Conjugal Rights. Rachel Jean-Baptiste
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toward French urban-planning efforts continued into the 1920s, and the diagrams and maps created by several architects of what Libreville should look like went unimplemented.79 Forecasting what other European observers would note later in the twentieth century, visitors in the 1920s described the city as dominated by the naturally occurring—rather than a built—environment.80 Gabrielle Vassal’s impressions of the town were of a sleepy seaside hamlet: “huge trees left standing, either isolated or in clusters about the town, the overgrown path, the spaces abandoned to the undergrowth of coarse grass and tangled bushes give a picturesque appearance to the town.”81 As his ship approached Libreville, Frederick Migeod summarized the view as, “the northern bank being hilly, though the hills were of no great height, while the southern bank was covered with mangroves. The town lies spread out three miles along the north side of the Estuary.” He also noted that the town was “pretty,” with palm, mango, coconut, and almond trees along its avenues.82 He signaled, as would urban planners to come for several decades, that the town was swampy and needed better drainage. There was only one road of four miles along which the only car owned by a European could traverse. He repeated the perpetual complaint that Libreville was an unhealthy place for Europeans, noting the low availability of meat, and because there was “no real segregation from the natives,” which resulted in whites’ being diseased.83 Africans lived in a variety of huts constructed of materials ranging from straw and bark to cloth. Libreville remained a rather unplanned city.
Though the French endeavored to consolidate colonial rule, hegemony was on a shoestring in Libreville in the first decade of FEA’s existence.84 A lack of colonial personnel, poor infrastructure, low population density, and the topography of dense forests and winding waterways provided shelter for Fang communities who wished to escape colonial control and enter into and leave Libreville at will.85 Furthermore, townspeople, insisting upon differentiation by clan, gender, ethnicity, and social status, claimed rights to housing and to shape the physical geography of the town, as well as to retain control over the wealth that their labor generated. Nevertheless, the expansion of colonial control was transformative, adding new political power brokers such as chiefs, diminishing some of the prestige that Mpongwé male elites held, and bringing about new economic opportunities and constraints with the export of Gabonese timber to global markets. These political and economic transformations shaped gender, marriage, and sexual relationships, and Estuary residents shaped the contours of historical change in their interpersonal relationships.
INTERRACIAL RELATIONSHIPS, PROSTITUTION, AND PROTEST: GENDER AND GENERATIONAL HIERARCHIES REORDERED
As Libreville was transformed from a nineteenth-century trading port to a colonial capital city, interracial sexual relationships, variably referred to by historical actors as “prostitution,” “debauchery,” or “marriage,” continued. Though the numbers of French women in colonies elsewhere in the French Empire increased after World War I, few traveled to FEA. In 1900, of 130 whites in Libreville, only 28 were women.86 By 1910, the European population of Libreville slowly grew to 200 people and remained at that level for the next twenty years. By 1931, about 1,300 Europeans lived throughout the colony, but white women represented only 29 percent of this population.87 The French cited disease epidemics, inadequate supplies of potable water and electricity, a lack of roads, and the small number of colonial personnel as making FEA unsuitable for women and children. Interracial relationships were prevalent in urban centers—Libreville, Lambaréné, and Port-Gentil—where European adventurers, traders, and government personnel converged.88 Myènè peoples, particularly the Mpongwé, established a monopoly in sexual-domestic unions with Europeans.
It is challenging to quantify the extent of interracial relationships. According to early twentieth-century missionary and colonial records, nearly every Mpongwé family sent their daughters to engage in relationships with European men. A 1914 letter by the governor of Gabon to the governor-general of FEA indicated that attached was a sixty-nine-page report listing the names of women engaged in interracial relationships and the names and ages of their mixed-race children. But the referenced report is missing from the archives.89 Interracial relationships of Mpongwé women and European men continued beyond Gabon’s borders. As French soldiers traveled toward Cameroon to fight Germans during World War I, Mpongwé women followed them. In a 1914 report, the governor complained that women native to Libreville were clandestinely leaving to carry out a “licentious life.”90 In a 1915 letter to superiors in France, a Catholic priest stationed in Libreville bemoaned the difficulty of cultivating monogamous Christian marriages among the region’s African communities, as well as among the European residents. Father Matrou, from the Sainte Marie missionary station, conveyed in his letter that “the presence of Europeans in Libreville and their dubious morality has introduced the commonplace existence of temporary unions between blacks and whites; this [is a] pernicious example.”91 Citing a 1918 colonial political report (the document is now missing from the archives), Georges Balandier wrote that of the 935 African women of marriageable age, as many as 400 remained single. Of these single women, 65 “cohabited with European men” and 100 lived by “prostitution.”92 Balandier did not detail if those categorized as living by prostitution engaged with white or African men or perhaps both. However, given the disdain that Mpongwé expressed toward Fang, it is likely that the women’s clients were Europeans and, if African, originated from West Africa. That about one-half of Mpongwé women were not married in 1918 is a vast change from Mpongwé women of the previous generation, for whom normative societal expectations were of universal marriage for men and women. Several factors likely diminished the possibility of Mpongwé women marrying Mpongwé men: mores of consanguinity that limited the available pool of marriage partners, the diminished numbers of Mpongwé men, and the presence of European men unaccompanied by European women.93 Gabrielle Vassal maintained that Libreville women “exercise a charm on Europeans” and “they are quite unlike all other native women throughout this vast colony, who admire and envy them.”94 It does not appear that every Mpongwé woman was in an interracial union, but that interracial domestic and sexual relationships between Mpongwé women and white men were commonplace.
Mpongwé and some Europeans described interracial sexual and domestic relationships that lasted over the course of months or years as “marriages.” It appears that women’s engagements in interracial relationships were family affairs. Male kin—fathers, uncles, or brothers—often initiated, sanctioned, and brokered Mpongwé women’s relationships. Missionaries noted that it was sometimes mothers who incited their daughters to enter interracial unions, which was in keeping with Mpongwé practices in which a woman’s mother had some influence in determining whom and when her daughter married.95 Many women’s families required that European men give them bridewealth, the jural and social confirmation of a relationship as a marriage in Mpongwé customary practice. Simone Agnoret Iwenga St. Denis, an Mpongwé woman with a mixed-race father, recounted the setting up of her grandmother’s union: “We demanded from the Norwegian white man to give bridewealth. He did this. It’s only following this that my grandmother began to regularly go to the man’s house.”96
Based on interviews with French businessmen and colonial personnel who had traveled to Gabon after World War I, French journalist France Renucci published a fictionalized account of an interracial relationship in Libreville. In the book Souvenirs de femmes, a newly disembarked French banker in 1920s Libreville accompanied colleagues to the home of his potential wife and her family, declaring his desire to marry “in the Gabonese way.”97 The young woman’s father initially refused the Frenchman’s request, needing to first consult with his wife. The mother responded with her demands for bridewealth: a demijohn of wine, a colored umbrella, bags of rice, packets of sugar, a dog, and 500 francs.98 This list represented a combination of luxury items, such as the umbrella and sugar, and basic items, such as the rice, which supplemented the family’s diet in times of low harvest.99 It would have taken an Mpongwé man several years to amass such a bundle of goods and currency.
In living with and/or maintaining the homes of European men, Mpongwé women completed the quotidian tasks of wives, of housekeeping and sexual labor, sustaining colonial manhood. Women’s care provided the “comforts of home” to European