Libreville
Named for freed slaves in 1849, Libreville houses a third of Gabon in a strangler-fig economy — oil killed agriculture, created wealth alongside poverty, and the host tree is hollow.
In 1849, the French navy released dozens of captives from the seized Brazilian slave ship L'Elizia onto the shore of the Komo estuary and named the settlement Libreville — Free Town. Today roughly a third of Gabon's entire population lives in this one city, drawn by a gravity that has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with oil. Gabon's GDP per capita ranks among the highest in Sub-Saharan Africa — approaching $9,000 — yet more than a third of its people live below the poverty line. Between 1995 and 2020, the country's aggregate wealth rose 35 per cent while per capita wealth fell nearly 35 per cent. The nation is getting richer. Its citizens are getting poorer.
A strangler fig begins as a seed dropped into the canopy of a host tree. It sends roots downward, wrapping the trunk in a lattice that thickens over decades until the host is smothered. Eventually the fig stands alone — a hollow column where a living tree once grew, impressive from the outside but structurally empty within.
Oil production began in the late 1950s and wrapped itself around the existing economy of timber, cacao, and Mpongwe trade networks the way a strangler fig wraps a host trunk. Petroleum revenues made the CFA franc strong enough to kill domestic agriculture through competitive exclusion — the economic equivalent of cutting off the host's light. Gabon now imports most of its food despite sitting in one of the most fertile forest zones on Earth. Oil, manganese, and timber together account for roughly 97 per cent of all exports. Oil alone generates about 40 per cent of GDP while employing only a fraction of the workforce — a keystone species whose removal would collapse the entire economic ecosystem. A single father-and-son dynasty, Omar and Ali Bongo Ondimba, administered the revenue stream for 56 unbroken years until a military coup in August 2023 ended the succession.
Libreville functions as the economy's root system — the point where resource revenues enter the national organism and get distributed (or hoarded). The city pulls population, talent, and investment from the rest of the country through source-sink dynamics so powerful that entire provinces have hollowed out. Youth unemployment approaches 40 per cent even in the capital, and the median age is barely 22. The host economy has been hollowed out. The fig still stands. But with oil production in long-term decline since its 1997 peak, Libreville faces the question every strangler fig must eventually answer: what holds the structure up when there is nothing left inside?