The history of Gabon

Gabon, on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa astride the equator, is a land of dense rainforest crossed by the Ogooué river. Its first inhabitants were forest hunter-gatherers, joined more than two thousand years ago by Bantu-speaking farmers and ironworkers whose descendants form most of the population today. From the fifteenth century the coastal peoples traded ivory, wood and, later, enslaved captives with European ships, and in the nineteenth century France turned trading treaties into a colony that became part of French Equatorial Africa. Since independence in 1960 Gabon has been one of Africa's richest countries per person thanks to oil, manganese and timber, but for more than 55 years it was ruled by Omar Bongo and his son Ali, until a military coup in 2023 opened a new period under Brice Oligui Nguema.

Archaeological sites in the Ogooué valley and on the coast show that people have lived in Gabon since the Stone Age. The earliest inhabitants known to history were rainforest hunter-gatherers, the ancestors of peoples such as the Babongo, Baka and Bakoya, often grouped under the outsiders' term Pygmies, whose presence goes back at least to the late Pleistocene. Their deep knowledge of forest plants, animals and music made them essential partners of later farming communities, with whom they traded and intermarried while keeping distinct ways of life.

Around 2,400 years ago, Bantu-speaking communities, part of the great Bantu expansion from the region of present-day Cameroon, reached the middle Ogooué, where sites such as Lalara and Otoumbi show the replacement of Late Stone Age occupations by villages of potters and farmers. A drier period that opened savannas within the forest may have eased their movement. Iron-smelting furnaces at Oveng, near the estuary, show that metal was being worked locally in the first millennia BCE and CE. In the Lopé–Okanda area of the middle Ogooué, now a UNESCO World Heritage landscape, thousands of rock engravings and the remains of successive villages record a long sequence of settlement. A burial cave at Iroungou near Mouila, used in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, held at least 28 people buried with iron currency, bracelets and ceremonial objects, a sign of wealth and social rank before any European contact.

By the fourteenth century the Vili kingdom of Loango, centred in what is now the Republic of the Congo and closely linked to the Kingdom of Kongo, extended its authority north along the coast to Mayumba and beyond. Raffia cloth served as currency, and Loango's officials taxed the trade in ivory, salt, copper and redwood that moved along the chain of lagoons. Farther north, the Myene-speaking peoples dominated the coast: the Mpongwe of the Gabon estuary, the Orungu around Cape Lopez and the Nkomi at Fernan Vaz. The Orungu and Nkomi had kings chosen by councils of elders, while the Mpongwe were organised into clans led by chiefs and councils. Inland lived many other peoples, among them the Punu, Nzebi, Tsogho and Kota, each with their own lineage-based societies, secret associations and religious traditions such as Bwiti, centred on initiation and the sacred iboga plant.

Portuguese navigators reached the estuary in 1472 and called it gabão, a hooded cloak, from its shape, the origin of the country's name. The Portuguese Empire settled the nearby islands of São Tomé and Príncipe rather than the mainland, and over the next centuries Dutch, English and French ships competed for the coastal trade. Europeans depended entirely on African brokers, who brought ivory, ebony and dyewood from the interior in exchange for cloth, salt, metalware, firearms and alcohol.

From the late seventeenth century, and above all in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the coast became a source of captives for the Atlantic slave trade. Gabon's ports were smaller outlets than those of Loango and Angola farther south: an English trader estimated in 1788 that about 500 people a year were embarked at Gabon and Cape Lopez. Captives were taken in war, for debt or by judicial sentence and brought down from the interior through chains of middlemen. The trade enriched the coastal elites, and the Orungu kingdom at Cape Lopez reached its height between about 1810 and 1850 as the region's leading slave market. Domestic slavery, which had existed before the Atlantic trade, expanded alongside it. Even after Britain and France outlawed the trade, slavers continued to load ships secretly, and at Mayumba barracoons held hundreds of people awaiting embarkation in the 1830s and 1840s.

France, seeking a naval base to suppress the slave trade and promote commerce, signed a treaty in 1839 with the Mpongwe ruler Rapontchombo, known to the French as King Denis, and further agreements with other chiefs on the estuary in the early 1840s. American Protestant missionaries from New England opened a mission there in 1842, and French Catholic missionaries followed. In 1849 the French navy captured a slave ship and settled the freed captives near its fort, founding Libreville, the free town, which became the colonial capital.

In the second half of the century explorers pushed up the Ogooué. Paul Du Chaillu described the forest and its gorillas in the 1850s, and in 1875–1878 and again from 1880 Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza travelled up the river with Gabonese guides and porters, signing treaties with local rulers and founding Franceville in 1880. During the same years the Fang, a large people moving from the north and east, settled across northern and central Gabon and reached the estuary, reshaping the region's population. France's claims were recognised at the Berlin conference in the Scramble for Africa, and Gabon was joined to the French Congo. In 1910 it became one of the four territories of French Equatorial Africa, governed from Brazzaville.

