Conjugal Rights. Rachel Jean-Baptiste
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European discourses to argue that the colonial encounter profoundly altered ideas about and practices of sexuality. Between 1910 and 1930s colonial Rhodesia, Jeater argues, Christianity and migration to towns produced the idea of individual responsibility and “sin,” as well as the idea that sexuality could take place outside of the sanction of family groups.58 By focusing primarily on colonial discourses, we have not been fully able to understand the meanings of sexuality and the complexities with which African historical actors thought of and embodied their sexuality. Furthermore, how did ideas about sexuality intersect with praxes of sexuality?
I heed the arguments and engage the threads of previous works on the history of sexuality in Africa, that sex inherently shapes and is shaped by political economy, that contestations over sexuality were about the contours of generation, gender, and the state, that attention to shifting colonial discourses about African sexualities reveals the fissures of colonial rule, and that colonialism profoundly shaped the landscape of practices and ideas about sexuality. However, analyses of the history of sexuality in Africa have insufficiently considered that sexual expression is also about emotions—such as desire, pleasure, yearning, and pain. I argue for the need to step back from deterministic analyses of sexuality and also analyze the subjective and interpersonal realms in which historical actors engaged in and conceived of sex. Analyzing the varied sexual landscapes and relationships in Libreville and historical actors’ often simultaneous expressions and experiences of the physical, emotional, and pragmatic offers a new window into the changing meanings and praxes of sexualities in African history.
Marriage was a primary relationship through which African men and women in Libreville articulated and experienced sexuality. A critical mass of books has chronicled social and economic change in Africa through the lens of marriage.59 As this body of scholars, including Brett Shadle, has shown, “nowhere in colonial Africa was marital stability a foregone conclusion.”60 In the region that became Libreville, men and women engaged in varied forms of extramarital sexual relationships prior to the colonial encounter, and over the course of the decades of colonial rule new forms of extramarital sexual relationships developed. However, in spite of marital instability, there was a persistence with which Libreville’s residents used changing forms of conjugal relationships as a metaphor in conceptualizing sexuality. As argued by Stephanie Newell, scholarship on marriage in Africa has emphasized “economic and social power rather than . . . desire and pleasure or coercion.”61 Furthermore, Jennifer Cole and Lynn Thomas contend that love, “the sentiments of attachment and affiliation that bind people to one another—in sexual, predominantly heterosexual, relationships,” is a neglected lens of research in African studies.62 I take seriously notions of sexual desire and love as units of analysis. Yet, following historical actors’ conceptions of heterosexual relationships as also mediating economic mobility, I engage the recent literature on love and money in contemporary Africa that demonstrates how people viewed well-being in relationships according to both material and emotional fulfillment.63
By analyzing a multiplicity of ways in which historical actors experienced their heterosexual relationships—as material well-being, deprivation, honor, respectability, desire, violence, pleasure, biological or social reproduction, criminality, legality—I seek to demonstrate the multivalent meanings of sexuality in this urban, West-Central African context. Scholars have debated the definition of sexuality as a unit of analysis, drawing a line between sexuality as ideology (“what ought to be”) and sexuality in behavior (“what was”).64 Historical actors in Libreville debated sexuality both as actualized and in discourse. Thus, I combine two definitions to analyze the history of sexuality in Libreville: Michel Foucault’s conception of sexuality as “a field of mobile power relations,” and Robert A. Padgug’s definition of sexuality as “praxis, a group of social relations, of human interactions.”65
I did not assume heterosexuality as normative when embarking upon research on the history of sexuality in Gabon. I was attuned to the multidisciplinary literature of queer theory, as well as emerging work on same-sex relationships and desire in African history that has disrupted ideas of heteronormativity.66 I mined documentary sources for and asked interviewees about same-sex desire. Informants vehemently denied same-sex desire as manifesting in Gabon; nor could I find traces of homosocial sexualities in colonial reports. I questioned interviewees on the ideas of homosexuality as “un-African” that some expressed. However, I also began to realize that there has been relatively little scholarly attention to the history of heterosexuality in Africa. In tracing the changing practices and meanings of heterosexuality, this book does heed the call of queer theory to call into question the idea that sexual and gender identities are normative.67
SOURCES AND METHODS
This book draws on historical, ethnographic, and cultural studies methodologies and text-based and oral source materials. I followed AbdouMaliq Simone’s formulation of “systematic social research” as the path to “immerse myself in various settings under whatever conditions and rubrics were possible” and for “multiple engagements as methodology.”68 I have utilized archival sources such as political reports, correspondence, legislation, policy debates, and ethnographies by colonial bureaucrats and military officers, as well as the correspondence of private French citizens with colonial officials and newspaper articles and editorials. Furthermore, the records of French Catholic and American Protestant missionaries are an important body of source materials, particularly for the nineteenth century.
Literary discourse analysis is a useful tool for demystifying the aura of “fact” that surrounds colonial and missionary documents. Literary theorist David Spurr argues that documents of imperial administrations involve some level of representations. Rather than reading colonial documents as only conveying history as it occurred, “scholars should consider these texts as snapshots of how [a] Western writer constructed a coherent representation out of the strange and often incomprehensible (to the writer) realities confronted in the non-Western world.”69 This interpretive lens allows the excavation of the anxieties and contradictions of colonial societies.
Though few registers have survived (only for scattered years in the 1930s through the 1950s), civil and criminal colonial court records housed at Gabon’s national archives are a particularly precious body of sources that allow a view into interior recesses of Gabonese households. Customary law, aptly defined by Martin Chanock as the laws and practices recognized by European and African political leaders in the colonial period as “tradition,” has been a crucial theme of African social historical inquiry since the 1980s.70 Richard Roberts and Kristin Mann’s 1991 edited volume, Law in Colonial Africa, advocated for the critical use of neglected colonial court cases to illustrate transformations in African social history.71 Since then, scholars have utilized the records of colonial courts, under the adjudication of Europeans, chiefs, and imams, to trace the transformations in the meanings of marriage, land rights, inheritance, and the end of slavery across Africa.72 Court records, however, have their limitations. Court records tend to reify conflict as normative.73 Furthermore, colonial court records may overstate the role of state institutions in people’s daily lives.74 Another limitation of court records stems from the question of language and translation. Though deliberations may have taken place in an African language, an African interpreter, with his own interests in presenting particular renderings of the case to a French judge, translates and writes the transcript into French, flattening out the nuances of orality and body language.75
Court records, nevertheless, remain an invaluable source material that permits the periodization and analysis of fundamental transformations in marriage and sex in the Estuary region. Contrary to elsewhere in British and French Africa, customary law was not decisively codified in colonial Gabon, and, thus, colonial courts remained an important arena in which litigants reworked legal and social understandings of the law. Colonial court records surviving in the Gabon national archives range from long-form summaries of testimony and biographical information about litigants to one- or two-sentence summaries of the conflict without identification of the litigants. The “option of the judicial path,” as one female defendant phrased it in a 1950 Libreville court case, was an option that many Libreville and Estuary residents strategically sought out to adjucaticate domestic conflict.76