Franceville (also historically known as Masuku) is a city in southeastern Gabon and the capital of Haut-Ogooué Province. The 2013 general population and housing census recorded the city's population at 110,568, making it the third-largest commune in the country after Libreville and Port-Gentil. The city lies on the east bank of the Ogooué River, just south of its confluence with the Mpassa, at the eastern terminus of the Trans-Gabon Railway and of the Transgabonaise road corridor running east from Libreville.
Founded in 1880 by the Italo-French explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza on the site of a pre-existing village called Masuku, Franceville grew from a refuge for formerly enslaved Africans into a colonial outpost and, after Gabon's independence in 1960, into an administrative, educational and scientific centre. The city owes much of its twentieth-century development to its proximity to the manganese mines of Moanda and the uranium deposits of Mounana, and to the political patronage of President Omar Bongo, who was born in the nearby village of Lewai (later renamed Bongoville).
Franceville is home to the Université des Sciences et Techniques de Masuku (USTM), Gabon's principal institution for the natural sciences and engineering, and to the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherches Médicales de Franceville (CIRMF), a biomedical research institute internationally known for its work on Ebola virus disease and other emerging infections. The surrounding Francevillian basin is internationally significant both as the location of the Oklo natural nuclear fission reactors, discovered in 1972, and as the source of the Francevillian biota, a controversial assemblage of 2.1-billion-year-old macroscopic structures interpreted by some authors as among the earliest evidence of complex life on Earth.
Etymology
The city grew out of a village known as Masuku. When Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza reached the upper Ogooué in June 1880, he chose the site to resettle Africans whom he and his companions had freed from slavery along the coast, and named the new settlement , a "free town" or "town of the freed", in reference to its function as a place of manumission. The spelling was subsequently modified to Franceville ("town of France"), an orthographic shift that, in effect, transformed the toponym from a reference to freedom into one honouring the colonising power. The indigenous name Masuku has been retained in the name of the city's university, the Université des Sciences et Techniques de Masuku. The regional adjective Francevillian has since been adopted by earth scientists as the standard designation for the Paleoproterozoic sedimentary series around the city and for the assemblage of fossils and natural reactors contained within it.
History
Pre-colonial period
Archaeological and linguistic evidence indicates that the upper Ogooué valley has been inhabited for at least two millennia. Iron-working farming communities speaking Bantu languages reached the middle and upper Ogooué in the course of the long southward and eastward Bantu expansion. By the nineteenth century the immediate vicinity of modern Franceville lay within the cultural sphere of the Batéké and the closely related Obamba, who are widely described in Gabonese ethnographic literature as the historical populations of the upper Ogooué plateaux. The Batéké of the Franceville area formed part of the wider political and cultural world of the Tio (Téké) Kingdom, whose ruler, the Makoko, exercised ritual and political influence over a large area astride the present Gabon–Congo border.
Subsistence in the upper Ogooué combined fishing along the rivers, hunting in the surrounding gallery forests and savannas, shifting cultivation of yams, bananas and — from the Columbian exchange onwards — cassava, and participation in a network of regional trade in iron, salt, copper, ivory and slaves that linked the interior to the Atlantic coast.
Foundation and French colonial period
Franceville was founded on 13 June 1880 during the second expedition of the Italian-born French naval officer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza into the upper Ogooué basin. Brazza's party, hampered in its eastward progress by the rapids of Poubara, halted at the village of Masuku, where Brazza established a post and settled there a number of Africans whom he and his collaborators had freed from coastal slave traders. From this base Brazza pressed on to the Congo, where in September 1880 he signed with the Makoko the treaty that would ultimately provide the legal basis for French sovereignty over what became the French Congo and Gabon.
The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 internationally recognised French claims in the region, and in 1886 an enlarged Gabon was attached to the French Congo under Brazza's governorship. Franceville remained administratively part of the Middle Congo colony until 1946, when it was transferred to Gabon. In 1910 Gabon, together with Middle Congo, Chad and Ubangi-Shari, was incorporated into the federation of French Equatorial Africa.
For most of the colonial period Franceville remained a small administrative post. It was the seat of a Catholic mission, and the brick-built Saint-Hilaire church, erected in 1899, is among the oldest surviving structures in the upper Ogooué. Colonial economic activity in the surrounding district consisted chiefly of concessionary rubber extraction, porterage, limited cash-crop agriculture (notably coffee) and, from the 1930s, artisanal gold mining southwest of the town.
