Conjugal Rights. Rachel Jean-Baptiste
equatorial climate and the environment—dense rain forests, lakes, rivers, and mountains—shaped the lives and livelihoods of Estuary inhabitants. Rain and humidity characterize the climate for most of the year, with seven to eight months of high humidity. The average temperature in a calendar year is twenty-six degrees Celsius. There are two rainy seasons, which result in rainfall for most of the year, with the longer season extending from January to May and the shorter one from September to December. In a normal season, about 2.5 meters of rain fall per year.4 There are two dry seasons, the longer one during the period of May to September and a short dry season from December to January. Several types of topography mark Gabon. In the east, there is a small savannah region. A mountainous region extends north and to the west of Libreville across the center of Gabon and includes elevations up to eight hundred meters in the Monts de Cristal and Massif du Chaillu (named by European explorers in the nineteenth century). As far as three hundred kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean, the coastal plains are covered by dense rain forest, with trees as tall as twenty-sixty meters.5 Rain forest is the dominant geographical feature, and it encompasses two-thirds of the region. Swampy regions next to the forested regions of the coast present an area of mangrove. The presence of tsetse flies and outbreaks of trypanosomiasis limit the possibilities of animal husbandry and the upkeep of many types of cattle. A French sociologist described Gabon as “a country of water.”6 A total of thirty-five hundred kilometers of rivers offer transportation routes, the longest of which is the Ogooué River at one thousand kilometers. These rivers provided transportation arteries foundational to economic transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lakes and lagoons dot the country, particularly in the Moyen-Ogooué.7 Bounded by one thousand meters of the Atlantic Ocean along the south, a series of estuaries provide shelter. The northern coast, between the Bay of Rio Muni and the Fernan Vaz Lagoon, harbors one such estuary that became the site of Libreville.8 Fed by the Como River, the Gabon Estuary is sixty-four kilometers long and fourteen kilometers wide at its mouth. It was this area, in mangroves surrounded by forests, that the Mpongwé would settle and that would come to be called the Estuary region. Europeans came to consider the Gabon Estuary “one of the best natural harbors on the coast of West Africa” after it was reached by the Portuguese in the 1470s.9 It was this factor that contributed to the increased convergence of varied African and European communities in the Estuary in the nineteenth century and the founding of Libreville.
Most of present-day Gabon’s fifty-two ethnic groups are of Bantu origins. By the seventeenth century, peoples of the Myènè ethnolinguistic group inhabited the northern and southern Gabon coasts.10 It is not possible to determine a precise chronology of their migrations and settlements, but scholars date their movements toward the coast between 1600 and 1800.11 The Myènè were composed of Orungu, Nkomi, Galoa, Enenga, and Adyumba matrilineal ethnic groups who concentrated along the Ogooué River in southern Gabon. The patrilineal Mpongwé concentrated along the right and left banks of the Gabon Estuary.12 By the nineteenth century, Mpongwé clans were concentrated into approximately three politically dominant clans and fourteen less important ones.13
Mpongwé communities prospered from Atlantic Ocean trade in goods over the course of three centuries. Between the 1500s and 1600s, the Mpongwé received cloth and products made of iron, such as nails, knives, and axes, from Portuguese and Dutch traders in exchange for ivory, honey, and beeswax that they procured from African societies who lived farther inland. From the sixteenth century onward, the Estuary was a crucial docking station for Portuguese and other European ships that needed to restock food and water and undergo repairs as they headed to or from the former Loango and Kongo kingdoms for trade.14 The Sékiani, who inhabited the area just beyond the Gabon River, and the Bakalai, who settled farther inland, encircled the Mpongwé. Until the Fang eclipsed them in the late nineteenth century, the Mpongwé represented the largest concentration of an African population in the Estuary region. The map below indicates the peopling of the Estuary circa the late nineteenth century, with several Mpongwé clans along the Estuary and the Fang in the Estuary’s interior.
MAP 1.1. Mpongwé Settlement in the Gabon Estuary, Mid-Nineteenth Century. (Reproduced from André Raponda-Walker, Notes d’histoire du Gabon, with authorization from the Fondation Raponda-Walker pour la Science et la Culture.)
Early to mid-nineteenth-century Mpongwé were organized around several commercially, politically, and socially connected yet independent settlements. The political organization was composed of extended kin groups, among which “big men” emerged; these male leaders exerted a sphere of influence over a given geographic locale.15 The basic unit of Mpongwé communities was a household headed by a male (nago), his wives and children, his sons, his sons’ wives and their children, and other dependents. Several households combined into a clan, headed by the senior patriarch (oga), in which members followed exogamy. A few of the most powerful clan leaders or “kings” (oga w’inongo) exercised a degree of influence over several clans in a given region.16 The most powerful clan heads, among which an oga was chosen, were also often affluent traders.17 By the mid-nineteenth century, there were four principal Mpongwé political units, headed by “kings” Glass, Denis, Georges, and Quaben. European observers referred to each kingdom by the name of its king. Though European observers mistook the oga of an Mpongwé settlement as a centralized figure of authority, in reality, political, social, and economic power was decentralized.18
The period between 1698 and 1818 was an era of political change along the southern and northern coasts. Internecine wars took place between numerous clans, and gradual resettlement took place when newly arrived clans displaced those already settled. This period also witnessed efforts by powerful Orungu and Mpongwé oga to consolidate their power. Individual heads of household maintained their own spheres of influence and engaged in commercial activities with other African communities and Europeans without deferring to the ogas. By the 1880s, European observers estimated the Mpongwé population at between three and six thousand free inhabitants and slaves, men, women, and children.19 The slave population ranged from one-third to one-half of the total population of Mpongwé villages. Nearly all households had at least one slave, and the wealthiest households had one hundred or more slaves.20
The expansion of the transatlantic trade in forest goods and slaves—which began in the 1500s and reached its height from 1815 to 1840 in the period of clandestine trade after many European nations had declared the slave trade illegal—profoundly altered Mpongwé societies.21 By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Mpongwé and other littoral Myènè societies had established themselves as middlemen to facilitate the trade of rubber, ivory, and slaves from interior peoples with European and American customers. It was the neighboring region of Loango that dominated the trade in slaves for this region of West-Central Africa, but Mpongwé middlemen trafficked in a smaller volume of slaves.22 In 1788, the Estuary region and Cape Lopez, farther south along the Atlantic Ocean, exported 500 slaves, as compared to the 13,500 slaves leaving the coasts of Loango and Kongo. Following the legal decrees of some European countries to abolish the slave trade in the early nineteenth century, lesser-known and more clandestine trading ports off the Estuary expanded their slave-trading enterprises, but continued to be eclipsed by the volume of slaves emerging from Cape Lopez. Between 1815 and 1850, estimates are that a few thousand slaves were exported from both the Estuary and Cape Lopez. Estimates of the annual demographic loss due to slave exports within Gabon range from 1 to 4 percent.23 European goods sought by Mpongwé included cloth, manufactured clothing, alcohol, metal objects, and weapons.
Europeans traveling in Gabon in the mid-1850s described Mpongwé traders as accomplished middlemen, enabling the transfer of goods from the inland to the coast through specialized trading networks based on the “trust” system.24 Dutch, American, British, and French traders competed to profit from the trade as each nation sought to monopolize the commercial exchange along the coast. Over the course of the nineteenth century, wood and ivory were also among the products that Mpongwé traded to Europeans. It was common for an Mpongwé trader to speak