Category: Arts and Culture

Gabon is a country in west central Africa. It shares borders with Cameroon to the north, the Republic of the Congo to the east and south, and Equatorial Guinea to the northwest. To the west is the Gulf of Guinea. Its area is 270,000 sq. km. and its population is 2,096,745 with the city of Libreville as its capital.

There have been three presidents since the country’s independence from France on August 17, 1960 and Gabon’s small population and natural resources has made it one of the region’s most prosperous countries.

The Pygmy people were the earliest inhabitants but were largely replaced by the Bantu.

The first Europeans arrived in the 15th century. The country’s name comes from the Portuguese word for cloak, which is the shape of the Komo River’s estuary by Libreville. Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, a French explorer, led a mission to the area in 1875. He became a governor and founded the town Franceville.

Gabon became part of French Equatorial Africa in 1910. The federation of four territories survived until 1959. On August 17, 1960, these territories became independent. Leon M’ba was the first president and was elected in 1961. Omar Bongo Ondimba was the vice president. French logging interests funded M’ba’s campaign to further their enterprises.

Upon taking power, M’ba banned demonstrations, suppressed the media, excluded opposition parties, and lessened freedom of expression. M’ba dissolved the National Assembly in 1964 and attempted to institute one-party rule. This was met with an army coup to oust him and restore democracy. The French, defending their interests, dropped paratroopers to restore M’ba.

After a few days, the opposition was imprisoned and the coup ended. The French intervention was met with international condemnation. Its troops still remain in Gabon outside the capital. In 1967, M’ba died and Bongo replaced him as president. He remained head of state until his death in 2009 after winning each election by large majority.

Gabon introduced a new constitution in the early 1990s with a more transparent multi-party system which added a bill of rights, an economic and social advisory board, and a body to guarantee those rights (National Council of Democracy).

There are nine provinces in Gabon, which are Estuaire, Haut-Ogooue, Moyen-Ogooue, Ngounie, Nyanga, Ogooue-Ivindo, Ogooue-Lolo, Ogooue-Maritime, and Woleu-Ntem. These are further broken down into 37 departments.

The country is located on central Africa’s Atlantic coast. Gabon’s climate is equatorial with extensive rainforests. These cover 85 percent of the country. The three regions are the coastal plains, the mountains, and the savanna.

The largest river is the Ogooue, which is 1,200 km long. Gabon has areas where there are hundreds of dolomite and limestone caves. These caves include the Grotte du Lebamba, Grotte du Kessipougou, Grotte de Bongolo, and the Grotte du Lastoursville. Many have not been explored.

Gabon’s natural preservation efforts are also noted. In 2002, the president designated 11 percent of the country as a national park, making Gabon an ecotourism destination. This is one of the world’s largest proportions of parkland. Natural resources include petroleum, natural gas, diamond, niobium, manganese, uranium, gold, timber, iron ore, and hydropower.

Gabon’s per capita income is four times that of other sub-Saharan countries. Oil production is a large reason for this. Gabon still has not invested in economic diversity or modernized. From 1975 to 1995, Gabon was part of OPEC. It exports iron, wood, and manganese. Mines for Uranium near Franceville were shut down in 2001 due to global competition, but plans have been made to reopen them. Exploitation of iron deposits north of Makokou is set to begin in the near future.

The devaluation of the CFA franc in the 1990s left Gabon unable to pay its international debt. The IMF and France have given additional loans in exchange for economic changes. Imports come mainly from France and Gabon’s export partners are China, Russian, and the U.S.

Despite the abundance of natural wealth, poor fiscal management has stifled the economy. However, the previous President Bongo Ondimba made concerted efforts to increase transparency and took various steps to make Gabon a more attractive investment destination to diversify the economy. He also attempted to boost growth by increasing government investment in human resources and infrastructure. GDP grew more than 6% per year over the 2010-13 period.

Animals are abundant in the rainforests of Gabon. 85 percent of the country is covered by rainforests and it is Africa’s fifth least densely populated country. Gabon boasts dense rainforests and unique ecosystems, contributing to its status as a biodiversity hotspot.

These habitats, along with lagoons, beaches, mangroves and savannahs make Gabon ideal for animals and reptiles. There are 60,000 forest elephants and 20,000 lowland gorillas. There is a National Tourism Strategy, which aims for 1,000,000 visitors per year.

While the music of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Cameroon is better known. Gabon can also claim a variety of musical styles, such as folk. Folk music in Gabon incorporates traditional drums, the ngombi, the obala, and the balafon. Also popular are singer and live performer, Annie Flore Batchiellilys, singer Oliver N’Goma, and popstar Patience Dababy. Sylvain Avara, La Rose Mbadou, and Georges Oyendze are famous guitarists. Gabon has also enjoyed other styles such as makossa, soukous, rumba, and hip-hop and rock from the UK and US.

