There are as many Gabonais in the hexagon these days as there are in Gabon, and it seems that most of them are in the Paris cour d’assises where Alain-Bernard Bongo is being tried for corruption. The defendant sits impassively in a dark brown suit and checked tie, treating the proceedings as beneath his notice. The gallery is packed with his countrymen, who are silent yet anything but impassive.
Bongo is Gabon’s most recent Big Man, the son and successor of Albert-Bernard Bongo, who in turn was the protégé of Léon M'ba, the powerful chef de département and mayor of Libreville. It is in the nature of Big Men to rise high and fall hard. M’Ba and the elder Bongo both held ministerial rank in the French governments of their time, only to end their careers with prison and disgrace. Alain-Bernard, too, was Minister of Mines and Energy under Sarkozy, and may yet be a prisoner under Hollande.
The courtroom is nowhere near large enough to accommodate all the Gabonais who want to watch, and the crowd spills out into the hallway under the eye of watchful policemen. There, courtroom decorum is forgotten, and the air is filled with a hundred conversations, all on the same subject.
“They do this to every black minister,” says a lady in her forties who will identify herself only as Marie. “They can’t stand when a black man rises, so they put him in prison.”
“If we don’t want Gabonais on trial for corruption,” an older man answers, “we should stop electing people who are corrupt.”
That might be a tall order under normal circumstances. Gabon is far from Paris, and the Gabonais are rarely concerned with what their politicians get up to in the capital: they might even approve of corruption if it favors them. But this time might be different. Alain-Bernard isn’t on trial for ordinary financial peculation, or at least not just for that. He is also accused of complicity in the 2010 murder of two labor activists in the Moukouti oil field, a crime rumored to have been carried out at the instigation of Elf Aquitaine. The two Myene trade unionists’ deaths have become a cause celebre in southern Gabon, all the more so since the Sarkozy administration has been accused of covering up the crime.
“He’s the scapegoat for Sarko’s sins,” Marie maintains.
“He’s one of the sinners,” answers her interlocutor, “pretending to be a nun.”
I return to the courtroom, and notice for the first time that Alain-Bernard is the only African outside the gallery. One of the jurors looks like she might be Algerian, but the others – the judges, the eight remaining jurors, the prosecutor, the defense counsel – all of them are from the hexagon. Europeans on one side of the bar, Africans stolid and silent on the other: it could easily be a tableau from colonial times.
But on second look, Bongo isn’t the only black person in the well. There is a witness too, a woman in a plain gray dress that contrasts with the spectators’ finery, so slight and soft-spoken that it takes a second look to notice she is there.
“What happened then?” asks the presiding judge.
“They said they had a message for Etienne. That he should leave the oil field, or they would rape and kill his wife in front of his eyes and then kill him.”
“Did you recognize any of them?”
“No. They weren’t from Moukouti. They were Teke, from the Congo Republic.”
“How could you tell they were Teke?”
“From the way they spoke.”
A couple of the jurors look unimpressed. But I am told there will be other evidence concerning the people who made those threats. And the Bateke, of course, are the Bongos’ ethnic group. The evidence is circumstantial, but it is adding up, slowly drawing the net tighter as each witness takes the stand.
Outside again, I find Marie’s companion, who gives his name as August Onyemi. He is fifty-six, born in the last years of the colonial era, an infant at the time of the referendum that persuaded de Gaulle to allow Gabon to remain French. He has lived in Paris for thirty years, and owns a grocery store in the eighteenth arrondissement, but like all the Gabonais, he pays close attention to doings at home.
“The grandfather” – he means M’ba – “was always in and out of trouble. He went to prison for fraud and embezzlement, and everyone knows he was involved in that cult murder in ’31, even though they could never pin it on him. But he kept coming back. He thought he was clever enough to get away with any crime, and so did the father and the son.”
“Why do people keep voting for them, then?”
He motions to me, pointing toward the exit, which is also toward the north. “Come and see.”
