Gabon’s late president Omar Bongo with former French president Jacques Chirac at the French-African Summit in February, 2007. Bongo, Africa’s longest-serving president, died on Monday last week of a heart attack in a Spanish clinic. Picture: Reuters
I WAS TRAVELLING IN FRENCH CENTRAL Africa when I got an unsolicited e-mail from Alain Autogue, a Frenchman who had heard from an editor at the Financial Times that I was to visit Gabon. He said he wanted to help me.
I knew little about Gabon except that it was a quiet, oil-rich former French African colony whose people consumed more champagne on average than anyone, including the French, and that its diminutive president, Omar Bongo, kept popping up in parts of the world that did not obviously concern him.
