Franceville

Sister cities

• Vire

History

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. 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. 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…

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.

Most-observed species

• Common Bulbul

  Pycnonotus barbatus (Desfontaines, 1789) · Aves
  17
• Speckled Mousebird

  Colius striatus J.F.Gmelin, 1789 · Aves
  17
• African Thrush

  Turdus pelios Bonaparte, 1850 · Aves
  14
• Bronze mannikin

  Lonchura cucullata (Swainson, 1837) · Aves
  13
• Northern Gray-headed Sparrow

  Passer griseus (Vieillot, 1817) · Aves
  12
• Woodland Kingfisher

  Halcyon senegalensis (Linnaeus, 1766) · Aves
  11
• Lesser Striped-Swallow

  Cecropis abyssinica (Guerin-Meneville, 1843) · Aves
  11
• Little Swift

  Apus affinis (J.E.Gray, 1830) · Aves
  9