Gabon's history: the presidency one family held from 1967 to 2023

Who lived in the Ogooué valley before the Portuguese

Rainforest hunter-gatherers are the earliest known inhabitants of the territory, attested from the Upper Pleistocene, roughly 43,000 to 13,000 BC. They are often called Pygmy peoples, and they include the Babongo, the Baka and the Bakoya.

Most of the evidence comes from the middle valley of the Ogooué. UNESCO added the Lopé-Okanda park to the World Heritage List in 2007 for a record of settlement that its listing describes as reaching back 400,000 years, through the Neolithic and the Iron Age to the Bantu-speaking and Pygmy peoples living there now, and for some 1,800 petroglyphs cut into the rock. On the coast, a Neolithic site at Owendo, on the edge of present-day Libreville, has hearths, pottery and shells radiocarbon-dated to about 5,040 years before present.

Farming arrived with iron. In the middle Ogooué, at sites such as Lalara and Otoumbi, Early Iron Age communities replaced the Late Stone Age occupations around 400 to 300 BC, at a time when the rainforest across Central Africa had broken into a mosaic of forest and savanna. Furnaces and slag at Oveng, in the Estuaire, show that iron was smelted locally.

The date of Bantu settlement depends on which source is asked. The archaeological sequence summarised in the English Wikipedia article on Gabonese history places Bantu speakers in the middle Ogooué by 400 to 300 BC; the article on Gabon itself puts the first Bantu migrants in the 13th century BC; the BBC's timeline has them settling in the 14th century AD.

Near Mouila, the Iroungou burial cave held at least 28 people and 512 grave goods, among them iron currency hoes, bracelets, gongs and long spatulate rods, and radiocarbon places its use in the 14th and 15th centuries AD.

How the coast brokered trade with Atlantic shipping

Portuguese navigators reached the estuary of the Komo in 1472. They called it after the gabão, a hooded cloak whose shape they saw in the outline of the estuary, and the word passed to the region and then to the state.

For more than three centuries after 1472 no European power held territory on this coast. The southern littoral fell within the orbit of the Kingdom of Loango, whose Vili merchants controlled access to ports, set tolls and prices, and used raffia cloth as currency; at Mayumba, Loango's representative took a tax of about 10% on redwood. North of that, Myene-speaking brokers held the river mouths: the Mpongwe in the estuary, the Orungu around Cape Lopez and the Nkomi at Fernan Vaz. The Orungu built a kingdom on control of trade through the mouths of the Ogooué, with an apogee around 1810 to 1850.

The trade in captives came late and stayed small by the standard of the coast to the south. Britannica dates its extensive development to the 1760s to 1840s, driven by demand from Brazil and Cuba. In 1788 the English trader Norris estimated that about 500 people a year were sold at "Gabon and Cape Lopez", against roughly 13,500 a year for Loango Bay, Malemba and Cabinda combined. By the 1830s and 1840s, with naval patrols at sea, captives taken south of Fernan Vaz were marched to Mayumba, then a town of about 1,000, where seven or eight barracoons typically held 500 to 600 people waiting for ships.

French officers formally closed the slave warehouses at Cape Lopez and Mayumba in 1887.

Why the capital was named Free Town

France entered the estuary by treaty. Captain Édouard Bouët-Willaumez signed with two Mpongwe clan heads, King Denis (Antchouwe Kowe Rapontchombo) on the southern bank in 1839 and King Louis (Anguile Dowe) on the northern bank in 1841, and both agreed to end the slave trade and to accept French sovereignty over their lands.

What hurried France along was a school. American Protestant missionaries from New England arrived in May 1842 to open one in the lands of King Glass, on the northern bank, where British, American and German traders already worked. The French answered by building Fort d'Aumale in King Louis's territory in 1843, brought in Roman Catholic missionaries in 1844, and in time obtained a treaty from King Glass as well.

In 1849 French authorities captured a slave ship trading illegally and freed the people on board. They were landed near the mission, and the settlement they founded, mainly of Vili people by Britannica's account, was named Libreville, French for "free town". With the fort beside it, the settlement became the nucleus of the capital, which had 899,000 inhabitants on 1 January 2025.

Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza's expeditions between 1875 and 1885 carried French authority up the Ogooué, where he founded Franceville in 1880, and an enlarged Gabon was attached to the French Congo in 1886 with Brazza as governor. France occupied the territory in 1885 and took until 1903 to administer it.

How France assembled the colony and worked its forest

The colony took its final shape late, and it was cut and pieced several times on the way.

Where the borders came from

France fixed the frontier with German Cameroon in 1885 and with Spanish Río Muni, the future Equatorial Guinea, in 1900. A decree of 29 December 1903 organised the French Congo with a colony of Gabon inside it, and in 1906 Gabon was separated from the Middle Congo with Libreville as its capital. In 1910 it became one of the four colonies of the federation of French Equatorial Africa. The convention of 4 November 1911 ceded a broad strip of northern Gabon to Germany.

