 rock engravings and dense archaeological remains in the Lopé-Okanda landscape, inscribed by UNESCO in 2007. Coastal Myènè peoples such as the Mpongwe and Orungu, and later the Fang, settled the estuary and rivers and became middlemen in the Atlantic trade. Portuguese navigators reached the estuary in 1472 and named it Gabão; over the following centuries European traders dealt in ivory, dyewoods and enslaved people through coastal kingdoms linked to Orungu and Loango. France signed treaties with Mpongwe rulers from 1839, and in 1849 settled freed captives from a seized slave ship at a site named Libreville. Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza's expeditions opened the Ogooué interior, Gabon became part of French Equatorial Africa in 1910, and Albert Schweitzer founded his hospital at Lambaréné in 1913. Gabon became independent on 17 August 1960 under Léon M'ba; from 1967 it was ruled for over four decades by Omar Bongo, sustained by oil wealth, and then by his son Ali Bongo, until a military coup on 30 August 2023 ended the Bongo family's 56-year hold on power.