From Atlantic Ocean Trading Post to Colonial Capital City, 1849–1929

      PART 1 ANALYZES TRANSFORMATIONS in marriage and sex in Libreville prior to 1930. Chapter 1 explores Libreville’s transformation from a small but strategic hub of Atlantic trade in slaves and forest and imported goods in the mid- to late nineteenth century to a nascent colonial capital city in 1910. I track the gendered dynamics of moving to and setting up homes in the emerging town and how the sexual economy shaped the political economy, legal infrastructures, and geographic layout. Chapter 2 picks up this thread from 1910 to 1929, years in which efforts by the French to consolidate colonial rule and direct the labor of Africans toward the colonial economy and timber production fundamentally altered daily life. I trace the unintended processes of women’s sexual labor in generating cash and other forms of wealth and how worries about the sexual economy compelled transformations in French conceptualizations of customary law and governance. These two chapters set the stage for how the dynamics of conjugal and sexual relations demonstrate cracks in the edifice of colonial rule and spaces for Gabonese to shape the lived realities of urban life in the decades to come.

1 Sexual Economy in the Era of Trade and Politics

       The Founding of Libreville, 1849–1910

      WRITING IN 1975, historian K. David Patterson observed, “The early history of Gabon has received almost no attention from scholars. . . . The whole region of Western Equatorial Africa remains something of a historio-graphical void.”¹ Since Patterson wrote this, less than a handful of publications have filled the historiographical void. A few publications have focused on the period before European contact.² The few publications focusing on the nineteenth century can be characterized as the “trade and politics school,” focusing on the end of the transatlantic slave trade, the exchange of Western and equatorial forest goods, and increasing French ambitions toward colonial rule and African resistance to French attempts at domination as motors of historical change.³ Scholars have argued of marriage and family life as serving normative functions—to allow elder men to maintain political power and social control over women, slaves, and junior men that permitted them to control nodes of transatlantic trade in slaves and goods. Marriage was an important institution through which individuals achieved social adulthood and kin groups formed alliances. What is common in research on the nineteenth century is an absence of an analytical focus on women and gender, an empirical absence that has led to conceptual gaps in our understanding of historical change.

      In chronicling how Libreville inhabitants negotiated dynamics of sexual economy over the course of the mid-nineteenth century to 1910, this chapter demonstrates that questions of how marriage was to be consecrated and the forms of socially acceptable sexual relations and gender roles were very much under contestation preceding and at the moment of colonial encounters. As the Estuary region transformed from a precolonial Atlantic Ocean trading port to a fledgling colonial outpost, changing meanings of gender roles in heterosexual relationships shaped infrastructures of town life. The written texts of French military personnel, Catholic proselytizers, multinational traders and men on the spot, American missionaries, and the remembrances of Fang and Mpongwé chiefs that I recorded in oral interviews tend to convey an androcentric perspective. Nevertheless, in these extant sources lie fragments that indicate how contours of changing notions of how to be male and female shaped economic, social, and political life. Marriage was not a normative social system that regularized sexual unions and status of offspring and reinforced patriarchal power. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sexual and conjugal politics within Mpongwé and Fang societies revealed fluidity in determining how individuals and groups exercised power along the axis of gender. By the late nineteenth century, it was common for European traders and Mpongwé women to engage in relationships of longterm concubinage, often sealed with a bridewealth bundle of goods or cash payments from the European companion. An Mpongwé moral economy dictated the terms of interracial sex and incorporated European men into shifting conceptualizations of respectable female sexuality, bridewealth, and marriage.

      Conjugal-sexual politics were central to how African communities and the French converged and diverged to build the town and their lives in these decades. Libreville had a relatively equal gender ratio from the time of its founding due to a combination of local and external factors. First, African households—men, women, and children, free and slave—already inhabited the space that later became the administrative center of the colony. As brokers of the lucrative transatlantic trade that began in the late fifteenth century, the Mpongwé served as middlemen between Europeans and interior African societies. Second, French imperial expansion in the 1840s and 1850s intersected with waves of African communities—who originated north of Gabon’s modern-day borders—as they migrated toward the coast. Fang households that included men and women appeared near the Estuary in the 1840s. These new arrivals were to become the Estuary Fang, a group that would develop ways of life distinct from those of other members of their ethnolinguistic group in the interior. Third, the demographic fragility and sparse population density of the equatorial region meant that French state officials, missionaries, and private citizens were often eager to attract African populations, men and women alike, toward Libreville and other centers of colonial economic production.

      The founding of Libreville and French efforts toward colonial rule created and intersected with a period of uncertainty, migration, and socioeconomic change within Gabon. Three historical turning points transformed the region: (1) the first of a series of treaties signed by Mpongwé political leaders in 1839 that ceded territory to the French and paved the way for French colonial rule and the “founding” of the town in 1849; (2) the parceling out of surrounding regions into concessionary control in 1898; and (3) the incorporation of the coastal town and interior regions into the more centralized colonial rule of French Equatorial Africa in 1910. Such political and economic changes were intimately tied to questions of the domestic lives of its inhabitants. As African and European strangers circulated through nineteenth-century Libreville, men and women strategized over how to ensure security, and weather the fluctuations of trade and politics, in formulating and reformulating their relationships with each other.

      MPONGWÉ BEGINNINGS: THE GENDERED POLITICS