Franceville (also historically known as Masuku) is a city in southeastern Gabon and the capital of Haut-Ogooué Province. The 2013 general population and housing census recorded the city's population at 110,568, making it the third-largest commune in the country after Libreville and Port-Gentil. The city lies on the east bank of the Ogooué River, just south of its confluence with the Mpassa, at the eastern terminus of the Trans-Gabon Railway and of the Transgabonaise road corridor running east from Libreville.

Founded in 1880 by the Italo-French explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza on the site of a pre-existing village called Masuku, Franceville grew from a refuge for formerly enslaved Africans into a colonial outpost and, after Gabon's independence in 1960, into an administrative, educational and scientific centre. The city owes much of its twentieth-century development to its proximity to the manganese mines of Moanda and the uranium deposits of Mounana, and to the political patronage of President Omar Bongo, who was born in the nearby village of Lewai (later renamed Bongoville).

Franceville is home to the Université des Sciences et Techniques de Masuku (USTM), Gabon's principal institution for the natural sciences and engineering, and to the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherches Médicales de Franceville (CIRMF), a biomedical research institute internationally known for its work on Ebola virus disease and other emerging infections. The surrounding Francevillian basin is internationally significant both as the location of the Oklo natural nuclear fission reactors, discovered in 1972, and as the source of the Francevillian biota, a controversial assemblage of 2.1-billion-year-old macroscopic structures interpreted by some authors as among the earliest evidence of complex life on Earth.

Etymology

The city grew out of a village known as Masuku. The regional adjective Francevillian has since been adopted by earth scientists as the standard designation for the Paleoproterozoic sedimentary series around the city and for the assemblage of fossils and natural reactors contained within it. 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.

Mining boom and post-independence expansion

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 to the discovery of the Mounana deposit in 1956; the Compagnie des Mines d'Uranium de Franceville (COMUF) was incorporated in 1958, and according to the IAEA's World Distribution of Uranium Deposits database, 25,635 tonnes of uranium were produced from the Mounana district between 1962 and 1999 by open-pit and underground mining. Over the four decades of operation, COMUF extracted ore from the Mounana open pit (1960–1975), the Oklo deposits (1970–1985 open pit; 1977–1997 underground), Boyindzi (1980–1991) and Mikouloungou (1997–1999).

Gabon became fully independent from France on 17 August 1960. Bongo's long tenure was accompanied by heavy public investment in his home province, transforming what had been, before 1970, a small administrative post "closer culturally and economically to the Congo than to Gabon" into one of the country's principal urban centres equipped with all-weather roads, a modern hospital, a university, a biomedical research institute and an international airport. Construction of the Trans-Gabon Railway to Franceville, begun in 1974, was completed in December 1986, with passenger services to the city commencing in 1987.

After Bongo's death in Barcelona on 8 June 2009 his body was repatriated to Gabon, lay in state at the presidential palace in Libreville, and on 18 June 2009 was buried in a private family ceremony at Franceville.

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.

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Demographics

250px|thumb|Local fashion in Franceville

At the 2013 census Franceville recorded 110,568 inhabitants, making the commune the third-largest urban centre in Gabon after Libreville and Port-Gentil; in provincial terms it heads Haut-Ogooué, one of the nine provinces of the country. The most important industrial activity of the surrounding region is the Moanda manganese complex operated by COMILOG, a subsidiary of the French mining and metallurgical group Eramet; Gabon is among the world's largest producers and exporters of manganese ore. Reclamation works at the former open-pit and underground workings, overseen in successive phases by Cogema/Areva/Orano, have been under way since closure, though the adequacy of post-mining rehabilitation remains contested in the technical and environmental literature.

Administration

Franceville is the capital of Haut-Ogooué Province, the southeasternmost of Gabon's nine provinces, and the seat of the Mpassa Department, one of the province's constituent departments. Since 2007 its curricula have been aligned with the Licence–Master–Doctorat (LMD) system used across Francophone Africa.

Initially focused on human reproductive biology and in particular on the causes of infertility in Gabonese women, the centre was later reorganised around the study of infectious diseases, parasitology and primatology. It houses laboratories for virology, bacteriology, parasitology, haematology, immunology and biochemistry, a Primatology Centre maintaining a colony of great apes used in comparative biomedical research, and a biosafety-level-4 laboratory, one of only a small number on the African continent, built to support work on viral haemorrhagic fevers.

Air

250px|thumb|Franceville Airport

The city is served by M'Vengue El Hadj Omar Bongo Ondimba International Airport located about 16&nbsp;km west of the city near the village of M'Vengué. It has a single paved runway and also hosts elements of the Gabonese Air Force. As of the mid-2020s, scheduled passenger service at the airport consists of the domestic route to Libreville operated by Afrijet Business Service.

Roads

Franceville is the eastern terminus of the Transgabonaise road corridor, an 828-km trunk route linking the city to Libreville and composed of segments of four national routes — RN1, RN2, RN3 and RN4, running through Ntoum, Kango, Bifoun, Ndjolé, Alembé, Lalara, Booué, Lastoursville, Mounana and Moanda. Franceville is also linked by secondary roads to Bongoville and to the border with the Republic of the Congo in the Léconi area.

Scientific significance

Oklo natural nuclear fission reactors

The uranium ore bodies of the Francevillian basin northwest of the city, in particular the Oklo, Okélobondo and Bangombé deposits, host the only known examples on Earth of natural nuclear fission reactors. The existence of natural criticality at Oklo was deduced in 1972 by researchers of the French Commissariat à l'énergie atomique after routine isotopic analysis of Gabonese uranium revealed an anomalously low ratio of fissile uranium-235 in ore from the Mounana mine; subsequent field and laboratory investigations established that a number of reactor zones had operated intermittently at the site around two billion years ago, sustained by naturally occurring water acting as a neutron moderator in uranium deposits then enriched to about 3&nbsp;% U-235. The Oklo deposits have since served as a natural analogue for studies of long-term radioactive waste storage.

Francevillian biota

Since 2008 an international team led by the Moroccan-born geologist Abderrazak El Albani of the University of Poitiers has documented a collection of 2.1-billion-year-old macroscopic structures preserved in the black shales of the Francevillian B Formation exposed in quarries and outcrops in Haut-Ogooué. These structures, described in a 2010 paper in Nature and in subsequent publications in PLoS ONE and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, have been interpreted by their discoverers as possible evidence of colonial and, in some cases, motile multicellular organisms, hundreds of millions of years older than the earliest widely accepted complex organisms. The informal names Francevillian biota and Gabonionta are used in the scientific literature to describe the assemblage, whose biological affinities remain disputed; some authors interpret the structures as non-biogenic or as microbial mat features rather than as metazoans.

Notable people

  • Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza (1852–1905), Italian-born French explorer and colonial administrator; founder of the settlement in 1880.

International relations

Twin towns – sister cities

Franceville is twinned with:

  • Vire, France (since 1983)

See also

  • Oklo
  • Natural nuclear fission reactor
  • Franceville, New Hebrides
  • List of companies and cities in Africa that manufacture cement
  • Railway stations in Gabon

References

Bibliography

  • Maria Petringa, Brazza, A Life for Africa. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2006.
  • Franceville map and weather
  • Mounana mine info at Mindat.org
  • Oklo mine info, site of over a dozen Precambrian natural nuclear reactors