Until the spread of literacy in the 21st century, Gabon’s history and traditions, such as its extensive folklore and mythology, were predominantly oral. These traditions are kept alive through “Raconteurs” such as the ingwala among the Nzebis, and the mvett among the Fangs.

Gabon uses internationally celebrated masks for a variety of predominantly ceremonial reasons such as birth, funerals, and marriage. Masks include the relicary figure of the Kota and the n’goltang (Fang). Precious materials and local woods are the main materials used by traditionalists.

In 2021, Gabon became the first African country to receive payment for reducing CO2 emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

The United States and Côte d’Ivoire recently launched the “Child Protection Compact Partnership Activities” which is aimed at addressing child sex trafficking and forced child labor in Côte d’Ivoire.

First Lady of Côte d’Ivoire Dominique Ouattara, United States Ambassador to Côte d’Ivoire Jessica Davis Ba, Deputy Director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons Bryan Marcus, the Minister of Employment and Social Protection Adama Kamara, and the Minister of Solidarity and the Fight Against Poverty Myss Belmonde Dogo were all present at the ceremony to implement the partnership between Côte d’Ivoire and the United States of America for child protection, in early September 2023, in Cocody, Côte d’Ivoire.

On December 7, 2022, the Child Protection Partnership (CPC) was signed between the United States of America and Côte d’Ivoire. The ceremony marked the implementation phase of this agreement. The Child Protection Compact (CPC) is a U.S. government aid program worth up to 10 million U.S. dollars, or around 5 billion CFA francs, to combat child trafficking. The focus of the partnership is to build the capacity of government bodies, civil society organizations and public international organizations to combat child trafficking. The objective is also to intensify Côte d’Ivoire’s efforts to meet the needs of child victims of trafficking, as well as children who are vulnerable or at risk of trafficking, in order to eliminate the phenomenon in the country.

The agreement is scheduled to run for five years.

Following a call for applications, the University of Massachusetts Lowell and Save The Children were selected to lead the implementation phase of the child protection partnership. The University of Massachusetts Lowell will conduct a study to provide accurate information on human trafficking in Côte d’Ivoire. Save The Children, for its part, will be responsible for implementing the activities of the child protection pact.

The First Lady, Ms Dominique Ouattara, who has been involved in child protection for several decades, welcomed the official launch of the partnership’s activities as she strongly feels the implementation of programs will enable Côte d’Ivoire to step up its actions to protect children. “Today, I am happy to see we are launching the implementation phase of our  agreement, which will enable Côte d’Ivoire to intensify its efforts in the fight against human trafficking, particularly with regard to children and young girls, thanks to funding from the American Government”, she said at the ceremony.

She also went on to say that child protection has always been at the heart of her concerns as she recalled her commitment to the fight against trafficking, exploitation and child labor for several years. “The issue of child protection has always been at the heart of my concerns. As you know, child labor is a global issue, and our country, Côte d’Ivoire, is unfortunately no exception. And for several years now, we have been fighting relentlessly against trafficking, exploitation and child labor within our borders, to eradicate this phenomenon”, she recalled. Dominique Ouattara recalled the creation of the Oversight Committee for Actions against Child Trafficking, Exploitation and Labor (CNS), Inter Ministerial Committee to Combat Child Trafficking, Exploitation and Labor (CIM) and the National Committee for the Fight against Human Trafficking (CNLTP), to take care of adults who are victim of human trafficking.

Côte d’Ivoire currently has in place a legal framework to criminalize the perpetrators of human trafficking and protect the victims. The first lady recalled the laws of September 30, 2010 prohibiting trafficking and the worst forms of child labor; the law of December 8, 2016 on the fight against human trafficking; and finally that of June 13, 2018 repressing the illicit trafficking of migrants.

In addition, the President of the CNS recalled in the context of repression, the creation in 2019 of six (06) special police brigades responsible for close surveillance throughout the national territory, in order to apprehend traffickers. “Thanks to the implementation of these legal and regulatory provisions, from 2012 to date, more than 200,000 vulnerable children and victims of trafficking and exploitation have been rescued, and more than 1,000 child traffickers have been apprehended, brought before the courts and prosecuted,” revealed Ms Dominique Ouattara.

This pact represents another sign of a steadily growing relationship between Côte d’Ivoire and the United States. Early this year in June, agreements signed between the African country and Cybastion Institute of Technology, a consortium of companies based in the U.S and member of U.S Chamber of Commerce for Cote d’Ivoire to have its own national Data center and administrative digital city.

That is also in addition to further deals between both countries in the areas of agriculture, education and marine resources being lined up for announcement before the end of the year.

When Paul Kagame became Rwanda‘s president in 2000, he inherited a country that had been torn apart by a brutal genocide. To rebuild it, he had to rely on mostly uneducated guerrilla fighters and a handful of ill-trained cadres. Even the most optimistic of observers doubted his chances.

