This week’s podcast is a compilation of items from the radio show. First, the 70th anniversary of the start of WWII: Marco Werman interviews Svetlana Savranskaya of The National Security Archive at The George Washington University about Russian memories of WW2. You may remember Savranskaya; she helped us consider the parallels between the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 and the U.S.-led invasion in 2001 in HWGH#10. In another story pegged to the 70th anniversary of the start of WW2, The World’s Laura Lynch reports on a reunion of Holocaust survivors in London. And finally, in a footnote to HWGH #19 (about Gabon’s President Omar Bongo), The World’s Marco Werman tells us about the musical career of Bongo’s son and successor, Ali Ben Bongo. >>> Click here to join the “How We Got Here” Facebook Group Page.

To find out more I turned to the political scientist James F. Barnes. He’s the author of Gabon: Beyond the Colonial Legacy and co-editor of Culture, Politics and Ecology in the Gabonese Rainforest. Jim is a a professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.  He says Gabon’s people respected Bongo but that his legacy is a country with a weak civil society and a big divide between rich and poor.  What strikes Barnes most is what a skilled politician Bongo was, how well he navigated a variety of friendships and alliances with powerful people, especially in France.  Barnes says the influence of the French in Gabon is extraordinary.

“It’s the thing that stands out in the minds of people who spend any time there–the extent to which Gabon and France are historically inseparable. The interactions that create the situation that we’re now dealing with, post-Bongo, those situations are due largely to a structure of power and influence involving many Gabonese but also involving key French historical personalities in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Gabonese in many occasions almost identify themselves as French.”