Conjugal Rights
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Conjugal Rights is a history of the role of marriage and other arrangements between men and women in Libreville, Gabon, during the French colonial era, from the mid–nineteenth century through 1960. Conventional historiography has depicted women as few in number and of limited influence in African colonial towns, but this book demonstrates that a sexual economy of emotional, social, legal, and physical relationships between men and women indelibly shaped urban life. Bridewealth became a motor of African economic activity, as men and women promised, earned, borrowed, transferred, and absconded with money to facilitate interpersonal relationships. Colonial rule increased the fluidity of customary marriage law, as chiefs and colonial civil servants presided over multiple courts, and city residents strategically chose the legal arena in which to arbitrate a conjugal-sexual conflict. Sexual and domestic relationships with European men allowed some African women to achieve a greater degree of economic and social mobility. An eventual decline of marriage rates resulted in new sexual mores, as women and men sought to rebalance the roles of pleasure, respectability, and legality in having sex outside of kin-sanctioned marriage. Rachel Jean-Baptiste expands the discourse on sexuality in Africa and challenges conventional understandings of urban history beyond the study of the built environment. Marriage and sexual relations determined how people defined themselves as urbanites and shaped the shifting physical landscape of Libreville. Conjugal Rights takes a fresh look at questions of the historical construction of race and ethnicity. Despite the efforts of the French colonial government and society to enforce boundaries between black and white, interracial sexual and domestic relationships persisted. Black and métisse women gained economic and social capital from these relationships, allowing some measure of freedom in the colonial capital city.
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Conjugal Rights
SERIES EDITORS: JEAN ALLMAN AND ALLEN ISAACMAN AND DEREK R. PETERSON
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In an edited volume urging scholars to “re-think” sexualities in Africa, Signe Arnfred argues that European imaginaries of African sexuality have oscillated from ideas of the exotic and the noble and depraved savage, yet have been continually “other” in comparison to the norm of European sexuality.55 Historians have analyzed European discourses of African sexualities as more fraught than Arnfred portrays.56 Megan Vaughan’s work on biomedical discourses in colonial British Central and East Africa and Diana Jeater’s book on colonial moralist conceptions of African sexuality in early colonial Southern Rhodesia demonstrate that no dominant, hegemonic colonial discourse emerged, but rather a range of discourses. Megan Vaughan underlines how colonial representatives expressed anxieties about African women’s sexuality in urban areas in particular and associated African women’s sexuality with disease and social breakdown. Vaughan traces how state-employed doctors and medical missionaries conceptualized and debated the mechanisms of syphilis vaccination campaigns to construct governable African subjects.57 In analyzing changing discourses of biomedicine, Vaughan’s analysis demonstrates the persistent import of controlling African women’s bodies by the apparatuses of colonial rule. Diana Jeater also demonstrates the multivalent nature of European ideas of African sexuality and how efforts to regulate sexuality were central to colonial rule. Jeater analyzes European discourses to argue that the colonial encounter profoundly altered ideas about and practices of sexuality. Between 1910 and 1930s colonial Rhodesia, Jeater argues, Christianity and migration to towns produced the idea of individual responsibility and “sin,” as well as the idea that sexuality could take place outside of the sanction of family groups.58 By focusing primarily on colonial discourses, we have not been fully able to understand the meanings of sexuality and the complexities with which African historical actors thought of and embodied their sexuality. Furthermore, how did ideas about sexuality intersect with praxes of sexuality?
Marriage was a primary relationship through which African men and women in Libreville articulated and experienced sexuality. A critical mass of books has chronicled social and economic change in Africa through the lens of marriage.59 As this body of scholars, including Brett Shadle, has shown, “nowhere in colonial Africa was marital stability a foregone conclusion.”60 In the region that became Libreville, men and women engaged in varied forms of extramarital sexual relationships prior to the colonial encounter, and over the course of the decades of colonial rule new forms of extramarital sexual relationships developed. However, in spite of marital instability, there was a persistence with which Libreville’s residents used changing forms of conjugal relationships as a metaphor in conceptualizing sexuality. As argued by Stephanie Newell, scholarship on marriage in Africa has emphasized “economic and social power rather than . . . desire and pleasure or coercion.”61 Furthermore, Jennifer Cole and Lynn Thomas contend that love, “the sentiments of attachment and affiliation that bind people to one another—in sexual, predominantly heterosexual, relationships,” is a neglected lens of research in African studies.62 I take seriously notions of sexual desire and love as units of analysis. Yet, following historical actors’ conceptions of heterosexual relationships as also mediating economic mobility, I engage the recent literature on love and money in contemporary Africa that demonstrates how people viewed well-being in relationships according to both material and emotional fulfillment.63
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