Gabon

Bantu-speaking peoples, the Fang and others, moved into the forests over the past two thousand years, living in dispersed villages and trading along the rivers and coast. From the fifteenth century the Atlantic coast, especially around the Gabon Estuary, became a centre of European trade, including a long and brutal role in the slave trade; Libreville was founded in 1849 as a settlement for people freed from a slave ship.

France declared the area a colony in the 1880s — the explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza was central to its acquisition — and ran it as part of French Equatorial Africa, extracting timber, especially okoumé, with forced labour. Independence came in 1960.

Gabon's second president, Omar Bongo, took power in 1967 and ruled for 42 years, one of the longest tenures in the world, cushioned by oil revenue and close ties to France. His son Ali Bongo succeeded him in 2009 and won three disputed elections before the military removed him in a coup in August 2023, ending the family's 55-year hold on power and installing a transitional government under General Brice Oligui Nguema.

Gabonese society is Bantu, dominated numerically by the Fang in the north, with the Myene, Punu, Nzebi, Kota, and others, plus small populations of Baka and Babongo forest hunter-gatherers. Most Gabonese are Christian, mainly Catholic, with a Muslim minority and widely practised traditional spirituality.

The best-known tradition is Bwiti, an initiatory religious practice centred on the psychoactive root iboga, with all-night ceremonies of music, dance, and ritual; elements of it have blended with Christianity in some communities. Mask traditions are strong — the white-faced okuyi (Mukudj) mask of the Punu, danced on stilts, is internationally known — along with the harp-zither mvet epic and polyphonic song.

Because the country is small in population and heavily urban, cultural life is concentrated in Libreville and Port-Gentil, and a large share of the elite has been educated in France, giving public life a strongly Francophone character.

Gabon is one of the least densely populated countries in Africa: most of its roughly 2.4 million people live in Libreville, the coastal capital, and the oil city of Port-Gentil, with the forested interior nearly empty. Around 88 percent of the country is forest.

Oil has made Gabon an upper-middle-income country on paper, with one of the higher GDP-per-person figures in Africa, but the wealth is very unevenly shared, poverty and youth unemployment are high, and much food is imported despite abundant land. Timber (with a ban on raw-log exports pushing local processing), manganese, and, increasingly, conservation-based tourism are the other pillars.

Daily life in Libreville features heavy traffic, seafront markets, and a Franco-Gabonese café and restaurant culture; in the interior, it is village farming, fishing, and small-scale logging, with the Trans-Gabon railway a lifeline.

Gabonese cooking is Central African, built on cassava (as bâton de manioc, steamed in leaves), plantain, and rice, eaten with sauces of groundnut, palm nut (sauce graine), or greens, and with fish, chicken, or bushmeat. Nyembwe chicken, cooked in palm-fruit sauce, is a national dish.

The Atlantic and the rivers provide excellent fish and seafood — odika (wild-mango-seed) sauce with fish is a speciality — and smoked fish flavours many dishes. Grilled fish and chicken with fiery piment and fried plantain are the everyday street and maquis food.

Palm wine and locally brewed drinks appear in villages; imported French wine and Régab, the ubiquitous local lager, are the drinks of the towns, along with strong coffee.

Gabon set aside 13 national parks in 2002, covering more than a tenth of the country, and they are its main draw for the few visitors who come. Loango National Park, on the central coast, is the showpiece — the place where forest elephants, buffalo, and gorillas can be seen on the beach itself, with hippos surfing the lagoon mouth, humpback whales offshore, and habituated western lowland gorillas tracked on foot.

Lopé National Park, in the centre and reachable by train, is a mosaic of rainforest and relict savanna, a UNESCO World Heritage Site for both its wildlife — mandrills in huge troops, elephants, buffalo — and its Iron Age and rock-art archaeology. Ivindo National Park protects the thundering Kongou and Mingouli falls and the forest clearings (bais) of Langoué, where elephants and other animals gather.

Closer to the capital, Pongara National Park across the estuary has leatherback turtle nesting and beach-and-mangrove walks, and Akanda protects coastal wetlands rich in birds. Libreville itself offers the seafront, markets, the Saint-Michel church with its carved wooden pillars, and the arts and mask collections of the national museum.