French administration was thin but harsh. From 1899 vast areas were handed to private concession companies, which extracted rubber and ivory through forced labour and violence, as in the neighbouring Congo. Under the indigénat code most Gabonese had an inferior legal status, owed heavy taxes, often paid in rubber, ivory or palm oil, and could be conscripted for unpaid labour on roads and plantations. Disease, famine and forced labour caused severe population loss in some regions in the early twentieth century. From the 1920s the felling of okoumé, a wood prized for plywood, became the backbone of the colonial economy and drew labour to the coast and rivers. In 1913 the Alsatian doctor and theologian Albert Schweitzer founded a hospital at Lambaréné on the Ogooué, for which he later received the Nobel Peace Prize.

During the First World War Gabon served as a base for the Allied campaign against German Kamerun. In the Second World War the colonial administration in Libreville sided with Vichy France, while most of French Equatorial Africa rallied to Charles de Gaulle. In November 1940 Free French forces, with British naval support, took Libreville and Port-Gentil after brief fighting, bringing Gabon over to the Free French. The war effort brought further forced labour and conscription. The first Gabonese political association, the Jeunesse Gabonaise, appeared in the early 1920s, and after the war Gabon sent deputies to the French parliament, notably Jean-Hilaire Aubame, deputy from 1946 to 1958.

Gabon became an autonomous republic within the French Community in 1958 and fully independent on 17 August 1960, part of the decolonisation of Africa. Its politics were dominated by two men: Léon M'ba, leader of the Gabonese Democratic Bloc and a strong supporter of close ties with France, and Aubame of the Gabonese Democratic and Social Union. M'ba became president in 1961 under a presidential constitution with Aubame as foreign minister, but he soon moved to concentrate power, curbing the press and squeezing out the opposition. On 18 February 1964 army officers overthrew him in a bloodless coup and installed Aubame, but within a day French paratroopers flew in under defence agreements and restored M'ba. Opponents were imprisoned, and France kept a permanent military base in Libreville.

When M'ba died in November 1967 he was succeeded by his young vice-president, Albert-Bernard Bongo, who had been chosen as his running mate that year. In 1968 Bongo dissolved the old parties and made his Gabonese Democratic Party (PDG) the only legal party. After converting to Islam in 1973 he took the name Omar Bongo, later adding Ondimba. Oil production off Port-Gentil soared in the 1970s, and with manganese from Moanda, uranium from Mounana and timber, Gabon's small population enjoyed one of the highest incomes per person in Africa, although wealth was very unequally shared and much of it was captured by the ruling elite. The state built the Trans-Gabon railway into the interior between 1974 and the mid-1980s. Bongo became the archetypal figure of Françafrique, the web of political, business and security ties between France and its former colonies, and he acted as a mediator in conflicts across Central Africa.

Falling oil prices, debt and austerity provoked strikes and riots in 1990, and Bongo agreed to a national conference that restored multiparty politics. He won disputed elections in 1993, 1998 and 2005; violent protests after the 1993 vote led to the Paris Accords of 1994 and a government of national unity, but the PDG kept its grip on power, and a 2003 amendment removed presidential term limits. In 2002 Gabon created thirteen national parks covering about a tenth of its territory, making conservation a pillar of national policy.

Omar Bongo died in a Spanish hospital on 8 June 2009 after 41 years in power. His son Ali Bongo Ondimba won the election that August amid fraud allegations and deadly riots in Port-Gentil, and his 2016 re-election, by a very narrow official margin over Jean Ping, was followed by protests in which dozens of people were killed. In October 2018 Ali Bongo suffered a stroke, and in January 2019 a small group of soldiers attempted a coup that quickly failed. Gabon joined the Commonwealth in 2022.

On 30 August 2023, minutes after the electoral commission declared Ali Bongo the winner of a third term, army officers seized power, annulled the result and dissolved state institutions. The head of the Republican Guard, General Brice Oligui Nguema, was sworn in as transitional president on 4 September. A new constitution was approved by referendum in November 2024, and in the presidential election of 12 April 2025 Oligui won about 90 per cent of the vote; Gabon was restored to full membership of the African Union and the Commonwealth. In May 2025 Ali Bongo and his family were released and left for Angola, and the International Court of Justice ruled in favour of Equatorial Guinea in the long dispute over Mbanié and neighbouring islands that Gabon had occupied since 1972. Legislative elections followed in September and October 2025, and in November a special criminal court in Libreville convicted Ali Bongo's wife Sylvia and son Noureddin, both abroad, of embezzlement and other crimes, sentencing them to 20 years in prison. Gabon enters the second half of the 2020s under an elected former coup leader, still dependent on oil and still seeking to turn its forests and minerals into broader prosperity.