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Introduction

Narrating a History of Domestic Life, Sexuality, Being, and Feeling in Urban Africa

LOCATED ON THE GABON ESTUARY along the Atlantic coast, Libreville (Free Town) was founded in 1849 by the French on land that political leaders of Mpongwé ethno-language communities, who had lived there for centuries, ceded via a series of treaties. The French populated the new settlement with a contingent of slaves they had intercepted from a vessel traveling from Angola toward the Americas.¹ Fifty-two former captives—twenty-seven men, twenty-three women, and two children of unidentified Central African origins—disembarked at the Gabon Estuary in February 1849.² The skeletal staff of the French administration, comprising a handful of naval personnel, alongside Catholic missionaries, pledged to each of the former slave men a hut and a parcel of land to begin their new lives. Yet, within months, a number of these men expressed their discontent with the “freed” lives that the French envisioned for them. In September, French naval reports relay, ten to sixteen men ran away into the forest and carried out attacks on Estuary communities.³ They stole arms, kidnapped women, and threatened to launch further attacks. The rebels issued a singular demand: they wanted wives. The mutineers had begun kidnapping women with the goal of making them their wives, and they threatened to inflict further terror upon Estuary residents unless they were given access to more women.⁴

The aspirations of these newly settled men to build a new present and future necessitated not just land and roofs over their heads, but also wives with whom to form households and ensure social and biological reproduction. Perhaps the rebels also conceived of wives as providing companionship and emotional attachment, factors that could provide them with a sense of belonging in their new home. These were poor men from distant places who had limited means to accumulate the imported goods that could constitute bridewealth payments to facilitate marriage. Bridewealth, a bundle of goods that a groom gave to a bride’s family, was a primary legal and social marker across Africa that made a relationship a marriage. These men also lacked the social capital that could have facilitated interpersonal relationships, and therefore marriage, in the Mpongwé communities of the Estuary region.

Marriage conferred dignity and the capacity to articulate social, legal, and economic rights to shape one’s personhood and status in society. If the men remained unmarried, they would be perpetual minors and socially dead, failing to establish adulthood and manhood.⁵ Not only had being uprooted from their natal homes separated them from their ancestors, to whom they owed offerings in order to prosper in their present life, but their unmarried status would not produce the children who would honor them when they died and perpetuate their lineages. In making the claim to marriage as a universal right for men to establish selfhood in the emerging settlement of Libreville, these men asserted a conception of the basic necessities of town life in terms unimagined by the French.

By October, the rebels had been killed, captured, or rejoined the settlement and pardoned. Fearing further mischief, a meeting involving the chief of the former slaves, the French doctor, and the naval commander convened to consider “the urgency of marriage” for Libreville’s new residents. Navy officers precipitously sought the approval of Catholic missionaries to bless en masse marriages of fifteen couples, fearing “very dangerous liaisons if they were left unmarried.”⁶ In alluding to the “dangerous liasons” that could develop if men and women among the former slaves remained unmarried, Catholic missionaries were also referring to the commonplace nature of interracial sexual relationships between African women and European men along the Gabon Estuary. In facilitating these marriages, the French acknowledged the rebels’ claims of marriage as a right. However, the French sought to consecrate marriage in rites intelligible to French norms, civil and Christian. Written records and memory are silent as to the actions and subjectivities of the women who were historical actors in these events at the town’s emergence. However, throughout the history of colonial Libreville, populations of women exceeded or nearly equaled those of men, and women’s claims to make the city “home” through varied articulations of sex and marriage also deeply shaped urban life.

More than anything else, the marriage mutiny of 1849 illuminates the importance of questions and contestations of how, not if, men and women would constitute self and sociality in Libreville through relationships with each other. This episode was the first and but one of a multitude of struggles to articulate the contours of domestic life and being in Libreville that would unfold in the century to follow. Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon, tells the story of the longue durée of such questions, narrating a social history of heterosexual relationships as lived and a cultural history of the meanings of such relationships. This book thereby links three important processes of historical change in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa: (1) transformations in conjugal and sexual relationships; (2) meanings of gender; and (3) urbanism.

