French Equatorial Africa

The poorer and more brutally exploited of France's two African federations, formed in 1910 from Gabon, Middle Congo, Ubangi-Shari and Chad, and governed from Brazzaville. Where French West Africa had ports, groundnuts and a school system, Equatorial Africa had rainforest, sleeping sickness and almost no administration at all. France handled that by leasing it out. From 1899 some forty concessionary companies were given monopolies over vast blocks of territory with the power to tax and compel labour, an arrangement copied from Leopold's Congo across the river and producing much the same results: rubber quotas enforced by hostage-taking, villages emptied, and population decline severe enough to alarm officials in Paris. André Gide's Voyage au Congo in 1927 made the abuses public in France, as Morel had made Leopold's public in Britain. The Congo-Ocean railway, built between 1921 and 1934 to link Brazzaville to the coast, killed something on the order of fifteen thousand conscripted workers over a hundred and forty miles of track. The federation's one moment of prominence came in 1940, when Félix Éboué, the governor of Chad and the first Black man to hold such a post, declared for de Gaulle. Brazzaville became the capital of Free France, and the Brazzaville Conference of 1944 promised reform while explicitly ruling out independence. The federation was dissolved in 1958 and its four territories became independent in 1960 as Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, the Central African Republic and Chad. Éboué died in Cairo in 1944 and is buried in the Panthéon. The Congo-Ocean line is still the country's main freight route. Gabon's oil later made it by far the richest of the four. Chad, the poorest, has been at war for most of its independent life.

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