Conjugal Rights. Rachel Jean-Baptiste
and reformulated their relationships with one another, a fluidity that would carry over well into the colonial period.
CONCLUSION
Fifteen years after the founding of Libreville, the French presence in the town had barely expanded. The underfunded and modest nature of the colonial presence in late nineteenth-century Libreville foreshadowed the uneven nature of colonial rule through the twentieth century.110 In 1861, a British traveler described the colonial trading post (comptoir) as in a rather desultory state, noting a ship docked in the Estuary to provide defense; Fort d’Aumale, which housed naval officers and also served as the hospital; a few “wood huts” surrounding the fort that housed administrative personnel; and the Saint Mary Catholic mission and a convent for the Soeurs Bleues.111 The French had not been able to establish either political or commercial ascendancy in the colony. A few feet away from Fort d’Aumale stood the trading houses of mainly German and British merchants. In 1875, the staff of colonial administration consisted of four people on a budget of 72,000 francs.112
In spite of the lack of a visible built environment of colonial society and state, colonial rule in Gabon was also marked by violence. In 1899, the French Congo was divided into about forty concession companies, with each land area roughly the size of France. The insolvent colony of Gabon was parceled into territories controlled by private concession companies. The brutal concessionary system unleashed further instability in a period already characterized by social fluctuation. In exchange for retaining exclusive rights over agricultural and industrial exploitation of their territories—mainly the exploitation of rubber and ivory—companies would give the state a percentage of their profits.113 By the turn of the century, the brutalities inflicted upon African populations in the French Congo became public and created scandal internationally and in France.114 The collection of rubber and other forest products under conditions of forced labor and violence resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, disease, and the decrease in agricultural production that contributed to massive food shortages and famine.
The creation of the French Equatorial Africa federation in 1910 signaled the attempt to enforce centralized colonial state control over Gabon’s diverse African communities and European men on the spot. The paucity of documentation of the period of concessionary rule means that we can know little about domestic politics in the Estuary region in these years. Yet, as the French attempted to transition from colonial conquest to colonial rule, townspeople’s shifting aspirations toward emerging forms of marriage and sexual relationships shaped transformations in political economy, and changes in politics and economics shaped domestic relationships in the next century of Libreville’s existence.
2
Libreville in the Era of Timber, 1910–1929
FROM 1910 TO 1929, the Estuary region witnessed vast social, economic, and political upheaval. Libreville was transformed from a fledgling colonial outpost characterized by interdependent African and European exchanges to a colonial capital city. The French endeavored to expand and rationalize colonial rule; the town was to be the headquarters from which the French could broadcast political control over the colony. Beginning in the 1910s and reaching a height in the mid-1920s, global markets clamored for Gabon’s okoumé wood, sparking the industry that was to become Gabon’s primary economic activity through political independence from French colonial rule in 1960.1 Greater numbers of Fang from northern Gabon migrated toward Libreville and other regions in southern Gabon to profit from the economic opportunities. Yet demographic decline and social disruption and dislocation brewed beneath the veneer of economic prosperity. Ecological disasters, food shortages, disease epidemics, and socioeconomic insecurity also arose.2 The French extracted increased labor, raw products, and money from Estuary residents to fund the campaigns of World War I against Germans in bordering Cameroon.3 In 1929, the global Depression made its way to Gabon, resulting in the near stoppage of timber production and a loss of work and money for Libreville residents. Through these fluctuations, a heterogeneous collection of African and European communities settled in, sojourned through, and departed from Libreville. Questions of urban planning regarding housing, health and hygiene, tax collection, work, policing, and governance were on the minds of state personnel and new and old residents alike. Couched in such questions were the dynamics of sexuality and marriage, between African women and men and between African women and European men.
An unintended consequence of economic shifts and the circulation of people through Libreville between 1910 and 1929 was that women’s sexuality provided paths for the generation of wealth in material goods and money. As had occurred in the nineteenth century, interracial sexual and domestic relationships between Mpongwé women and European men proliferated. Mpongwé men brokered such relationships for female dependents, often daughters who had received some formal French education. Some relationships were short-term sexual encounters and others long-term domestic and sexual relationships that Mpongwé societies viewed as marriages. These relationships occurred along local conjugal-sexual mores and were mutually beneficial for African and European societies. Some women accrued independent property and monetary wealth through interracial relationships, thereby disrupting hierarchies of gender and generation with elder kin and chiefs. Moreover, many Mpongwé women exercised a political voice, using their literacy to protest against colonial efforts to exact greater political and economic control over Libreville’s African communities. By World War I and its aftermath, some groups of elite African men, chiefs, and colonial officials—made anxious by the social mobility that some black and mixed-race women involved in interracial unions achieved—sought to limit the occurrences of interracial unions. For some Fang women, compensation for having sexual relations with West African men and Fang migrant laborers provided a means for their husbands and male kin to obtain cash to meet colonial tax directives.
Over the course of these first two decades of the existence of French Equatorial Africa (FEA), Gabon continued to experience population decline, diminished birth rates, and increased mortality. French colonial state and society settled upon African women’s sexual promiscuity and increased divorce as reflective of the “disorganization of the African family.” In Libreville, regulating African sexuality, particularly that of African women, in order to populate and safeguard social and biological reproduction in the colony was to become a key and contested process of urban planning and state-building.
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS: COLONIAL CONSOLIDATION AND OKOUMÉ, 1910–1929
Understanding the transformations in the manifestations of and anxieties about African women’s sexuality involves tracing the transformations in politics, economics, and demography that swept through the Estuary region. Following the official “on-paper” creation of French Equatorial Africa in 1910, the French endeavored to place an infrastructure for colonial rule over the colony of Gabon and its capital city. These efforts encompassed four means: (1) to complete the task of military conquest; (2) to establish geographic boundaries and delineate where Africans could live; (3) to facilitate governance through appointing French and African personnel; and (4) to direct the economic activities of Gabon’s population toward French profits. In the first ten years of FEA’s existence, political control beyond the Estuary region was tenuous. French officers and Senegalese tirailleurs (colonial infantry) mounted numerous campaigns to temper varied insurgencies in the interior. While southern Gabon remained relatively free of armed resistance to colonial rule, it was not until 1925 that insurgent Fang populations in the northern region of Woleu-Ntem ceded to colonial governance.4
Following the task of military conquest, colonial officials endeavored to divide the colony into administrative units and set up a political hierarchy of French personnel and African chiefs and civil servants who were to be auxiliaries in military defense, civil governance, and economic mobilization.5 The colony was divided into civil circumscriptions (circonscriptions), which were further divided into numerous subdivisions. The French subdivision heads reported to the circumscription leader, who then reported to the governor’s Office of Political and Administrative Affairs. Libreville sat in the Gabon-Como Estuary circumscription and was both the capital city of the colony