I periodize such dynamics as early as the nineteenth-century years of the Estuary region’s standing as a way station in transatlantic trade routes, but the greater part of this story centers on 1930 through 1960. These were years of tremendous social, political, and economic change in Libreville and its rural suburbs as the town grew through immigration and the export of timber came to be the colony’s primary economic activity. Disembarking via oceans, rivers, and overland, a population of about fifty Central African ethnolanguage groups, West Africans, and Europeans converged to transform the equatorial forest located along the Atlantic coast into a town in which they could establish homes and achieve fortune. I focus principally on the conjugal and sexual careers of the Mpongwé, inhabitants at the time of Libreville’s founding, and the Fang, whose migration toward the Estuary transformed the region and who would come to represent a large proportion of the city’s population over the course of the twentieth century. During this same period, conjugality and sexuality in the Estuary region also involved the persistence of interracial relationships between Mpongwé women and white men of varied nationalities even as the colonial state sought to demarcate rigid racial boundaries. Engaging the call of scholars who have argued that the study of households and gender needs to take center stage in African history, I argue that Libreville’s residents lived and contested meanings of urban life according to shifting mores of sexual economy.⁷ In defining the term “sexual,” I conceive of two meanings: practices and conceptions of what it meant to be male and female, as well as practices and meanings of sexuality. In conceptualizing the term “economy,” I am inspired by Alfred Marshall’s definition of economics as the study of humans “in the ordinary business of life.”⁸ Thus, “sexual economy” in this book means the transactions and relationships of everyday life around the meanings and lived experiences of gender identities and sexual relationships. Historical actors engaged in, had aspirations toward, and debated sexual economy based on changing emotional, social, political, and economic vectors. Ideas and lived experiences of sexual economy changed over time and shaped the very material and conceptual fabric of urban life.

Changing articulations and negotiations of sexual economy were motors of historical change that shaped the unfolding of key aspects of urban life: money and its use, distribution, and social value in the form of bridewealth (chap. 4); the law, legal systems, and jurisprudence (chap. 5); moral and social order and human and spatial geography (chap. 6); and racial and ethnic differentiation (chap. 7). Town life engendered an unprecedented circulation of people, material, and ideas in this Equatorial African locale. Taking advantage of the unparalleled opportunities and mitigating the risks required new forms of male-female partnerships. Heterosexual relationships changed as the city itself changed, presenting new kinds of social, cultural, and economic possibilities. The varied African and varied French communities understood sexual relationships to be the key to social, cultural, and economic goals, but in a variety of configurations that often resulted in contestation as well as convergence.

Colonial rule sparked the creation of Libreville, and the French sought to mold the lives of its African inhabitants into their own models. However, in examining the interstices of everyday affective life and institutional governance, I contend that African women and men were not accidental visitors to the colonial town. The loves, passion, breakups, makeups, courting, and jealousies of historical actors laid bare political and legal claim-making to belonging in the town. These processes shaped the very meaning of urbanism. African women and men in Libreville made urban life according to their own changing logics and sentience in ways that were touched by and sometimes circumscribed but never fully controlled by the colonial state, African political leaders, or church representatives. On the contrary, Libreville’s inhabitants made choices about if and how to marry, if and how to divorce, whom to love, and with whom to have sex that changed government policies and caused the colonial state to perpetually scramble to maintain social control. Such contestations did not stop with the end of formal colonial rule. As Libreville became the capital of independent Gabon in 1960, marriage and sex occupied the forefront of ideas about modern urban life, governance, and nation.

In addition to material concerns, historical actors in Libreville married, divorced, and had sexual relationships based on emotional aspirations of love, fear, pleasure, pain, and belonging, sentient factors. As argued by historian of medieval Europe Barbara Rosenwein, the study of emotion should also guide historical inquiry and analysis. People across time and space, Rosenwein argues, have lived in “emotional communities,” forms of grouping that are the same as social communities such as families and neighborhoods.⁹ However, what makes emotional communities distinct from social communities are systems of feeling: “what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them; the evaluations that they make about others’ emotions; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.”¹⁰ Analyzing how “systems of feeling” in heterosexual relationships also shaped historical actors’ negotiations of urban life opens a new window into the complex articulations of historical change and continuity in colonial-era West-Central Africa. Following the conjugal and sexual lives of Libreville’s inhabitants and institutions offers a fresh perspective into the anxieties, hopes, disappointments, and unintended contingencies of city life. The varied articulations of sexual and conjugal comportment over time and space by varied African and French actors in Libreville reflected significant social, political, and economic change over the course of the twentieth century. Conjugal Rights engages three important historiographical themes of African studies: (1) urban history; (2) the history of women and gender; and (3) the history of sexuality. In foregrounding the history of sexuality, Conjugal Rights expands our understanding of this little-studied theme in research on Africa and reveals the linkages between shifting articulations of eros and social, political, and economic change.

