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Early colonization
This discussion focuses on Gabon since the late 15th century. For a treatment of earlier periods and of the country in its regional context, see Central Africa.
At the arrival of the first Portuguese navigators to Gabon in 1472, portions of southern Gabon were loosely linked to the state of Loango, which in turn formed a province of the vast Kongo kingdom to the south. From the offshore islands of Sao Tome and Principe, where the Portuguese established sugar plantations, they developed trade with the mainland. From the late 1500s, Dutch, French, Spanish, and English competitors also exchanged cloth, iron goods, firearms, and alcoholic beverages for hardwoods, ivory, and a few enslaved people.
The slave trade achieved extensive development only between the 1760s and 1840s, as a result of heightened demand from Brazil and Cuba. Interior peoples sent undesirables from their own societies and captives from warfare down the waterways to the coast, where they were collected in barracoons (temporary enclosures) to await the arrival of European ships. The Orungu clans at Cape Lopez organized a kingdom whose power rested on control of the slave trade through the mouths of the Ogooué River. The Mpongwe clans of the estuary, who were already important traders, also profited from the slave trade, as did the Vili of Loango, whose activities extended throughout southern Gabon. Only the Fang, who were migrating southward from Cameroon into the forests north of the Ogooué, ordinarily refused to hold slaves or engage in warfare to obtain them. The coastward migrations of the numerous and often warlike Fang nevertheless contributed to the further decimation and dispersion of many interior peoples, particularly during the 19th century.
French control
By 1800 the British were becoming the leading traders in manufactures throughout the Gulf of Guinea. After 1815 the French sought to compete more actively in the commercial sphere and to join Britain in combating the slave trade. To these ends, Capt. Édouard Bouët-Willaumez negotiated treaties with the heads of two Mpongwe clans, King Denis (Antchouwe Kowe Rapontchombo) on the southern bank of the estuary in 1839 and King Louis (Anguile Dowe) on the northern bank in 1841. They agreed to end the slave trade and to accept French sovereignty over their lands. The arrival of American Protestant missionaries on the northern bank in May 1842 to open a school in the lands of King Glass (R’Ogouarowe)—the centre of British, American, and German commercial activity—spurred the French to establish Fort d’Aumale within the territory of King Louis in 1843. In 1844 France brought in Roman Catholic missionaries to promote French cultural influence among the Mpongwe and neighbouring peoples. French agents obtained a treaty from King Glass, recognizing French sovereignty. In 1849 Bouët-Willaumez organized a small settlement of mainly Vili formerly enslaved people called Libreville (“Free Town”), which, combined with the fort, formed the nucleus of the capital.
During the 1850s and ’60s the French gradually extended their control along the adjacent coast and sent explorers into the interior. The expeditions of Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza between 1875 and 1885 established French authority on the upper Ogooué, where Franceville was founded in 1880, and on the Loango coast. An enlarged Gabon was attached to the French Congo in 1886 under Brazza as governor.
In 1910 Gabon became one of the four colonies within the federation of French Equatorial Africa. The French delimited the frontier with the Germans in Cameroon in 1885 and with the Spanish in Río Muni, or Spanish Guinea (later Equatorial Guinea), in 1900. French occupation of the Gabon interior brought little opposition, but interference with trade and such exactions as head taxes, labour taxes for public projects, and forced labour provoked considerable resistance, as did the French policy from 1898 to 1914 of developing the economy through monopolistic concessionary companies, which devastated settlement, agricultural production, and trade.
In the period between the two world wars, a pro-French but anticolonialist elite was created, mainly from the graduates of the boys’ schools of the Brothers of Saint-Gabriel at Libreville and Lambaréné. From their ranks came most of the politicians who held office during the Fourth French Republic (1946–58), when Gabon became an overseas territory with its own assembly and representation in the French Parliament. During this era France considerably expanded public investment in the economy, health care, and education. In 1958 Gabon became an autonomous republic within the French Community and, after concluding cooperation agreements with France, achieved independence on August 17, 1960.