Mining boom and post-independence expansion
Systematic geological prospecting carried out by the French after the Second World War transformed the economic and demographic balance of the upper Ogooué. Large deposits of high-grade manganese ore were identified at Moanda, about 65 km northwest of Franceville, and were brought into production from 1962 by the Compagnie Minière de l'Ogooué (COMILOG). Uranium prospecting in the Franceville basin began in 1955, leading to the discovery of the Mounana deposit in 1956; the Compagnie des Mines d'Uranium de Franceville (COMUF) was incorporated in 1958, and according to the IAEA's World Distribution of Uranium Deposits database, 25,635 tonnes of uranium were produced from the Mounana district between 1962 and 1999 by open-pit and underground mining. Over the four decades of operation, COMUF extracted ore from the Mounana open pit (1960–1975), the Oklo deposits (1970–1985 open pit; 1977–1997 underground), Boyindzi (1980–1991) and Mikouloungou (1997–1999).
Gabon became fully independent from France on 17 August 1960. The country's second president, Omar Bongo, born Albert-Bernard Bongo on 30 December 1935 in the nearby village of Lewai (now Bongoville), came to power in 1967 and ruled until his death in 2009. Bongo's long tenure was accompanied by heavy public investment in his home province, transforming what had been, before 1970, a small administrative post "closer culturally and economically to the Congo than to Gabon" into one of the country's principal urban centres equipped with all-weather roads, a modern hospital, a university, a biomedical research institute and an international airport. Construction of the Trans-Gabon Railway to Franceville, begun in 1974, was completed in December 1986, with passenger services to the city commencing in 1987.
After Bongo's death in Barcelona on 8 June 2009 his body was repatriated to Gabon, lay in state at the presidential palace in Libreville, and on 18 June 2009 was buried in a private family ceremony at Franceville.
Geography
Franceville lies on the eastern bank of the Ogooué immediately south of the river's confluence with the Mpassa, at an elevation of roughly 350 m (1,150 ft) above sea level. The urban area is built on a series of low plateaux that form a transitional zone between the dense equatorial rainforest of the central Gabon basin to the north and west and the grassy Batéké Plateau to the east and south.
About 15 km south of the city the Ogooué enters a constricted gorge that produces the Poubara Falls; the falls and the adjoining rapids are spanned by traditional liana (vine) suspension bridges that are among the longest of their type in Gabon. The Ogooué itself rises on the Batéké Plateau on the Congolese side of the frontier to the east.
Climate Franceville has a tropical savanna climate (Aw in the Köppen climate classification), with warm temperatures throughout the year, a long rainy season from roughly September to May, and a relatively dry and cooler season in June, July and August. Frequent thunderstorms occur during the rainy months.
Demographics
At the 2013 census Franceville recorded 110,568 inhabitants, making the commune the third-largest urban centre in Gabon after Libreville and Port-Gentil; in provincial terms it heads Haut-Ogooué, one of the nine provinces of the country.
Haut-Ogooué is described in the regional literature as the historical home of the Batéké (Téké), the Obamba and smaller ethno-linguistic groupings such as the Ndumu, the Bakanighi, the Ndzébi (Nzébi) and the Mbete, all of them speakers of Bantu languages belonging to the Téké and related groups of the Niger-Congo family. Internal migration since the 1960s, linked in particular to mining and to public-sector employment, has added to this base a population drawn from elsewhere in Gabon as well as smaller communities of West African and Levantine traders. French is the sole official language and the language of administration, schooling and inter-ethnic communication.
The majority of the population of Haut-Ogooué is Christian, with Roman Catholic and Protestant (chiefly Evangelical) adherents predominating, alongside a Muslim minority and continuing practice of indigenous religious traditions.
Economy
Franceville is the principal commercial and service centre of Haut-Ogooué Province. It functions primarily as a trading town for a mining hinterland and as the main staging point for the transport of manganese, timber and passengers along the Trans-Gabon Railway. The most important industrial activity of the surrounding region is the Moanda manganese complex operated by COMILOG, a subsidiary of the French mining and metallurgical group Eramet; Gabon is among the world's largest producers and exporters of manganese ore.
Uranium was extracted from the Mounana district — including the deposits of Oklo, Okélobondo and Bangombé - between 1962 and 1999, when COMUF ceased production after the exhaustion of the most readily recoverable reserves; over those four decades Mounana supplied a substantial portion of the uranium used in the French civil and military nuclear programmes. Reclamation works at the former open-pit and underground workings, overseen in successive phases by Cogema/Areva/Orano, have been under way since closure, though the adequacy of post-mining rehabilitation remains contested in the technical and environmental literature.
Smaller-scale economic activities in and around Franceville include artisanal and small-scale gold mining, livestock rearing and agriculture (cassava, plantain, maize, cocoyam, peanuts and coffee), fishing along the Ogooué and the Mpassa, and an informal service and trading sector focused on the Grand Marché in the city centre. The Batéké plateaux support commercial ranching, and the Parc de la Lékédi, established by COMILOG on a former mining concession south of the city, maintains introduced and native fauna for conservation and ecotourism purposes.