Gabon Emoji & Symbols

The flag of Gabon has three equal horizontal bands: green on top, yellow in the middle, blue at the bottom. The usual reading is that green stands for the equatorial forest that covers most of the country, yellow for the equator, which crosses Gabon, and for the sun, and blue for the Atlantic Ocean along its coast. The flag was adopted in August 1960, just before independence; the version used in 1959 had a narrower yellow band and the French tricolour in the corner. In emoji the colours are 💚💛💙, or 🟩🟨🟦 stacked as squares, and the heart string is a handy way to show the colours in a bio or status where a flag emoji may not display.

The Gabon flag emoji 🇬🇦 is not a picture stored in Unicode. It is two regional indicator letters, 🇬 and 🇦, spelling GA, the country's ISO code, and phones and apps that know the pair draw the flag. Country flags arrived in emoji in 2015, so every current phone shows it. Windows' own emoji font draws no country flags, so on a Windows PC it often shows as the letters GA, while the person you send it to on a phone sees the flag.

"Gabon flag vs Sierra Leone" is a common search because the two flags look alike at a glance: three horizontal stripes with green on top and blue at the bottom. The difference is the middle band, yellow for Gabon 🇬🇦 and white for Sierra Leone 🇸🇱. In an emoji keyboard, search "Gabon" rather than scrolling by colour.

Gabon national symbols: the black panther, the okoumé and La Concorde

The coat of arms of Gabon is held by two black panthers, which is why the panther is the animal people name as Gabon's national symbol. On the shield a ship under sail rides the sea, a picture of the nation moving forward,; above it grows an okoumé tree, the country's most important timber. The mottos are Union, Travail, Justice (Unity, Work, Justice) and, on a ribbon on the tree, the Latin Uniti progrediemur, "we will go forward united". There is no black panther emoji: people write 🐆🖤, the black panther being a black leopard. The arms in emoji are 🐆🛡️⛵🌳. The national anthem is La Concorde.

The panthers also run the football. The national team is Les Panthères, so fans write 🇬🇦⚽🐆. Gabon co-hosted the Africa Cup of Nations with Equatorial Guinea in 2012 and hosted it alone in 2017 🏆, and its best-known player, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, was named African Footballer of the Year in 2015.

Rainforest and wildlife emoji: elephants on the beach, surfing hippos

Close to nine tenths of Gabon is forest 🌳🏞️, and in 2002 the country created 13 national parks at once, together about a tenth of its land. Gabon has the largest population of forest elephants in Africa 🐘, along with western lowland gorillas and chimpanzees 🦍, and in Lopé National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, mandrills gather in groups of hundreds 🐒. There is no mandrill emoji, so 🐒 stands in. The rivers have hippos and crocodiles 🦛🐊, the forest grey parrots 🦜, and the Gaboon viper 🐍, named after the country, has the longest fangs of any venomous snake.

On the coast at Loango National Park the forest runs straight down to the Atlantic, and elephants, buffalo and hippos come out onto the beach; the photographs of hippos in the waves made "surfing hippos" famous 🦛🌊🏄. Further south, the beaches around Mayumba are one of the world's most important nesting grounds for leatherback turtles 🐢, and humpback whales pass offshore in the southern winter 🐋. For a beach day on the Libreville coast, 🏖️🌊 is enough.

Gabonese food emoji: poulet nyembwe, bâton de manioc and odika

The national dish is poulet nyembwe: chicken cooked in a sauce made from the pulp of palm nuts 🍗🌴🥘. It comes with rice, plantains 🍌 or a bâton de manioc, a stick of fermented cassava dough steamed in leaves. There is no cassava emoji, so 🫜 (root vegetable) is the closest, and 🥬 covers the cassava-leaf stews. Smoked and grilled fish 🐟 with chilli 🌶️, and peanut sauces 🥜🍲, are everyday food.

Odika is the most Gabonese flavour of all: a paste made from the roasted kernels of the wild mango, Irvingia gabonensis, a tree named after Gabon. Pressed into dark blocks and grated into sauces, it is nicknamed chocolat gabonais, Gabonese chocolate, so people send it as 🥭🍫. With it all goes a cold 🍺, usually the local Régab.

Holidays, music and the emoji people send

The national holiday is 17 August, Independence Day, marking independence from France in 1960. It is sent as 🇬🇦🎉🎆 with "Bonne fête de l'Indépendance !" or "Vive le Gabon !". Most Gabonese are Christian, so Christmas ✝️🎄 is a big family holiday.

Libreville 🏙️, the capital, means "free town": it was founded in 1849 by people freed from a captured slave ship. Port-Gentil is the oil city 🛢️⚓🚢, Moanda mines manganese ⛏️, okoumé logs 🪵 go out for plywood, and the Transgabonais railway 🚆 runs inland to Franceville. On the Ogooué River at Lambaréné, Albert Schweitzer opened his hospital 🏥 in 1913, and pirogues 🛶 still carry people along the river.

In the Bwiti tradition, ceremonies are led by the ngombi harp 🪉 with drums 🥁🪘, and the sacred iboga plant 🌿 is at their centre. For a party, 💃🕺🎶 does the job.

How to type French letters and the CFA franc in Gabon

French is Gabon's official language, the language of school, government and most messages: CLDR estimates about 1.5 million French speakers in a population of about 2.5 million. Gabon also has around forty Bantu languages, among them Fang, the most widely spoken, Punu (about 220,000 speakers by the CLDR estimate), Nzebi and Myene; see our French and Punu collections. Writing in French needs à â æ ç é è ê ë î ï ô œ ù û ü ÿ and the quotation marks « », written with a space inside.

On Windows, hold Alt and type on the number pad: 0233 é, 0232 è, 0234 ê, 0224 à, 0231 ç, 0244 ô, 0156 œ, 0171 «, 0187 ». On a Mac, Option + E then the vowel gives an acute, Option + ` a grave, Option + I a circumflex, Option + U a diaeresis, Option + C gives ç, Option + Q œ and Option + \ «. On a phone, long-press the vowel or the c. In HTML, é is é and « «.

The currency is the Central African CFA franc (code XAF), shared with Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Chad, the Central African Republic and Equatorial Guinea and pegged to the euro. It has no sign of its own in Unicode: people write FCFA after the amount, as in 10 000 FCFA. The ₣ sign was made for the old French franc and is not used for it.