Conjugal Rights. Rachel Jean-Baptiste
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from the governor-general to subordinate civil servants, from managers to lower-skilled laborers in the timber industry and trading companies, encompassing European men of high social status to those of lower social status, engaged a “mistress” or “native wife.”101 Joseph Blache, a sailor who sojourned in and out of Gabon in the 1920s, described the wife of a French colleague (or perhaps his own) as a “housekeeper, tailor, laundress, unrolling her mat in the bedroom of the white, each night!”102 However, Blache qualified, many a “black marriage of Gabon” involved only sex as Mpongwé women lived in their family homes in Mpongwé villages by day and came to their European husbands’ houses only at night. The care of métis children fell to Mpongwé kin. As children grew beyond infancy, their white fathers, or more commonly Mpongwé mothers and kin, often conferred métis boys or girls respectively to Catholic priests or nuns at the mission station of Sainte Marie for rearing and education.103
Interracial relationships brought material and monetary wealth to women’s families, prompting critiques by Catholic missionaries and some European observers of the prostitution of women that benefited Mpongwé men. Some women’s families gained a monthly monetary payment from their female dependents’ European lovers, bringing about a relationship that a study funded by the Anti-Slavery Society described as “a rental contract.”104 Others portrayed Mpongwé male intermediaries as “pimps.” French journalist Albert Londres, visiting Gabon in 1928, relayed that as he arrived in the port he witnessed, “a Gabonese woman, followed by a nègre who appeared to want to offer her to the newly disembarked, walked along on high heels, her black legs in yellow silk hose, swaying in a rose dress a body for rent, if not for sale.”105
Women’s sexual labor permitted some Mpongwé families to maintain their elite social status as fortunes changed in Libreville’s shifting economic currents and the colonial state sought to curtail African economic autonomy. In the early twentieth century, a Catholic missionary stationed in Libreville reflected that women acquired money, linens, dishes, canned goods, and rice during the time with their European husbands. Once the European men left Gabon, the missionary concluded, “they return to their parental home and the family struggles with a difficult problem: how to live comfortably without having done anything.”106 In the new era of colonial restrictions on African social and economic ascendency, Mpongwé women facilitated the continued flow of imported prestige goods. Women’s labor also brought in cash, of increasing necessity in Libreville. In instituting a head tax, colonial officials hoped to compel African men to work for European enterprises or in agricultural labor producing cash crops. However, daughters’ sexual labor allowed some Mpongwé men to avoid such colonial directives.
Mpongwé women also used their wealth and literacy to claim economic rights for all of Libreville’s African residents. For some women, the provision of sexual and domestic services to European men also resulted in their ownership of property. After departing from Gabon, some European men left the cement homes in which they had lived to their Mpongwé wives. This made some Mpongwé women among the most wealthy of Libreville’s African inhabitants. Women’s independent wealth paved the way for them to have a political voice alongside Mpongwé men in efforts to assert African economic rights in face of colonial tax increases. In November 1919, Angélique Bouyé, an Mpongwé woman, wrote a letter to French officials complaining that the amount of poll tax to be paid had increased in the past year from 3 to 5 francs.107 Bouyé claimed to be writing on behalf of Libreville residents, and the inspector of colonies to whom she addressed the letter referred to her as the spokesperson for the city’s African residents. Bouyé requested that colonial officials cease in instituting further tax increases. Moreover, Bouyé’s letter included specific requests on behalf of women in Libreville. She complained that African soldiers collecting taxes wrongfully arrested African women on the pretext that they had not paid taxes.108 Bouyé concluded the letter with the request that female property owners who paid the land tax be exempt from the poll tax.
While French colonial personnel expressed anxiety about women’s sexual promiscuity and prostitution in Libreville, colonial economic policies set in motion the very currents in which women’s sexual labor was a viable path for earning money. Fang communities could also make money from women’s sexual labor, with African men of Equatorial African or West African origins.109 In a 1913 annual report, the governor of Gabon opined that the social ills of Mpongwé men’s laziness and their reliance on women’s sexual labor to make money had spread to other ethnic groups migrating to Libreville. The governor surmised, “Whatever the origin of the [native] inhabitant of Libreville, his mentality quickly becomes that of a Gabonese. The prostitution of women is elevated to the level of an institution; as a result the poll tax is an illusory obligation.”110 The governor’s words illuminate how cash had become the method of obtaining sex and how the money earned permitted some Fang men to pay the new and perpetually increasing tax requirements. Some Fang husbands in polygynous marriages consented for their wives to have sexual relationships for a certain number of nights with African laborers who had migrated to the Estuary region’s timber camps in search of work.111 The migrant men could travel with the women to another location and would return the wives after the stipulated amount of time and remit the agreed-upon payments of cash or goods to the husbands. In 1918, an inspector’s report of the Estuary region noted that tirailleurs would set up temporary unions with married or unmarried women in Fang villages in which they were sent to enforce the collection of taxes. Fathers or husbands would consent for sexual relationships with female dependents to occur. The soldiers would pay a “bridewealth” fee for sexual access to a woman, and the husband or father would in turn remit the money given by the tirailleur to the village chief as the tax payment.112 Turning to these relationships did not appear to be motivated by efforts of husbands or fathers to become wealthy, but was rather a desperate act to meet tax obligations when families didn’t have enough money.
As interracial unions continued to occur in early twentieth-century colonial Gabon, African and French societies shifted in their ideas about the desirability of interracial unions and of the respectability of women involved in such relationships. On a day-to-day basis, African women and European men engaged openly in domestic-sexual relationships, with little censure from French and African political figures. Yet, in moments of socioeconomic and political crisis, “native wives” appeared in public records as persons that impeded governance and contributed to a decline in moral and social order in Libreville. Particularly in moments of economic and food crisis that occurred in waves following World War I, some Myènè men sought to restrict Mpongwé women’s social, economic, and political mobility.
Some women who engaged in interracial unions held a privileged status, allowing them to escape colonial regulation of African communities, which resulted in the ire of African men. This especially was true when colonial officials extracted forced labor or increased taxes from African populations after World War I, yet seemed to exempt some Mpongwé women. In efforts to rationalize the production of timber toward the benefit of French interests, officials attempted to limit the autonomy of Myènè men who had managed to obtain permits for large forestry concessions and become wealthy from exporting timber. In 1921, a letter signed “The Inhabitants of Lambaréné” arrived on the desk of the lieutenant governor in Libreville. Since 1918, the colonial state had required male and female subjects to perform ten days of labor per year. However, a provision had allowed wealthy Gabonese, usually male Myènè forestiers (timber industry exploiters), to pay cash rather than serving forced labor. Yet a 1921 law took away this option, ordering that “all native forestiers are required to perform forced labor. . . . None among them will be allowed to pay cash in lieu of their days of obligatory labor.”113 The letter writers signaled the hypocrisy of this law, since European forestiers who did business in the same manner as African forestiers did not have to perform labor. They protested the existence of two systems of laws regulating forestiers: one for Europeans, the other for Africans.
Gabonese women’s relationships with European men allowed them to attain higher status in the new colonial order compared to Gabonese men, thereby disrupting an imagined gender relationship of women’s political and economic subjugation. The letter writers remonstrated that female lovers of Europeans occupied a privileged status that allowed them to escape the new racialized