In December 1977, a style of rule associated with medieval Europe was visited upon a hitherto obscure country tucked away deep in equatorial Africa. There, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, a onetime commander of a 500-man army who had seized power in 1965 in a military coup, proclaimed himself president for life, and then, several years later, imperial sovereign of the country, which he rebranded as the Central African Empire.
Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the president of France—the former colonial power of the newborn would-be empire—knew enough to stay away from Bokassa’s coronation, which cost around $20 million, the equivalent of 8 percent of the poor country’s entire annual GDP at the time. But Paris offered support in other ways. In addition to helping finance it, France sent troops to provide security for the lavish coronation. Its airplanes assured all of the logistical needs. And a French Army orchestra was even assigned to blare out the tunes that accompanied two days of official celebrations.
France was eventually embarrassed enough by its association with the clownish Bokassa to provide backing for a military coup that deposed him two years later, but that did not mean that Paris had drawn a firm line against dynastic rule in this part of the continent. Far from it.
In the early hours of Wednesday, after a group of 12 military officers appeared on television in Gabon to announce the overthrow of Ali Bongo, that central African country’s president, Paris denounced the coup and called for the results of a recent presidential election that Bongo ostensibly won to be respected.
The deep problems surrounding Bongo’s legitimacy, like that of several of France’s long-standing and dynastically inclined clients in the region, went unmentioned. In this case, the overthrown leader had conducted the latest in a string of presidential elections under conditions that were heavily skewed in his favor, and then cut off internet service in the country to prevent scrutiny and mounting criticism from circulating within Gabon’s borders until controversy could blow over. In a slightly surreal touch, one of his ministers posted on X (formerly Twitter) about how normal things were in the country at a time when most Gabonese were severed from social media.
As its response to the recent military coup in the West African country of Niger has also shown, France has dug itself in on a position that rejects coups d’état as a means of changing governments in Africa. What France has never done, however, is use much of its influence to ensure transparent elections, democratic legitimacy, political fair play, and respect for the rule of law in its favored client states.
Gabon, an oil-rich country that has hewed remarkably closely to France throughout its 63 years of independence, has been ruled in largely undemocratic ways by the Bongo family for 57 of those years. Ali Bongo’s late father, Omar Bongo Ondimba, was placed in office with France’s assistance in 1967 and repeatedly protected by Paris as he grew enormously wealthy in the following years. Bongo père groomed his son, Ali, who succeeded him after his death in 2009, winning a presidential election that led to a riot in the country’s second-largest city, Port-Gentil. (Ali Bongo’s principal rival for the succession then was his own sister, who had been director of the presidential cabinet.)
Bongo fils suffered a serious stroke in 2018, but he has continued to cling to power despite being seriously diminished. For a time, he disappeared from public view entirely, but more recently he has been seen entering the Élysée Palace in Paris with a badly halting step, where he was greeted by French President Emmanuel Macron.
This is not an ableist criticism of an obviously limited leader, as some might imagine. Rather, it is a comment on how hard it has been for France to find its tongue where the perpetuation in power of loyal clients on this continent is concerned. Although this is not limited to Central Africa by any means—Togo, in West Africa, has also had a dynastic-style succession, and Ivory Coast’s president, long favored by the French, has altered the constitution to allow himself to remain in power virtually indefinitely—it has been more conspicuous in this part of the continent than anywhere else.
There is a reason for this. Central Africa is a region that is unusually rich in natural resources whose leaders have accumulated vast wealth essentially through what economists refer to as rent collection. In doing so, they have not only grown fantastically wealthy, but they have also provided unwavering support to France internationally while taking care to give its companies a large share in a variety of lucrative extraction industries.
To understand this pattern better, one need only look at Gabon’s immediate neighbors. On one side sits the Republic of Congo, another small petrol state, led by Denis Sassou Nguesso. France astutely courted Sassou, a former Marxist, into its fold in the 1970s, when he first served as head of state from 1979 to 1992. Later, it backed him during his bid to regain power after a civil war, and he has continued as president since 1997. Sassou’s son, Denis-Christel, is currently serving as a minister in his 79-year-old father’s government and is widely expected to attempt to succeed his father when the moment comes.
It is not exactly a crime, perhaps, but echoes of the imperial Bokassa ring out in the fact that Omar Bongo wed Sassou Nguesso’s daughter and produced two children with her, a male and a female. In a pattern that is redolent of medieval European royalty, these two had a father and a half-brother who served as president of one country, Gabon, and a grandfather who was president of another, Congo. (Along similarly tangled lines, Gabon’s new junta leader is the cousin of the overthrown Bongo.)
On Gabon’s northern borders sits Cameroon, another oil state with numerous other natural resources. It has been led by the same man, the 90-year-old Paul Biya, since 1982. For years, Biya has spent enormous chunks of time outside of his country, especially in Switzerland. His flamboyant and much younger wife, Chantal, meanwhile, has been widely seen as having pretensions of wielding power after his death, as has their son, Franck. This is a time span, by the way, that nearly matches the entire length of my career in journalism, and indeed I covered Biya’s government in its early days in some of my first assignments. This also makes Biya one of the longest-reigning leaders in the world. He has competition nearby, though.
That comes from Gabon’s neighbor to the northwest, Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish colony that has also drawn close to France, even adopting a French-backed regional currency and French as one of its official languages. The same family has ruled the tiny and even richer oil state in an often-heavy-handed dictatorial fashion since 1968. The leader since 1979—in other words, longer than Biya—has been the 81-year-old Teodoro Obiang Nguema. His son and namesake, Teodoro, is widely expected to seek to succeed him.
What do these countries all have in common other than self-perpetuating family rule? The list is not a very hopeful one. All have a small but very wealthy class of elites coupled with high levels of poverty and stark inequality. None has successfully branched out from resource extraction. All have official corruption and political repression as central facts of life. And in the diplomatic sphere, all have enjoyed a great deal of silence from the West about their poor governance and the circumstances of their rule—especially from France, which has received all of these leaders on high-profile visits.
Although much Western commentary will link them together, the problems in the African region known as the Sahel—which has been the scene of numerous coups recently, and where France has been repudiated by one military government after another—are quite different from those of Central Africa. Yet the answer from Paris in both cases has been to just say no to military takeovers.
Broadly speaking, governments in the Sahel face nearly impossible challenges. They rule over vast but landlocked and largely arid territories that face the brutal impacts of climate change; Islamist insurgencies; some of the world’s deepest poverty; near indifference from the West to their development needs; and, perhaps most importantly, extremely fast population growth. The most honest and democratic government in the world would be hard-pressed—and probably worse, stumped—under such circumstances. The closest thing to a long-term solution for Sahelian countries may be a radical reconfiguration of the state in this part of Africa, which because of its own complexities is nowhere on Africa’s political agenda.
Central Africa’s resource states are small and inherently rich, but they have been woefully governed to the point where they may have squandered their best chances at development. This can be seen most clearly in the recent experience of Gabon, which has sought to rebrand itself through so-called greenwashing as a pro-environment state, because it has squandered so much of its oil wealth.
The coups in the Sahel are unlikely to answer that region’s problems, but neither is the Western answer of no coups helpful with regard to Central Africa’s problems, especially after so many years of silence about anti-democratic behavior and illicit enrichment. In some parts of Africa, the temptation to throw up one’s hands in futility sometimes seems understandable. But in the Gabons and Congos and Cameroons of the world, which are in some ways even bigger tragedies, the West, led by France, has been far too complicit in a lack of social and democratic progress.