Gabon

Gabon sits astride the Equator, and rainforest covers most of it. The Ogooué drains the greater part of the country, gathering rivers from the interior plateaus and meeting the Atlantic in a maze of channels near Port-Gentil. Grassy savanna breaks the forest at Lopé, and the Crystal Mountains rise in the north-west. At Loango the trees run down to empty beaches where elephants and hippos wander onto the sand, and a network of national parks, created in 2002, shelters lowland gorillas and mandrills.

Forest peoples such as the Baka were joined over many centuries by Bantu-speaking farmers, among them the Fang, Punu and Myene. Portuguese sailors arrived in the 1470s and are said to have named the Komo estuary after the gabão, a hooded cloak. France signed treaties with coastal chiefs from 1839 and in 1849 settled Africans freed from a captured slave ship at Libreville. Albert Schweitzer opened his hospital at Lambaréné in 1913, and Gabon became independent in August 1960.

Bwiti, an initiation religion combining ancestor worship with Christian elements, uses the bitter root of the iboga shrub in all-night ceremonies, and Fang masks hang in museums worldwide. In 1972 scientists found that natural nuclear chain reactions had run in the uranium ore at Oklo some two billion years ago. Offshore oil brings in most export earnings, manganese from Moanda rides the Transgabonais railway to the port of Owendo, and the forests yield okoumé, a soft wood prized for plywood.