Conjugal Rights. Rachel Jean-Baptiste
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If the woman’s kin agreed to consider divorce, they convened a public discussion, presided over by clan elders, in which the husband and the wife’s male representatives could both make their cases.53
Justifiable grounds for a divorce appeared to include the indication of ill-treatment between spouses or a physical ailment that hampered biological reproduction. Elders seem to have granted a divorce if a husband’s drunkenness or physical abuse was excessive, and, following this decision, the husband and the wife’s male kin debated over the reimbursement of bridewealth. At stake were both the reimbursement of goods and the custody of children. In cases in which the husband had not yet paid bridewealth, the woman’s family retained custody of children born during their cohabitation. The reimbursement of bridewealth was not absolute. Under certain conditions, women’s kin did not have to reimburse the bridewealth; for example, if children born during the marriage were to remain in the husband’s custody or if the husband was found at fault for ill-treatment of his wife.54 If a man’s impotence was the grounds for divorce, then reimbursement by a woman’s family was not necessary. If the elders judged that a man had repudiated his wife without cause, not only was her family exempt from reimbursing bridewealth, but they also retained custody of her children.55
With their husbands’ approval, married women could have sexual relationships with men other than their husbands, and these extramarital sexual encounters were not considered to be adultery. In nineteenth-century Mpongwé societies, men could accord to male visitors sexual access to Mpongwé women—their wives, slaves, and daughters—as a gesture of hospitality, in exchange for compensation, and to solidify commercial and political alliances.56 While doing fieldwork in Gabon in 2001, I asked Mpongwé chiefs—individuals who self-identified as being knowledgeable about customs “before the time of the white man,” which the Gabonese call the years prior to French rule—about these practices. Joseph Lasseny Ntchoveré, an Mpongwé chief, elaborated, “These were old systems which existed. Sometimes it occurred for security reasons, sometimes when one arrives at a friend’s home in a foreign land, to avoid you having to go elsewhere, he would allow you to go with his wife, to ensure your well-being.”57 Husbands could also recognize a wife’s lover as her legal lover (nokndyè) on the condition that the lover remitted the agreed-upon compensation to the husband.58 These occurrences of married women engaging in extramarital sex with impunity could occur only if the husband granted permission. Husbands sanctioned their wives’ extramarital sex within the context that the husband chose the lover and that the relationship would benefit his own material wealth or cultivate political or economic alliances.
Sexual and domestic relationships between Mpongwé women and white men of varied nationalities shaped sociality, economics, and politics in precolonial Gabon. Mpongwé women of varied statuses played a crucial role in facilitating the transatlantic trade via short- and long-term sexual-domestic relationships with European men. Historian Owen White argued that European men sought out “African women as companions from the earliest days of their presence” in Africa.59 Yet African societies in Libreville also negotiated and benefited from interracial relationships. As African and European communities encountered each other along the coast, the Mpongwé adapted conjugal-sexual practices to incorporate interracial unions, and European men seeking partnerships with African women adapted to these conditions. As early as the 1600s, European traders docking in Gabon noted the commonplace occurrence of women from Mpongwé societies, who could have been slaves or other low-status women, boarding European vessels to engage in sex in exchange for goods.60 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European visitors recorded that Mpongwé traders would offer wives, likely slave wives, as pawns to European traders for receiving a cargo of imported goods. European traders could have sexual access to female pawns until Mpongwé traders returned with the amount of forest goods that they had agreed to furnish in exchange for the European goods.61
By the late nineteenth century, it was common for European traders and Mpongwé women to engage in long-term relationships, often sealed with a bridewealth bundle of goods or a cash payment from the European companion. Unlike previous centuries in which Mpongwé women in relationships with European men were often low-status women, women in interracial relationships in the nineteenth century were often the daughters of elite families. Some Mpongwé and Europeans alike referred to these relationships as marriages.62 European merchants trading along the coast could meet the bridewealth requests of Mpongwé households more readily than Mpongwé suitors. In Lambaréné, a European suitor might remit 600 francs’ worth of cloth, guns, and alcohol to an Mpongwé companion’s family.63 Alternatively, European men in Libreville might have given anywhere from 15 to 25 francs per month to their Mpongwé wives, who would then transfer the money to their Mpongwé fathers or uncles.64
An Mpongwé moral economy dictated the terms of interracial sex and incorporated European men into normative conceptions of respectable female sexuality, bridewealth, and marriage. Moreover, the circulation of and sexual access to women solidified Mpongwé men’s commercial and political alliances. European traders with Mpongwé wives held an advantage over those who were not married to an Mpongwé woman, as their marriages indicated acceptance into the “trust system” of trade along Gabon’s coasts.65 Interracial unions also consisted of short-term and episodic sexual relationships. Interracial sexual interactions were so commonplace in the Estuary region in the nineteenth century that missionaries referred to the area as “the Black Babylon.”66 French nuns groused in an 1860 report that not only did the roles of Mpongwé men change within the context of increased attention to trade, but a “certain emancipation modified in turn the Gabonese woman. Sly and prideful the gabonaise, used as a mistress by Europeans soon imposed on her male congeners the demands of her coquettishness, her nonchalance, and degradation.”67 It cannot be said that Mpongwé women voluntarily entered into intimate relationships with European men, in the same way that it cannot be said that marriage and sexual relationships between Mpongwé men and women did not involve some level of coercion. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Senegal, black and mixed-race women, often referred to as signares, who engaged in relationships with European merchants were able to amass wealth in property and slaves.68 Unlike the signares, there is little indication that Mpongwé women involved in interracial unions established independent homes, trading networks, or amassed immense wealth.69 As subsequent chapters will show, interracial domestic and sexual relationships between Mpongwé women and white men would continue to occur into the twentieth century, with some women accumulating independent wealth that would disrupt gender and generational hierarchies within Mpongwé communities.
Yet, to return to the story of Libreville in the nineteenth century, the mid-nineteenth century signaled a period of social dislocation, epidemic disease, economic change, and political flux along the coast in the Estuary region. It appears that by the 1840s the Mpongwé population had precipitously decreased. David Patterson cautions that demographic estimates for this period may reflect inaccuracies but indicates that it is probable that Mpongwé settlements experienced as much as a 50 percent decline in population between 1840 and 1860.70 A series of smallpox and other disease epidemics undoubtedly caused many deaths. Yet, downplaying factors such as these, European observers attributed the population decline to alcohol consumption, abortion, and venereal diseases that spread through polygyny and the prostitution of Mpongwé women. French Catholic observers portrayed the Mpongwé as “drunken, promiscuous, dishonest, and effete, a people obsessed with the lure of trade wealth and willing to do almost anything for a profit,” whose degeneration was due to their adoption of the vices of European civilization.71 The Estuary region also experienced a decline in trading fortunes. By the turn of the century, Cape Lopez supplanted it as the principal port of commercial activity, and new commercial centers such as Lambaréné emerged as European fortune seekers followed new nodes of trade upcountry and sought to bypass Mpongwé middlemen. A series of nuanced localized and regional historical processes set in motion a movement of persons toward the coast. These demographic shifts—the presence of new arrivals and the lessening numbers of Mpongwé residents—facilitated the gradual but not inevitable transition to colonial rule.
MIGRATION, MARRIAGE AND GENDER, AND THE TRANSITING TO COLONIAL RULE, 1840S–1899
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