The last piece was added after the Second World War. Only in 1946 was the Haut-Ogooué attached to Gabon, which then reached its present form. Omar Bongo had been born at Lewai in the Haut-Ogooué in 1935, eleven years before the region was attached to Gabon, and his family's home province is the one whose turnout figures were disputed in 2016.

What the colony was made to produce

From 1898 to 1914 France developed the colony through monopolistic concession companies, a policy that Britannica says devastated settlement, farming and trade. Companies from France received vast concessions to cut okoumé, the hardwood on which Gabon's timber industry rests. Most people lived under the indigénat, an inferior legal status, with heavy taxes and the corvée of forced labour, and because cash was scarce for most of the colonial era farmers paid their taxes in ivory, palm oil and rubber.

Léon M'ba, a Fang appointed a canton chief in 1922, spoke against the abuses and was exiled to Oubangui-Chari in 1933. Gabon's first political party, the Jeunesse Gabonaise, was founded around 1922. In 1913 the missionary doctor Albert Schweitzer opened his hospital at Lambaréné.

In August 1940 the rest of French Equatorial Africa rallied to the Free French, and Gabon stayed loyal to Vichy until 12 November 1940, when the Vichy administration withdrew after the Battle of Gabon. During the war the state conscripted half the adult male population for road building and for plantations, and refusing the corvée was punished with prison.

Under the Fourth Republic, from 1946 to 1958, Gabon was an overseas territory with its own assembly and seats in the French Parliament, and most of its politicians came from the boys' schools of the Brothers of Saint-Gabriel at Libreville and Lambaréné, an elite Britannica calls pro-French but anticolonialist. Gabon became an autonomous republic within the French Community on 28 November 1958. France agreed to full independence on 15 July 1960, and Gabon became independent on 17 August 1960. The new state kept close relations with France and opposed political ties with the other states of sub-Saharan Africa, out of dissatisfaction with the old federation and a wish to develop its natural resources for its own benefit.

How French troops restored the first president

Two parties came to independence: Léon M'ba's Gabonese Democratic Bloc and Jean-Hilaire Aubame's Gabonese Democratic and Social Union. Neither won a majority in the first election, and the two leaders, concluding that the country had too few people for a two-party system, agreed on a single list. Under the presidential system adopted for the February 1961 election, M'ba became president and Aubame foreign minister.

The arrangement held until February 1963, when the larger party forced the smaller to merge or resign. Its ministers resigned, M'ba called elections for February 1964 and cut the National Assembly from 67 deputies to 47, and the opposition could not field a list that met the new electoral decrees. On 18 February 1964, with the ruling party set to win by default, the army removed M'ba in a bloodless coup. French paratroopers flew in within 24 hours, on orders from Charles de Gaulle, and restored him. The man the colonial administration had exiled in 1933 was returned to office by French troops thirty-one years later. Elections in April 1964 gave candidates backed by M'ba's party 31 seats and the opposition 16.

The succession was settled in the same years, and in the constitution. Late in 1966 the text was revised so that the vice-president would succeed automatically if the president died in office. M'ba, ill with cancer, appointed Albert-Bernard Bongo vice-president on 12 November 1966. The Guardian's obituary records that Jacques Foccart, de Gaulle's adviser on Africa, had been looking for a successor, and that Bongo's lack of a political base and his origin outside the Fang majority were thought advantages; Wikipedia describes his appointment as following an interview with de Gaulle in Paris in 1965 that amounted to approval.

M'ba and Bongo were elected president and vice-president on 19 March 1967, with the ruling party taking all 47 seats. M'ba died on 28 November 1967, and on 2 December Bongo, aged 32, became president under the provision written the year before.

How Omar Bongo kept the presidency until his death

Bongo held the office for 41 years and six months, from December 1967 to June 2009, under two different party systems.

How the single party won its elections

In March 1968 Bongo dissolved M'ba's party, founded the Gabonese Democratic Party and declared a one-party state. In 1973 he was the sole candidate, and he and a single party list were elected with 99.56% of the votes cast. The same year he converted to Islam and took the name El Hadj Omar; observers quoted in the Université Laval's survey of Gabon's language policy read the conversion as a gesture towards the mainly Muslim members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which Gabon joined in 1974. Oil, just coming on stream, tripled in value after the 1973 crisis. In April 1975 Bongo abolished the vice-presidency and appointed a prime minister, an office with no right to succeed him. He was re-elected with 99.96% in 1979 and 99.97% in 1986.

Opposition was organised and punished. The Movement for National Renewal sponsored demonstrations at the Université Omar Bongo in December 1981, and in November 1982 thirty-seven of its members were convicted of offences against state security, thirteen of them to twenty years of hard labour; all had been pardoned and released by mid-1986. France's support was material: The New York Times reported in 1988 that French aid in 1987 came to US$360 million, including a subsidy covering a third of the budget. Uranium from Gabon supplied the French nuclear bombs that de Gaulle tested in the Algerian desert in 1960. Bongo is reported to have said that Gabon without France was a car with no driver, and France without Gabon a car with no fuel.

