ABSTRACT
The French obtained a footing on the Gabun coast of the Congo 1 at an early date, because the caravels of Dieppe and La Rochelle naturally crept round from the Guinea posts. French Equatorial Africa, as the federation became known after 1912, thus resolved itself into a huge coastal-forest, an intermediate series of agricultural plateaux, and a pastoral steppe-zone gradually merging into the northern desert. In the van was Savorgnan de Brazza, the man to whom the French Congo, in its modern form, is due. His first expedition of 1875–1878 disproved the tales about the Ogowe, but showed that it was an indirect path inland, because the point where its navigability stopped abutted on the Alima. Fortunately for the French Congo, the mother-country at this time was swept by what even the official accounts described as “a great wave of public opinion.”
