2019 — The Failed Coup in Gabon

On January 7, 2019, soldiers in Gabon seized the national radio station in Libreville and announced that the government had been overthrown. They struck while President Ali Bongo was in Morocco, recovering from a stroke. Within hours, loyalist forces stormed the station and arrested four of the five mutineers.

It was Gabon's first coup attempt in over half a century, and it failed almost as quickly as it began. Yet the brief seizure of a microphone exposed how fragile the old order had become. Four years later came the reckoning it foreshadowed: the successful 2023 coup that ended the Bongo family's 56-year rule over Gabon.