Gabon: a Neo-Colonial Enclave of Enduring French Interest

Abstract

French culture, economy, and polity have long dominated the small African country of Gabon. The French control of the colonial era, which reached its nadir in the 1898–1930 period of the brutal ‘concessionary companies’, has been replaced, since independence in 1960, by an insidiousrapprochementwith Paris, fashioned by Gabon's leadership. A French journalist long familiar with the continent has written, ‘Gabon is an extreme case, verging on caricature, of neocolonialism ’.