A supporter of Jean Ping prays in front of security forces in August 2016 (MARCO LONGARI/AFP via Getty Images)

The taxi pulled up outside an unremarkable concrete block. It wasn’t quite what I’d been expecting but I paid and got out. An election banner drooped from a second-floor balcony. Maybe this was the right place.
It was January 2017, and I was looking for the residence of Jean Ping, the leader of the Gabonese opposition, who was holding his first press conference in months. I was hoping to get him talking about how the Africa Cup of Nations, the football tournament I was in Gabon to cover, was another example of the Bongo regime wasting the country’s resources. But this didn’t look like somewhere a politician would live.
There was no one around, so I wandered in. It was empty. There were broken windows, torn posters, a ripped armchair. I went up to the first floor. The doors hung open, locks smashed. I went into an empty room. There was a circular hole in the window, cracks radiating outwards. The grubby cream walls were streaked with deep brownish red smears and handprints, the marks of fingers. I think I knew then what I was looking at, but it was only later that I processed it. I’m a football journalist. I was well aware I was out of my depth.
An elderly man in overalls emerged and asked what I was doing. It turned out the taxi had brought me to Ping’s campaign headquarters, rather than his residence. The caretaker pointed me in the right direction and, a few minutes later, I was drinking coffee with Ping in his villa. But by then I knew what I’d seen. A return to the campaign headquarters with two colleagues confirmed what I had suspected. The outer walls were dimpled with bullet holes. The windows of the gatehouse were shattered. Some attempts had been made to clear up, but there was plenty of evidence of blood.
Yesterday, Gabonese military officers appeared on television to announce they had seized power following disputed election results, ending the 56-year rule of the Bongo family. What I had stumbled upon six years ago was the aftermath of the previous election, held in August 2016.

Omar Bongo became president after the death of Léon M’Ba in 1967, and eagerly continued his predecessor’s work in dismantling the nascent post-independence democracy. He remained in power until his own death, in 2009. When his son, Ali, won the subsequent election, there was protracted political violence for the first time in the country since 1964, when French paratroopers had put down an attempted military coup provoked by M’Ba’s dissolution of the national assembly. In 2009, a three-month curfew was imposed on Port Gentil, a centre of anti-Bongo feeling. What followed the election in 2016 was far worse.
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