Franceville (Gabon)

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.