Conjugal Rights. Rachel Jean-Baptiste
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along the coast, the migration of the Fang toward the Estuary was a phenomenon that would alter the social, political, and economic landscape of the region. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the demographic and ethnic makeup of the Estuary region began to be reordered, as were commercial networks and exchanges.72 How and why Fang groups migrated has been a topic of scholarly debate, yet most scholars agree that Fang migration commenced from the region of modern-day Cameroon.73 Fang clans migrated along the Woleu and N’Tem Rivers, down the Ogooué, and into the Gabon Estuary.74 Fang men who had previously hunted or procured forest goods that they transferred to Myènè middlemen now sought direct access to European traders. By the 1830s, the Fang appeared in the hinterlands of the Estuary region, near the Como River. Mpongwé kings, in turn, sought to protect their monopoly over direct access to European traders and consolidate their sphere of influence over smaller Mpongwé communities. Simultaneously, the French sought to overturn the dominance of British and German traders along the Gabon coast. Seeking to protect Mpongwé trading interests, King Denis signed a treaty in 1839 that granted the right to the French to construct “all buildings and fortifications” deemed necessary.75 In 1843, King Louis also signed a treaty of alliance with the French that permitted the establishment of a naval post on the Estuary’s right bank, paving the way for inland movement of French military personnel, traders, and missionaries.76 Even as the French declared the name of Libreville in 1849, varied African and European parties jockeyed for ascendancy over lucrative trade and political power.
The aspirations of Fang and European traders to bypass Mpongwé middlemen and directly engage in commercial exchanges eroded the Mpongwé monopoly as trade brokers. By 1853, French adventurer Compiègne reported that Fang scouts had arrived at the coast; in 1857, an American missionary reported that Fang had erected housing settlements on the Como River.77 European observers estimated the numbers of Fang who migrated over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century to be in the tens of thousands, but this was an exaggeration. Historians think the number was a maximum of a few thousand. French naval officers directed their aspirations for the imagined economic productivity of the nascent colony toward attracting Fang to locate villages near French posts and harnessing Fang labor. By the 1870s, European trading houses set up factories along inland fluvial systems, particularly along the Ogooué River, which facilitated the direct exchange of European and forest goods with Fang and other procurers. Many Mpongwé men now worked as managers of European factories that dotted the Ogooué or as traders who obtained European goods from the coast on credit and traveled inland to sell the goods in exchange for forest products.78 Libreville became the center of trade, where multinational trading houses set up their headquarters, and where the French set up a fledgling government in an attempt to wrest control over the heterogeneous collection of Africans and Europeans who circulated through the region. Residents of Fang villages located near Libreville engaged in limited day-today interaction with Europeans and often battled in violent skirmishes with French officials and Senegalese militia well into the early decades of the twentieth century.
The intersectionalities of marriage and economic production of newly arriving Fang communities also indelibly shaped the fabric of Libreville’s founding. The decentralization of political power, spatial dispersal of clans, and the mobility of villages were defining aspects of late nineteenth-century Fang sociopolitical organization.79 The basic social, religious, military, and economic unit of Fang societies was a family unit called the nda bôt.80 It included the founding patriarch, referred to as the ésa, his elderly relatives, his wives and children, his younger brothers, and his unmarried sisters and their illegitimate children. Each nda bôt was a self-sustaining economic and political unit, and members recognized only the authority of the ésa or other designated male leader.81 Each nda bôt claimed membership to a clan (ayon) in which members shared a male ancestor. The ésa exercised ultimate authority and arbitrated conflicts between those who belonged in his nda bôt, though external arbiters could settle interclan conflicts. Affiliation with a clan did not entail territorial or political centralization, but exogamy was observed among members of the same ayon in the maternal and paternal lines.82 Several nda bôt might inhabit a common geographical location that formed a village (nlam).
Among the ésa in a given village a leader would emerge, but there is no Fang term for a person who held permanent political power. “Chiefs” of given villages held temporary centralized power for purposes such as leading a group in war or to represent their interests in political or trade negotiations; another man could always assume leadership.83 Key factors that determined which men would be selected as leaders were their oratory skills and wealth in people. Thus, the chief was often the person who was referred to as the rich man (kouma) or the orator (nzôé) in his community.84
Labor in the small and readily mobile Fang settlements was divided along gender lines. Mobile kin groups searched for fertile land, following the paths of elephants and hunting trails, and by the beginning of the mid-nineteenth century, sought direct access to European traders and bypassed Mpongwé middlemen. When the soil was exhausted, an entire village would relocate, a practice that resulted in only five to ten years being spent in a given location.85 Once a clan decided upon a part of the forest to inhabit, during the dry season the men would clear the area of forest growth with machetes to make it habitable and agriculturally productive. Men were also responsible for defending the settlement, building the foundations of huts, doing the hunting, and, according to areas of specialization, forging iron or maintaining small livestock such as pigs and goats.86 Fang men who lived near the Estuary and Ogooué regions traded ivory and rubber with European traders for guns, cloth, metal objects, and beads.87 Women labored in shifting subsistence agriculture as they planted, maintained, and cultivated bananas, corn, peanuts, and the staple of manioc during the rainy seasons in plots located within walking distance from homesteads. Women might also maintain smaller gardens next to their homes in which they grew items such as tomatoes, yams, and eggplants.88 By the 1890s, Fang were the primary producers of food for the Estuary region as fewer Mpongwé farmed. Fang women carried baskets of manioc and plantains to sell in Libreville. Written sources mention nothing about the distribution of income in Fang households from the sale of produce. Historian Jeremy Rich conducted oral interviews in 2000 with Fang male informants who relayed that wives had to give all proceeds to their husbands, yet he doubts the veracity of these claims as they may reflect contemporary gender tensions over control of wealth. 89 Women also fished and assisted in the construction of homes by using branches to cover huts built by their husbands. The Fang did not employ domestic slavery nor directly participate in the transatlantic slave trade, although they did sell war captives, criminals, and debtors to traders of other ethnolanguage groups.90
It is challenging to portray the interior architecture of Estuary Fang households of the nineteenth century and the transformations in domestic politics given the limited availability of firsthand accounts. As with the Mpongwé, it appears that the transference of women in marriage facilitated commercial and political alliances between Fang men and households and between the Fang and other African communities. Marriage (aluk) among Fang was to be negotiated by male kin of the bride and groom. A woman would leave her family of origin to live with her husband once he had made a good-faith deposit on the agreed-upon bridewealth (nsua bikeng), but this marriage was only provisionary until he paid the entire amount. Nsua bikeng literally means “bridewealth of iron”; the payment of bikwela (ekwala in the singular), about four pieces of iron held together, was the standard payment prior to the incorporation of European goods into bridewealth in the late nineteenth century.91 This particular form of iron was not used for purposes other than a marriage payment. Gabonese historian A. Nguema Allogo underlines the value of iron for its rarity and that it symbolized the cohesion of two families joined by marriage, given that it could be procured only from collective labor.92 Prior to the transference of bridewealth, a woman could engage in sexual relations with men of her choosing. Marriage conferred adulthood. A man older than sixteen years old who remained single was called a nkoé, a pejorative term meaning a boy.93 Marriage transferred rights over a woman’s labor, sexual access, and reproductive capacities to the husband’s kin group, and through the practice of levirate, could become