.
As in French Occidental (West) Africa (FOA), administrators could maintain political control through the indigénat, a policy that allowed the imprisonment or other punishment of Africans without any judicial proceedings.6 By 1920, colonial personnel had put in place a system of African chieftaincy. In rural areas, French personnel appointed elder and often illiterate men to preside over administrative and territorial units classified in descending geographic territories called canton, terre, and tribu.7 Chiefs’ duties were ostensibly to conduct censuses, collect taxes, and recruit labor for colonial public works projects, and they had the authority to imprison those who failed to pay taxes or respond to forced-labor projects.8 Administrators sought to make the French presence more felt throughout the colony, increasing the numbers of colonial officials who could undertake frequent tours around circumscriptions to persuade local chiefs’ collaboration in these efforts.9
The infrastructure of governance in Libreville and its hinterlands was to reflect centralized political control in the colony’s administrative capital. The Estuary circumscription was composed of the capital city of Libreville and rural areas within a few days’ journey on foot or via riverways, Cocobeach to the west and Kango in the north. Libreville was governed by an administrator-mayor who was assisted by a commission of three French civil servants or private citizens plus one African.10 However, echoing the rest of the colony, turnover of Libreville’s French personnel was frequent.11 As early as 1906, the military commander appointed five chiefs in Libreville to collect taxes and mediate civil conflicts among African communities.12 African men who had received some basic French education, primarily Mpongwé, worked as civil servant clerks in varied administrative offices.13
MAP 2.1. Administrative Division of Gabon, 1916. (Reproduced from Christopher Gray, Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa, 178.)
Rocked by the insolvency of the concessionary period and suffering from tepid funding from mainland France, colonial officials sought to maximize the colony’s local revenues.14 By 1908, administrators required taxes to be paid in currency, not in kind, in an effort to compel Africans to work for wages in the colonial economy.15 In 1910, the colonial state decreed that women in the Estuary region were also to pay taxes in addition to men; each woman was to pay 2 francs, while men were to pay 5 francs.16 Only children, the elderly, the infirm, soldiers, and colonial clerks were exempt from the tax. By the end of World War I, the colonial currency of the franc was in circulation, and this was changed to CFA (Communauté Financière Africaine) franc coins and notes after 1945.17 By 1920, individual tax rates had increased to 10 francs for Estuary residents, while tax rates remained at 3 to 5 francs elsewhere in the colony.18 Another new policy was that of forced labor. Beginning in 1915, each able-bodied adult man was to give seven days of work per year on public works projects or could buy out his days of forced labor at the rate of one-half franc per day.19
The historiography of 1910s and 1920s Gabon has emphasized these decades as “the timber era.”20 The increased export of okoumé wood changed the colony and the Estuary region’s fortunes, landscape, and peopling. The expansion of the timber industry had begun with the consolidation of FEA, with timber exports tripling between 1910 and 1913. The okoumé industry stagnated during World War I, when there was a near standstill in trade, but increased to unprecedented heights thereafter.21 Africans and Europeans alike rushed to forests in southern Gabon to work in the timber industry, the moment of the okoumé rush that characterized the 1920s.
In the beginning years of the okoumé rush, the felling and transport of timber by African communities was an affair of kin, men and women alike, and involving entire villages. The years of 1920–1924 saw an era of African “free wood-cutters.” Anyone with an ax could cut down okoumé trees to sell to European trading houses.22 Colonial reports relay that Fang men were turning away from “traditional” labor in hunting, fishing, and cutting down brush to focus solely on lending services as tree fellers.23 Taking about one month’s worth of labor, a clan leader managed a workforce of kin—wives, children, nephews, brothers, and other dependents—and then floated the logs to European trading locations that began to dot Gabon’s rivers.24 Rivers were key to the okoumé economy, as the waterways provided an exit and transportation route for the trees to reach the coast for export. Free woodcutters could accept the purchasing price of a given European buyer or refuse it and try to sell to another.25 In 1924, a head of a convoy of free woodcutters could earn the equivalent of 75–130 francs per person on his team for a period of work felling a tree.26 In the regions of the Bas-Ogooué and Ogooué, but also in the Estuary region, where a confluence of forests and rivers existed, subdivision heads reported a veritable “okoumé fever,” and that entire villages had abandoned their settlements in the bush and agricultural cultivation to work in felling timber.27
Historians Christopher Gray and Francois Ngolet have argued that the mid-1920s ushered in the decline of an economy in which Africans controlled their terms of engagement and work into an “economy of exploitation” in which African laborers lost the means to determine the nature, duration, and remuneration of their labor.28 European forestry societies came to hold control over the timber industry.29 Several factors contributed to this. First, the French more regularly implemented policies that required permits to cut wood and gain access to specific areas of forest plotted on maps.30 Only French businesses with significant capital could afford the fees for permits of larger hectares. Furthermore, increased mechanization in cutting down and transporting wood resulted in the hiring of European workers to man machinery, while African laborers were hired to float logs along interior waterways toward the ocean, more manual and dangerous yet lower-paid work.31 The amount of money that a wage laborer earned per month, 40 francs plus food rations, was lower than what a free woodcutter could earn for a month’s labor, which was about 70 francs.32
In contrast to the era of free woodcutting that involved the labor of men and women linked by ties of affinity, timber production from the mid-1920s stimulated migrant labor of Fang men and other ethnic groups toward southern Gabon. Thousands of Gabonese men migrated from interior regions to timber yards looking for work and money. Though the lower Ogooué region and areas around Lambaréné were the hubs of the timber industry, the Estuary region was a key center of forestry as well, housing a number of timber concessions in its hinterlands. A new site of living and work occupied the landscape: the timber yard. One of the largest in the Estuary region employed forty Europeans and fifteen hundred Africans, and was composed of separate African and European villages, with stores selling durable goods, silos filled with rice, and fish and agricultural goods for purchase.33 Libreville also housed the administrative headquarters of forestry and trading companies of varied European nationalities.
Historian Clotaire Messi Me Nang described the typical timber yard as a “monstrous devourer of men.”34 Work in timber camps was rough and dangerous—poor living and working conditions and little regulation contributed to the deaths of laborers, who were sometimes recruited through violence.35 Workers frequently abandoned contracts with complaints of insufficient food rations, beatings to compel them to work, and long workdays of twelve hours or more. Few worksites employed medical personnel, and workers died from illnesses such as sleeping sickness, beriberi, leprosy, and dysentery.36 In spite of these precarious conditions, okoumé wood continued to be king and was the sector of the colonial economy that employed the largest number of Gabonese laborers.37
By the end of the 1920s, nearly all economic production within African communities along the northern and southern Gabon coasts depended directly or indirectly on the timber industry.38 The okoumé rush supported the growth of other types of enterprises, with some Africans self-employed as transporters or owners of bars.39 Though few Mpongwé entered the industry as manual wage laborers, some Mpongwé men obtained new avenues of wage work as clerks, interpreters, and in finance. Though timber companies were owned by the French, the mid-1920s did appear to be a period of “extraordinary prosperity”