Lambaréné

The Ogooué was Gabon's highway into the interior, and the point where it divides around an island was a natural meeting place for the river's peoples; the town's name comes from Galoa, a Myene language of the middle Ogooué. In the 1870s the explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza traced the river towards its source, and he stayed at Lambaréné on several occasions; Protestant and Catholic missions followed, with stations in the town and along the river nearby.

The event that fixed the town's name abroad came in 1913, when Albert Schweitzer, an Alsatian theologian, organist and physician, arrived with his wife Hélène and opened a hospital at the Paris Missionary Society's station on the river. Interned as a German citizen during the First World War and back after it, he rebuilt the hospital in the 1920s, moving it in 1927 to a larger site a few kilometres away, and ran it until his death in 1965. The Nobel Peace Prize he received in 1952 made Lambaréné internationally known, and also drew criticism of the paternalism of his methods, an argument that has followed his reputation ever since.

Around the hospital, the town grew as a colonial administrative and river-trade centre. The national road now crosses the town, and two bridges tie the island to both banks. Today Lambaréné is the capital of Moyen-Ogooué province, a modest town whose hospital remains a working institution and a centre for research into tropical diseases.

The town is Galoa and Myene in its older identity — river people whose language, songs and funerary traditions belong to the middle Ogooué — with Fang, Punu, Eshira and others settled here through a century of work and migration. French is the shared language, and the missions have shaped public culture since the nineteenth century: Catholic and Protestant congregations are large — Catholicism is the largest faith — and new Christian movements have multiplied since the 1980s.

Traditional practice continues alongside this. Bwiti, the initiatory religion centred on the iboga root, with its night-long ceremonies of harp and drum, is practised in the region and is a private religious matter rather than anything staged for visitors; mask and dance traditions appear at funerals and celebrations rather than on a schedule.

Lambaréné's other cultural fact is Schweitzer himself. The hospital, its museum and the graves beside the river draw visitors from Europe, and the town is used to explaining a complicated legacy: a man widely honoured for the medical work he built, and criticised for the colonial attitudes that came with it. Life otherwise moves at the pace of the river — pirogues in the early morning, football in the late afternoon, and long evenings in the maquis bars.

About 40,000 people lived in Lambaréné at the 2013 census, which makes it one of Gabon's larger inland towns while still feeling small. The island holds the older offices and the market; the right bank holds the hospital; and the left bank, around the Isaac district, is where most residents live.

Work is in administration, the hospital and its research unit, schools, small trade and transport, with fishing and farming in the villages around. Many households combine a wage with a plot of cassava and plantain or with fish from the river. Young people leave for Libreville and Port-Gentil in search of work, a pattern repeated across the interior.

The day starts before dawn on the water, when pirogues cross to the market with fish and produce, and the town is quiet by mid-afternoon heat. Supplies, fuel and electricity can be unreliable, and the rains bring flooding to low-lying banks. Weekends mean church, football, funerals held over several days, and family visits by boat to villages downstream.

Lambaréné eats from the river. Freshwater fish — captured by net and line, eaten fresh or smoked over wood — is the everyday protein, served with cassava in its many forms: bâton de manioc, fermented dough steamed in leaves, or the leaves themselves stewed with palm oil and groundnut. Plantain, taro and rice complete the plate, and piment made from small fierce chillies is on every table.

The sauces are Gabonese standards. Nyembwe, pounded palm nuts cooked to a thick orange sauce, is served with chicken or fish and is counted a national dish; odika, ground from wild mango seeds, gives a dark, rich sauce usually eaten with fish. Bushmeat is part of the traditional diet of the region and is sold in the markets, though several species are protected and the trade is regulated. Fruit from the forest and gardens — mango, safou, pineapple, papaya — turns up on stalls in season.

Drinks are Régab lager, palm wine tapped in the villages and brought in by pirogue, and sweetened bissap from hibiscus flowers. Bread, coffee and pastries from the French tradition are the usual breakfast in the town, and strong sweet tea is drunk at any hour.