Libreville and the freed
The coast was drawn into the Atlantic trade early, and the estuary that now holds the capital was a slaving centre. Libreville — "Freetown" in French — takes its name from a settlement founded in 1849 for a group of enslaved Africans freed from a captured slave ship, an origin it shares in spirit with Freetown in Sierra Leone and Liberia's coast.
Inland lay the peoples of the rainforest — Fang, Myene, Punu and others — and a French colonial administration that folded Gabon into French Equatorial Africa. The most famous outsider was Albert Schweitzer, whose hospital at Lambaréné, founded in 1913, made the town internationally known.
Oil and the Bongos
Independence came in 1960 under Léon M'ba. When he died in 1967, his vice-president Omar Bongo took over — and stayed for 42 years, one of the longest tenures in African history. Offshore oil, discovered in commercial quantities in the 1970s, gave him the means: a small population and a large crude income made Gabon, on paper, one of the richer countries in the region.
Bongo ran a tightly controlled single-party state for decades, cultivated an exceptionally close relationship with France, and became a byword for the murky post-colonial network known as "Françafrique". Much of the wealth stayed at the top; a third of the population remained poor even as the presidency accumulated property abroad.
The son and the fall
Omar Bongo died in 2009 and his son Ali Bongo Ondimba won the election to succeed him, extending the dynasty. Ali suffered a stroke in 2018 that left him visibly diminished, and questions about who really governed dogged the rest of his rule. In 2016 he had been declared the winner of a bitterly disputed election marked by violence.
In August 2023, minutes after Ali was proclaimed the winner of yet another contested vote, army officers announced they had seized power and placed him under house arrest, ending 56 years of Bongo rule. The coup, led by General Brice Oligui Nguema — himself a relative of the family — was greeted with street celebrations rather than resistance.
After the dynasty
Oligui Nguema promised a transition and then, in April 2025, won a presidential election to formalise his own rule, a familiar arc for a coup leader. Whether the change at the top produces any change in how the oil money is shared is the test the country now faces.
Gabon's real distinction is ecological. It is one of the most heavily forested nations on earth, home to thousands of forest elephants and to the famous images of surfing hippos and beach-walking gorillas at Loango. Since 2002 a network of 13 national parks has tried to build a future on that forest rather than only on crude — a rare bet in the region.