Conjugal Rights. Rachel Jean-Baptiste
wife, his domestic servant work! And the women who live in debauchery with Europeans, will he make them work or even have to buy out their days of obligatory labor? If he intends to execute orders as received, why apply regulations to some and not to all?”114 As implied in this letter, in the new colonial differentiation between Africans and Europeans, black and white, the woman lover of a European man occupied the status of “European.” The letter writers’ social status had declined. Reordering former hierarchies of men’s greater access to wealth, female lovers and live-in domestic companions to European men could now rise to a status of privilege formerly granted to Myènè men. The categorization of interracial relationships as “debauchery” also implied condemnation of these women as morally suspect, living outside normative sexual relationships that benefited male heads of households. No longer did a woman’s relationship with a European benefit an entire community, but it individually placed her at a level above other “natives.”
While Mpongwé women’s family members might have brokered, approved, or acquiesced to their unions with European men, involvement in these relations did reorder power relationships within Mpongwé communities. Conflict over property could sometimes escalate among kin, as represented in a story recounted by French journalist Albert Londres of his voyage to Libreville in the late 1920s. En route on a ship, Londres encountered a European man named Rass who said that he had lived with a woman whom he identified as “ma Gabonaise” in Libreville for seven years. Her aunts had poisoned and killed her, Rass claimed, in order to gain control of her clothing and the hut (case) that he had left to her after he departed.115 Poisoning was a common manifestation in Mpongwé communities to control recalcitrant members of society or to exact justice over a disagreement, and some older women were the most skilled practitioners.116 When Rass arrived with Londres at the house in which he and his wife had lived, Rass was shocked to find that the aunts whom he said poisoned her now lived in the case. He accused the aunts of killing her because with her death they inherited all of her property. The unnamed woman’s individual ownership of the house and clothing, and her unwillingness to allow her aunts to access this wealth, challenged the authority of senior women over junior women.
Mpongwé women’s independent accumulation of wealth through interracial relationships also provided a pathway to question the authority of Mpongwé chiefs, who claimed political control over residents, and of colonial officials, who sought to direct how women earned and spent their money. In earlier years of colonial rule, colonial projects had attempted to turn Mpongwé men into peasant producers of foodstuffs and cash crops or laborers on European plantations.117 Amid the food shortages of the 1920s, colonial officials blamed the shortages on the supposed laziness of Mpongwé populations and their lack of participation in agricultural production. Officials turned to Mpongwé chiefs in an effort to compel Mpongwé women to farm, as did women of other ethnicities, to produce more food for the town’s population. Yet a chief testified to a 1922 commission of inquiry on the availability of food: “He [the mayor of Libreville] advised us to work in food cultivation like in other countries, that those who put in real efforts would be compensated. We responded that this was good! But it is you others, Europeans, who prevent our women from working because they earn too much with you.”118 The chief relayed that the cash and material resources that European men gave their Mpongwé wives provided women with enough earnings to refuse agricultural work. Another chief argued, “In the past, our women worked on the land, but today they no longer want to and they no longer listen to us!”119 Mpongwé patriarchs could not fully control Mpongwé women’s labor or how Mpongwé women would participate in the colonial economy.
On a January morning in 1922, a group of sixty mainly Mpongwé women, some holding children in their arms, mounted a cacophonous demonstration at the town hall before the mayor, his deputy, and the police commissioner.120 The group of women arrived at the mayor’s office in response to a rumor. Officials had allegedly announced the day before that all farmers, mainly Fang inhabitants of Libreville’s hinterlands, were to bring produce to city hall, where colonial officials would purchase their products at preset prices, instead of to the public market, where Fang farmers could control the prices. Colonial officials would then ration and distribute food to the city’s African and European inhabitants. The investigative report following the women’s protest summarized the assembled women as “Mpongwé, without a profession or living in concubinage with Europeans; three or four among them claimed to be seamstresses or washerwomen who have found themselves to be without work or money, although they were luxuriously dressed and well shod.”121 The report characterized the women as “lazy,” refusing to work in agricultural labor that would have yielded produce to relieve the shortage of food. Rather, the women would arrive at the market early and purchase large quantities of food, leaving nothing for wage laborers, who could not reach the market until the end of their workday.
Libreville’s colonial officials reacted angrily to the women’s demonstrations, noting that they had asked the women to present themselves individually, not in a group, and that a committee of male Mpongwé notables had already convened earlier in the week to address native concerns over food rationing. It was the male chiefs, not this ad hoc gathering of women, whom officials viewed as the authorized intermediaries with the colonial state. Though the women were asked to leave the premises, some refused, and four were arrested in an attempt to compel those who remained to disband.
This gathering of an all-female Mpongwé delegation asserted that women could claim a political voice and directly address the colonial state without African men as intermediaries.122 The Mpongwé women gathered at city hall challenged Mpongwé gender and colonial stratifications—thereby proving to be “dangerous” women, as seen by colonial officials and elder Mpongwé men. Women’s provision of sexual and domestic services to European men simultaneously circulated colonial capital into African communities, yet threatened colonial plans for socioeconomic and political management. As alluded to in the summary of the encounter, many of these women were currently or had been previously engaged in relationships with European men. They invoked their visible positions as taxed property owners and conspicuous consumers with money to protest state attempts to restrict their purchasing power and redirect their labor into agricultural production. Carrying children in their arms, some perhaps the métis children of colonial officials, the women cited their roles as mothers and caretakers of children as justification for their privileged access to food. Unlike the Igbo women’s protests in 1929 Nigeria, Mpongwé women did not protest in order to reclaim roles of the precolonial past.123 Mpongwé women were protesting in order to maintain the privileged existence that they had gained within the transition to colonial rule. The investigation concluded that other African inhabitants of Libreville applauded the women’s arrests. The approbation of townspeople at the women’s imprisonment indicates how less-affluent African urbanites might have resented the privileged status that the women sought to retain as others went hungry and felt the impact of colonial efforts to increase their labor and constrain the money that they could make.
REGULATING AFRICAN MARRIAGE PRACTICES: CODIFYING CUSTOMARY MARRIAGE LAW
Amid the political, social, and economic upheavals, colonial and health personnel assessing demographic data in the first two decades of the twentieth century determined that African populations throughout the colony were decreasing.124 By the 1920s, French medical officials and missionaries reported the disappearances of entire villages that they had visited in the early years of the twentieth century.125 In a 1920 article, a French doctor who headed the colony’s health service described Gabon as “a sick country” with a diminishing population, insufficient food supply, elevated rates of morbidity, and reduced fertility.126 By 1929, a colonial medical report estimated that the population of the entire colony was 334,000 inhabitants, reduced from estimates of 403,000 people in 1924.127 Furthermore, the document conveyed, 10 percent of women in some villages were sterile, and the infant mortality rate was about 50 percent. Colonial states and societies in the Belgian Congo, Kenya, and Malawi reported similar anxieties regarding population stagnation or decrease.128 Among the factors of communicable disease epidemics, forced labor, and food shortages that contributed to demographic decline and mortality in Gabon, colonial state and society settled upon African marital and sexual practices, transformed by colonial rule, as the