Word: mba
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...stability of some of his peers is based on flimsier stuff. Gambia, which gained its freedom only last year, is too new and too tiny to give Prime Minister David Kairaba Jawara immediate cause for concern. French troops keep Gabon's President Léon Mba propped up in return for rights to his nation's uranium deposits. In Malawi, Prime Minister Hastings Banda is a demagogue who has banned everything except starvation, remains arrogant only because his army numbers only 800 men and is still commanded by British officers who are happy with the status...
Once again French paratroopers came to Léon Mba's rescue. Steel-helmeted paras sent in quickly by Charles de Gaulle had saved the Gabonese President's skin only two months ago, when his 400-man army pulled a predawn coup and replaced him briefly with Op position Leader Jean-Hilaire Aubame (TIME, Feb. 28). In putting down that rising, the French troopers killed 27 Gabonese soldiers, then spirited Aubame off to an island just outside the port capital of Libreville, decided to stay on in the former French colony to keep an eye on things. Back...
This time around, Mba took out autocrat insurance. His bullyboys kidnaped an estimated 1,000 opposition supporters, dumped them hundreds of miles deep in the bush on election day. Even at that, anti-Mba candidates captured 53% of the popular vote. But thanks to convenient gerrymander and the 1,500 French settler votes that went almost unanimously to Mba in Libreville, his Bloc Démocratique Gabonais Party won 31 of the National Assembly's 47 seats. Immediately, a call for a general strike went up, and angry youths began gathering in Libreville's shady, bungalow-lined streets...
Fearing a full-scale rising, Mba clamped a 6:30 p.m. curfew on the capital, then arrested Opposition Leader Jean-Hilaire Aubame, who had headed the short-lived provisional government. Though Aubame had never been particularly popular, the arrest ballooned him to heroic proportions in the eyes of the aroused public. The riots exploded with new violence, and in the glare of burning shops and houses, Libreville's French population-largely composed of old Indo-China and Algerian colons-noticed that only the Americans were spared the angry mob's violence...
...presidential palace, where he had been hiding since the French put him back in power, Autocrat Mba promised a thorough investigation. But it took no board of inquiry to conclude that Mba and the French have only themselves to blame for allowing "sterile agitation" to blossom into fecund antigovernment, anti-French feeling. It may be a long time before French troops dare pull out of Gabon...