But 23 years later, the country is stable, prosperous, growing, unified and, in large part, reconciled. Social services, such as education, healthcare, housing and livestock are provided to the needy, with no distinction of ethnicity or region of origin – two forms of discrimination that characterised the governments leading up to the genocide against the Tutsi, which Kagame, as leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), brought to an end.

His grip on power has been nearly unassailable. What a lot of people fail or reluctantly admit is that he’s equally a brutal dictator. Since coming to power he has extended constitutional term limits, shut down the free press and clamped down on dissent. Reporters have been driven into exile, even killed; opposition figures have been imprisoned or found dead. His country has been reduced to tyranny.

But this dictator isn’t a pariah, like Vladimir Putin of Russia or Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Instead, he’s one of the West’s best and most reliable friends.  Paul Kagame, since coming to power in 1994, has won his way into the West’s good graces. He’s been invited to speak — on human rights, no less — at universities such as Harvard, Yale and Oxford, and praised by prominent political leaders including Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and the former U.N. general secretary Ban Ki-moon.

It doesn’t end there. Mr. Kagame’s Western friends include FIFA, which held its annual congress at a shiny sports complex in Kigali in March, and the N.B.A., whose African Basketball League plays in Rwanda. Europe’s largest carmaker, Volkswagen, runs an assembly plant in Rwanda, and major international organizations such as the Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum are close partners. Western donors finance a whopping 70 percent of Rwanda’s national budget.

While the criticism about his dictatorship is justified, the critics make one mistake: to imply that these freedoms were already existent in Rwanda and that Kagame simply took them away. They weren’t. Kagame and Rwandans have been working to establish them in a country that has never had them.

Born in southern Rwanda in 1957, Kagame’s parents fled the country during anti-Tutsi pogroms when he was two years old. He was raised in Rwandan communities in refugee camps in Uganda, where he observed and was a victim to the recurrent oppression visited upon his people. He later joined a Ugandan guerrilla movement, the National Resistance Army that installed Yoweri Museveni as president of Uganda.

When he returned to Rwanda as leader of the RPF, the country’s coffers had been looted, an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus had been killed, the survivors were traumatized, the killers fearful of retribution and the returnees destitute. Rwanda was a failed state by any measure.

Twenty-five years after the genocide, the wounds are slowly healing. Survivors still see Kagame as the guarantor of their existence. He pardoned the perpetrators and set the country on a journey to unity and reconciliation.

Kagame has been tough in his style of governance; intransigent on corruption, populism and divisive speech. Politicians with hate-charged rhetoric have consistently faced harsh sentences and lengthy prison terms. Speech is regulated to prohibit ethnic prejudice while democracy was trimmed and tailored to the peculiar predicament facing the Rwandan people. This was necessary to install a new mentality towards governance.

A new, unified country had somehow to be built with the same people – killers and their victims living side-by-side with a unity of purpose: the betterment of their village, the district, their country.

In this endeavor, Kagame was acting with the people’s mandate and within the ambit of the Rwandan constitution. His mission as Rwandan leader is first and foremost to protect the Rwandan people from genocide – by any means necessary. This mission, which is not sufficiently understood by the Western world, will probably, also be passed on to his successors for two or three generations to come.

Kagame owes much of his success to his skilled political rhetoric, an art form Rwandans call “ubwenge.” In news conferences where Rwandan journalists, aware of the risks faced by less pliant colleagues, throw him softball questions, Mr. Kagame shines. Often, his target is the West. He consistently voices an anti-imperialist message about how Europe is “violating people’s rights” and berates the West’s “superiority complex.”

This posture makes him a leading avatar of a new type of postcolonial ruler. Other populist nationalist presidents such as Erdogan of Turkey, Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico and Narendra Modi of India also rally their populations behind similar sentiments, elevating themselves as world leaders no longer beholden to the West. Often at the heart of their defiant speeches are references to old crimes — massacres, genocides and expropriations committed by European empires that date back as far as the 16th century.

Such appeals work because Western leaders still offer only grudging “regrets” for such atrocities and rarely apologize, partly out of fear that their nations will have to cough up huge sums in reparations. This allows the grievances to live on. Many in former colonies still feel those past humiliations as viscerally present, manifest today in institutions that are dominated by Western interests, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, or in international trade and aid negotiations. Postcolonial leaders such as Kagame find much popularity in their insistence that the West should atone for its history, however improbable that might be.

The price of avoiding apologies, though, is that Western leaders find their moral authority diminished. Instead, they engage in placatory behaviors — offering praise and partnership, rather than condemnation. Perhaps nowhere is this dynamic clearer than in Rwanda, where Mr. Kagame’s leverage with Western leaders is particularly strong because the country’s grievances are recent. He is very adept at guilt-tripping the West and his jabs hit home hard.

