Conjugal Rights. Rachel Jean-Baptiste
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criticism and probing questions. Gillian Berchowitz supported this project with patience and encouragement. Two anonymous reviewers provided valuable critiques. Carina Ray and Kahleen Sheldon read several chapters in varied stages. The book benefited tremendously from Michelle Beckett’s close reading and editorial suggestions and Nora Titone’s sharp eye for detail. Hilary Jones and Lorelle Semeley have conversed with me innumerable times about our mutual interest in historical change in Francophone Africa. The small community of scholars who work on Equatorial Africa—including Florence Bernault, Phyllis Martin, Jeremy Rich, John Cinnamon, Marissa Moorman, Meredith Terretta, and Kairn Klieman—has provided me with immeasurable assistance in obtaining access to archives, people, and institutions. In France, Pascale Barthélémy, Anne Hugon, Odile Goerg, and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch have been generous colleagues. At the State University of New York at Albany, conversations with Patricia Pinho, Glyne Griffith, and Lisa Thompson pushed me to think more critically about the analysis of race, and I have benefited greatly from Iris Berger’s insights and mentorship.
I am grateful to and profoundly thank the men and women in Gabon who generously shared the most intimate details of their lives and hosted me in their worksites, homes, and sacred spaces. Jean-Emile Mbot and the Laboratoire Universitaire des Traditions Orales at the University of Gabon Omar Bongo provided me with institutional affiliation. Soeur Marie Sidonie and Soeur Maria Cruz of the Congrégation de l’Imaculée de Castres assisted me with transportation and introductions to social networks. Guy Rossatanga-Rignault and the Fondation Raponda-Walker pour la Science et la Culture also facilitated access to key documents and people. Patrick Cellier shared his treasure trove of historical postcards. The staff of the National Archives unearthed uncataloged documents and photographs. The company of Brigitte Meyo, Achille de Jean, Judy Knight, and many Haitian expatriates helped to make Libreville a home away from home.
I thank my family and friends for their love, patience, and encouragement during this long journey. Marsha Figaro and Erica Olmsted have been tremendous friends. My parents, Christie and the late Aramus Jean-Baptiste, and Ari, Sara, Pria, and Noah Jean-Baptiste provided me with sustenance beyond life in the academy. Cassandra Jean-Baptiste, whose life has unfolded within the shadow of writing this book, and Glenn Hoffmann formed the emotional community that nurtured the completion of this project.
MAP I.1. Gabon
Introduction
Narrating a History of Domestic Life, Sexuality, Being, and Feeling in Urban Africa
LOCATED ON THE GABON ESTUARY along the Atlantic coast, Libreville (Free Town) was founded in 1849 by the French on land that political leaders of Mpongwé ethno-language communities, who had lived there for centuries, ceded via a series of treaties. The French populated the new settlement with a contingent of slaves they had intercepted from a vessel traveling from Angola toward the Americas.1 Fifty-two former captives—twenty-seven men, twenty-three women, and two children of unidentified Central African origins—disembarked at the Gabon Estuary in February 1849.2 The skeletal staff of the French administration, comprising a handful of naval personnel, alongside Catholic missionaries, pledged to each of the former slave men a hut and a parcel of land to begin their new lives. Yet, within months, a number of these men expressed their discontent with the “freed” lives that the French envisioned for them. In September, French naval reports relay, ten to sixteen men ran away into the forest and carried out attacks on Estuary communities.3 They stole arms, kidnapped women, and threatened to launch further attacks. The rebels issued a singular demand: they wanted wives. The mutineers had begun kidnapping women with the goal of making them their wives, and they threatened to inflict further terror upon Estuary residents unless they were given access to more women.4
The aspirations of these newly settled men to build a new present and future necessitated not just land and roofs over their heads, but also wives with whom to form households and ensure social and biological reproduction. Perhaps the rebels also conceived of wives as providing companionship and emotional attachment, factors that could provide them with a sense of belonging in their new home. These were poor men from distant places who had limited means to accumulate the imported goods that could constitute bridewealth payments to facilitate marriage. Bridewealth, a bundle of goods that a groom gave to a bride’s family, was a primary legal and social marker across Africa that made a relationship a marriage. These men also lacked the social capital that could have facilitated interpersonal relationships, and therefore marriage, in the Mpongwé communities of the Estuary region.
Marriage conferred dignity and the capacity to articulate social, legal, and economic rights to shape one’s personhood and status in society. If the men remained unmarried, they would be perpetual minors and socially dead, failing to establish adulthood and manhood.5 Not only had being uprooted from their natal homes separated them from their ancestors, to whom they owed offerings in order to prosper in their present life, but their unmarried status would not produce the children who would honor them when they died and perpetuate their lineages. In making the claim to marriage as a universal right for men to establish selfhood in the emerging settlement of Libreville, these men asserted a conception of the basic necessities of town life in terms unimagined by the French.
By October, the rebels had been killed, captured, or rejoined the settlement and pardoned. Fearing further mischief, a meeting involving the chief of the former slaves, the French doctor, and the naval commander convened to consider “the urgency of marriage” for Libreville’s new residents. Navy officers precipitously sought the approval of Catholic missionaries to bless en masse marriages of fifteen couples, fearing “very dangerous liaisons if they were left unmarried.”6 In alluding to the “dangerous liasons” that could develop if men and women among the former slaves remained unmarried, Catholic missionaries were also referring to the commonplace nature of interracial sexual relationships between African women and European men along the Gabon Estuary. In facilitating these marriages, the French acknowledged the rebels’ claims of marriage as a right. However, the French sought to consecrate marriage in rites intelligible to French norms, civil and Christian. Written records and memory are silent as to the actions and subjectivities of the women who were historical actors in these events at the town’s emergence. However, throughout the history of colonial Libreville, populations of women exceeded or nearly equaled those of men, and women’s claims to make the city “home” through varied articulations of sex and marriage also deeply shaped urban life.
More than anything else, the marriage mutiny of 1849 illuminates the importance of questions and contestations of how, not if, men and women would constitute self and sociality in Libreville through relationships with each other. This episode was the first and but one of a multitude of struggles to articulate the contours of domestic life and being in Libreville that would unfold in the century to follow. Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon, tells the story of the longue durée of such questions, narrating a social history of heterosexual relationships as lived and a cultural history of the meanings of such relationships. This book thereby links three important processes of historical change in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa: (1) transformations in conjugal and sexual relationships; (2) meanings of gender; and (3) urbanism.
I periodize such dynamics as early as the nineteenth-century years of the Estuary region’s standing as a way station in transatlantic trade routes, but the greater part of this story centers on 1930 through 1960. These were years of tremendous social, political, and economic change in Libreville and its rural suburbs as the town grew through immigration and the export of timber came to be the colony’s primary economic activity. Disembarking via oceans, rivers, and overland, a population of about fifty Central African ethnolanguage groups, West Africans, and Europeans converged to transform the equatorial forest located along the Atlantic coast into a town in which they could establish homes and achieve fortune. I focus principally on the conjugal and sexual careers of the Mpongwé, inhabitants at the time of Libreville’s founding, and the Fang, whose migration toward the Estuary transformed the region and who would come to represent a large