What changed when other parties returned

A fall in oil prices in the mid-1980s brought austerity, and austerity brought strikes and demonstrations in Libreville and Port-Gentil in early 1990. A national conference in March and April 1990 drew the ruling party and 74 other political organisations. On 22 May 1990 amendments restored multiparty politics and set a five-year term with one re-election. The next day the opposition leader Joseph Rendjambe was found dead in a hotel, and the rioting that followed led France to send troops under Opération Requin, reinforcing the battalion of 500 marines it kept in the country. During the emergency Elf and Shell cut output from 270,000 barrels a day to 20,000 until Bongo threatened their licences. The National Assembly adopted a new constitution unanimously on 26 March 1991.

Bongo won the first contested presidential election in December 1993 with about 51% of the vote, a result the opposition refused to accept. The 50% devaluation of the currency in January 1994 set off protests in which about three dozen people were killed. Talks hosted in Paris produced the accords of November 1994 and a government of national unity, and the accords were approved by referendum in July 1995. Bongo won again in 1998 with 66%. In 2003 a constitutional amendment removed presidential term limits, and in 2005 he was re-elected with 79.2%.

He died in a Barcelona clinic on 8 June 2009. Under the amended constitution the president of the Senate, Rose Francine Rogombé, became interim president, and the August 2009 election was the first in the country's history without Bongo on the ballot.

What changed when the son inherited the party

The ruling party chose Bongo's son, the defence minister Ali Bongo, as its candidate. He was declared the winner of the election of 30 August 2009 with 41.7% of the votes cast. Allegations of fraud brought violent protests in Port-Gentil, where four people died and the French consulate was attacked, and he was inaugurated on 16 October 2009. The BBC records that relations with France cooled after 2009, when the French authorities opened a long-running corruption investigation into the family's assets.

The 2016 result was contested over one province's count. Official results first gave Ali Bongo 49.8% against 48.2% for Jean Ping. In the Haut-Ogooué, the family's home province, the official figures showed a turnout of 99.9% with 95.5% for Bongo, against a national turnout below 60%. Protesters set fire to the parliament building in Libreville. The Constitutional Court cancelled the results of 21 polling stations, which widened the margin to 50.66% against 47.24%, and Bongo was sworn in on 27 September 2016. Between 50 and 100 people were killed by security forces in the protests, and about 1,000 were arrested.

On 24 October 2018 Ali Bongo suffered a stroke in Riyadh, and he recovered in Rabat. The constitution provided that if the president was incapacitated the president of the Senate would act and organise an election within 60 days. In November 2018 the Constitutional Court instead amended the constitution itself to let the vice-president or the prime minister take over the president's duties for a time, a step opposition leaders called unconstitutional. Soldiers attempted a coup on 7 January 2019 and were overpowered the same day. Gabon joined the Commonwealth in June 2022.

In 2023 the term was cut from seven years to five, still with no limit, and the presidential, legislative and local elections were set for one day, 26 August. The internet was shut down. At 3:30 in the morning of 30 August the electoral commission declared Ali Bongo re-elected with 64.27%, and minutes later officers calling themselves the Committee for the Transition and Restoration of Institutions announced on state television that they had annulled the election and dissolved the state institutions. ISPI, an Italian institute, wrote that the palace appeared to be preparing an eventual transfer to Ali Bongo's eldest son, Noureddine, and quoted the coup's leader telling the French ambassador that the army "no longer wanted to be used to kill Gabonese after each election". That leader was General Brice Oligui Nguema, commander of the Republican Guard and Ali Bongo's cousin, who was sworn in as transitional president on 4 September 2023.

Sources give the family's tenure as 55 years, among them the BBC and International IDEA, or as 56, in Wikipedia's article on the coup. The dates are 2 December 1967 and 30 August 2023.

What the new constitution was written to prevent

Voters approved a new constitution in a referendum on 16 November 2024. The Constitutional Court validated the result on 29 November: 91.6% in favour, on a turnout of 54.2%. It was promulgated in December.

Read in sequence, the changes return to the same two questions: who succeeds a president, and how long a president may stay.

International IDEA, which tracks the transition, lists the seven-year term renewable once among several clauses the text declares unamendable, alongside an amnesty for those who took part in the 2023 coup and a definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. The World Bank describes the bar as excluding spouses and direct descendants of former presidents. The BBC adds that candidates must be exclusively Gabonese with a Gabonese spouse, which shuts out Ali Bongo, who is married to a French woman, and that the text removes the prime minister and creates two vice-presidencies. Critics quoted by the BBC said the design could concentrate power in the presidency, and International IDEA noted that nothing in it prevented the military leader from standing.

He stood. The presidential election of 12 April 2025 had eight candidates, and Oligui Nguema won with more than 90% of the vote. The World Bank dates the start of the Fifth Republic to that election, with legislative, local and senatorial elections following in September and October 2025. The Commonwealth, which had partially suspended Gabon after the coup, restored its full membership in July 2025.