Rwanda’s 1994 genocide — during which nearly one million Rwandans, many of them ethnic Tutsis, were killed — was perpetrated under the noses of United Nations peacekeepers, who diligently filed reports on the killings while seemingly impotent to prevent them. Although Kagame’s former ambassador to the United States and other political allies have accused him of “sparking” Rwanda’s genocide and doing little to prevent it, he has cast himself as the hero who ended it.

International analysts and champions of democracy have not embraced Kagame’s atypical approach, often assessing Rwandan politics through a Western lens and thus missing the complexities of governing post-genocide.

As a result, they may have missed what is arguably the most edifying case study in national transformation of the last 25 years.

Rwandan mothers receive ante and post-natal healthcare and maternal mortality ratios in the country decreased by 77 percent between 2000 and 2013. New-borns are vaccinated. The city is clean and people can walk safely at night. Since 2019, ministers no longer require personal security details. “Your security will be guaranteed like that of other Rwandan citizens,” they were told. The progress the country has made under his watch is visible.

A lot of outsiders seem concerned that Kagame has not groomed a successor, and although there are no crown princes in Rwanda, the president has chosen to groom thousands of young men and young women, in particular, to lead the country into the future. The average age of his cabinet is 40. Women make up 50 percent of the cabinet, 61.5 percent of the parliament and 50 percent of Supreme Court judges.

In 2018, Kagame chaired the African Union, championing potentially game-changing initiatives such as the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA), which was signed in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.

Of course, major challenges remain. In 2017, the unemployment rate was 16.7 percent and the youth unemployment rate 21 percent. But Kagame is betting on the country’s MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions) strategy and information communications technology and off-farm employment opportunities to absorb the 250,000 young people who enter the job market each year. The bookmakers are still out, but with Rwanda’s economy expanding by 8.6 percent in 2018, the county rated the second-best place to do business in Africa and it having soared up the human development index, the indicators are looking promising.

During the Igbo Landing of 1803, approximately 75 captives from present-day Nigeria died by mass suicide in Georgia’s Dunbar Creek rather than face a life in chains.

Hundreds of years ago, enslaved people from various parts of Africa were kidnapped, crammed onto slave ships, and whisked to the Americas. But in 1803, 75 Igbo people from modern-day Nigeria fought back in a remarkable event known as the Igbo Landing.

By the time Igbo Landing took place in 1803, the slave trade in the Americas had existed for almost 200 years. Millions of healthy men and women were abducted from Africa and sent to the New World, where they toiled under harsh conditions on plantations along the southern coast.

In May 1803, the Igbo and other West African captives arrived in Savannah Georgia, on the slave ship, the Wanderer. They were purchased for an average of $100 each by slave merchants John Couper and Thomas Spalding to be resold to plantations on nearby St. Simons Island. The chained slaves were packed under deck of a coastal vessel, the York, which would take them to St. Simons. During the voyage, approximately 75 Igbo slaves rose in rebellion, took control of the ship, drowned their captors, and in the process caused the grounding of the ship in Dunbar Creek.

Then, the captives made a wrenching choice. Instead of surrendering to the slavers waiting on the shore, they marched into the water and drowned themselves. What happened at Igbo Landing has been called a mass suicide, but many see it differently — as an act of mass resistance.

“By the water spirits we came and by the water spirits we will be taken home,” they sang as they walked, still in chains, into the water.

The sequence of events that occurred next remains unclear. It is known only that the Igbo marched ashore, singing, led by their high chief. Then at his direction, they walked into the marshy waters of Dunbar Creek, committing mass suicide. Roswell King, a white overseer on the nearby Pierce Butler plantation, wrote the first account of the incident. He and another man identified only as Captain Patterson recovered many of the drowned bodies. Apparently only a subset of the 75 Igbo rebels drowned. Thirteen bodies were recovered, but others remained missing, and some may have survived the suicide episode, making the actual numbers of deaths uncertain.

Regardless of the numbers, the deaths signaled a powerful story of resistance as these captives overwhelmed their captors in a strange land, and many took their own lives rather than remain enslaved in the New World.

The mutiny and subsequent suicide by the Igbo people was called by many locals the first freedom march in the history of the United States. Local people claimed that the Landing and surrounding marshes in Dunbar Creek where the Igbo people committed suicide in 1803 were haunted by the souls of the dead Igbo slaves. The story of Igbo, who chose death over slavery which had long been part of Gullah folklore, was finally recorded from various oral sources in the 1930s by members of the Federal Writers Project.

Today, the stretch of St. Simons Island is a quiet place. Full of marshlands and beaches, it regularly draws tourists because of its golf courses and rich Southern cuisine. But for those who look closer, it’s also something else — the site of Igbo Landing, the place where dozens of Black captives chose to drown instead of being enslaved.