Conjugal Rights. Rachel Jean-Baptiste
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conjugality and sexuality in the Estuary region also involved the persistence of interracial relationships between Mpongwé women and white men of varied nationalities even as the colonial state sought to demarcate rigid racial boundaries. Engaging the call of scholars who have argued that the study of households and gender needs to take center stage in African history, I argue that Libreville’s residents lived and contested meanings of urban life according to shifting mores of sexual economy.7 In defining the term “sexual,” I conceive of two meanings: practices and conceptions of what it meant to be male and female, as well as practices and meanings of sexuality. In conceptualizing the term “economy,” I am inspired by Alfred Marshall’s definition of economics as the study of humans “in the ordinary business of life.”8 Thus, “sexual economy” in this book means the transactions and relationships of everyday life around the meanings and lived experiences of gender identities and sexual relationships. Historical actors engaged in, had aspirations toward, and debated sexual economy based on changing emotional, social, political, and economic vectors. Ideas and lived experiences of sexual economy changed over time and shaped the very material and conceptual fabric of urban life.
Changing articulations and negotiations of sexual economy were motors of historical change that shaped the unfolding of key aspects of urban life: money and its use, distribution, and social value in the form of bridewealth (chap. 4); the law, legal systems, and jurisprudence (chap. 5); moral and social order and human and spatial geography (chap. 6); and racial and ethnic differentiation (chap. 7). Town life engendered an unprecedented circulation of people, material, and ideas in this Equatorial African locale. Taking advantage of the unparalleled opportunities and mitigating the risks required new forms of male-female partnerships. Heterosexual relationships changed as the city itself changed, presenting new kinds of social, cultural, and economic possibilities. The varied African and varied French communities understood sexual relationships to be the key to social, cultural, and economic goals, but in a variety of configurations that often resulted in contestation as well as convergence.
Colonial rule sparked the creation of Libreville, and the French sought to mold the lives of its African inhabitants into their own models. However, in examining the interstices of everyday affective life and institutional governance, I contend that African women and men were not accidental visitors to the colonial town. The loves, passion, breakups, makeups, courting, and jealousies of historical actors laid bare political and legal claim-making to belonging in the town. These processes shaped the very meaning of urbanism. African women and men in Libreville made urban life according to their own changing logics and sentience in ways that were touched by and sometimes circumscribed but never fully controlled by the colonial state, African political leaders, or church representatives. On the contrary, Libreville’s inhabitants made choices about if and how to marry, if and how to divorce, whom to love, and with whom to have sex that changed government policies and caused the colonial state to perpetually scramble to maintain social control. Such contestations did not stop with the end of formal colonial rule. As Libreville became the capital of independent Gabon in 1960, marriage and sex occupied the forefront of ideas about modern urban life, governance, and nation.
In addition to material concerns, historical actors in Libreville married, divorced, and had sexual relationships based on emotional aspirations of love, fear, pleasure, pain, and belonging, sentient factors. As argued by historian of medieval Europe Barbara Rosenwein, the study of emotion should also guide historical inquiry and analysis. People across time and space, Rosenwein argues, have lived in “emotional communities,” forms of grouping that are the same as social communities such as families and neighborhoods.9 However, what makes emotional communities distinct from social communities are systems of feeling: “what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them; the evaluations that they make about others’ emotions; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.”10 Analyzing how “systems of feeling” in heterosexual relationships also shaped historical actors’ negotiations of urban life opens a new window into the complex articulations of historical change and continuity in colonial-era West-Central Africa. Following the conjugal and sexual lives of Libreville’s inhabitants and institutions offers a fresh perspective into the anxieties, hopes, disappointments, and unintended contingencies of city life. The varied articulations of sexual and conjugal comportment over time and space by varied African and French actors in Libreville reflected significant social, political, and economic change over the course of the twentieth century. Conjugal Rights engages three important historiographical themes of African studies: (1) urban history; (2) the history of women and gender; and (3) the history of sexuality. In foregrounding the history of sexuality, Conjugal Rights expands our understanding of this little-studied theme in research on Africa and reveals the linkages between shifting articulations of eros and social, political, and economic change.
URBAN AFRICA
This sexual-conjugal biography of Libreville in the precolonial and early colonial nineteenth century contributes to research that decenters colonial imperatives at the origins of urbanism in Africa.11 As argued by John Parker of locations such as Accra that were urban prior to colonial conquest,“The transition from precolonial city-state to colonial city was not about the creation of new urban identities and institutions but the reconfiguration of old ones.”12 By identifying how marriage and sex were important currents in the Estuary in the nineteenth century, before the consolidation of French colonial rule, I demonstrate the continuities in how Africans conceptualized town life into the twentieth century.
In an important current in African urban studies, researchers have challenged the very concept of “urbanization” as a linear process that automatically results in a standard set of structural changes. James Ferguson has critiqued the manner in which modernization theorists have interchangeably used the term “urbanization” and the terms “modernization,” “monetization,” “proletarianization,” and “detribalization,” a slippage in language that he calls “teleologies of social change.”13 Similar to Ferguson, historians of Africa emphasized African agency in determining what urban life looks like. Town dwellers forwarded their own conceptions of modernity and directed their leisure time and sartorial makeup.14 Wage laborers countered European bosses’ conception of work time and offered alternative visions of wage labor.15 After World War II, urban men were at the forefront of nationalist and anticolonial politics.16
However, in keeping the term “urbanization” as an analytical category, we have narrowed the possible terrains on which Africans conceptualized town life and have posited the source of transformations in city life to the very teleologies we seek to disrupt. In his research on four cities across sub-Saharan Africa, AbdouMaliq Simone contests the very term “urbanization” as the cognitive framework through which researchers analyze urban African history. Simone exhorts scholars to examine how specific actors “reach and extend themselves across a larger world and enact these possibilities of urban becoming.”17 Moreover, Simone contends, “particular modalities of organization, long rooted in different African histories, are resuscitated for new objectives and with new resiliency.”18
Conjugal Rights traces “urban becoming” rather than “urbanization” in Libreville in order to encompass the multiplicities of processes through which individuals created and gave meaning to urban life. In correlating the themes of sexuality, marriage, and transformations in how to be male and female through the interpretive lens of urban becoming, this book offers a fresh perspective to understandings of African urban history.
There is a rich collection of histories of women in urban Africa, but this scholarship has not often resulted in the gendering of urban African studies. When discussing African urbanites, general overviews of African urban history often talk about only African men— the African city has been gendered male. The normative urban African character, the person with agency to shape meaning and experience of life on the Copperbelt, in Johannesburg, Mombasa, the Witwatersrand, and Dakar, the mine, the factory, and the street, is male.19 In tracing the uneven and changing gendering of Libreville as male and female, this book centers the historiographical and epistemological paradigms of women’s