URBAN AFRICA

This sexual-conjugal biography of Libreville in the precolonial and early colonial nineteenth century contributes to research that decenters colonial imperatives at the origins of urbanism in Africa.¹¹ As argued by John Parker of locations such as Accra that were urban prior to colonial conquest,“The transition from precolonial city-state to colonial city was not about the creation of new urban identities and institutions but the reconfiguration of old ones.”¹² By identifying how marriage and sex were important currents in the Estuary in the nineteenth century, before the consolidation of French colonial rule, I demonstrate the continuities in how Africans conceptualized town life into the twentieth century.

In an important current in African urban studies, researchers have challenged the very concept of “urbanization” as a linear process that automatically results in a standard set of structural changes. James Ferguson has critiqued the manner in which modernization theorists have interchangeably used the term “urbanization” and the terms “modernization,” “monetization,” “proletarianization,” and “detribalization,” a slippage in language that he calls “teleologies of social change.”¹³ Similar to Ferguson, historians of Africa emphasized African agency in determining what urban life looks like. Town dwellers forwarded their own conceptions of modernity and directed their leisure time and sartorial makeup.¹⁴ Wage laborers countered European bosses’ conception of work time and offered alternative visions of wage labor.¹⁵ After World War II, urban men were at the forefront of nationalist and anticolonial politics.¹⁶

However, in keeping the term “urbanization” as an analytical category, we have narrowed the possible terrains on which Africans conceptualized town life and have posited the source of transformations in city life to the very teleologies we seek to disrupt. In his research on four cities across sub-Saharan Africa, AbdouMaliq Simone contests the very term “urbanization” as the cognitive framework through which researchers analyze urban African history. Simone exhorts scholars to examine how specific actors “reach and extend themselves across a larger world and enact these possibilities of urban becoming.”¹⁷ Moreover, Simone contends, “particular modalities of organization, long rooted in different African histories, are resuscitated for new objectives and with new resiliency.”¹⁸

Conjugal Rights traces “urban becoming” rather than “urbanization” in Libreville in order to encompass the multiplicities of processes through which individuals created and gave meaning to urban life. In correlating the themes of sexuality, marriage, and transformations in how to be male and female through the interpretive lens of urban becoming, this book offers a fresh perspective to understandings of African urban history.

There is a rich collection of histories of women in urban Africa, but this scholarship has not often resulted in the gendering of urban African studies. When discussing African urbanites, general overviews of African urban history often talk about only African men— the African city has been gendered male. The normative urban African character, the person with agency to shape meaning and experience of life on the Copperbelt, in Johannesburg, Mombasa, the Witwatersrand, and Dakar, the mine, the factory, and the street, is male.¹⁹ In tracing the uneven and changing gendering of Libreville as male and female, this book centers the historiographical and epistemological paradigms of women’s and gender history on urban African history.

WOMEN AND GENDER IN AFRICAN HISTORY

In a landmark 1996 edited volume on urban women in Africa, Kathleen Sheldon wrote, “Women and gender have rarely held center stage in accounts of urban analytic issues.”²⁰ Since then, a number of books have been published on African women in cities. Countering earlier publications that posited African women as “passive rural widows,” historians have demonstrated how women, like their male counterparts, migrated to cities in search of economic opportunities.²¹ Women usually worked on the margins of the colonial wage-labor economy, as beer brewers, sex workers, and hawkers. Focusing primarily on Southern and Eastern Africa and on colonies in which there were large numbers of European settlers, this research has argued that though small in numbers, women shaped the political economies of cities and rural regions from which they originated, as well maintained the social reproduction of African societies.²²

Several decades of research have yielded a commonly accepted chronology of African women’s twentieth-century colonial history as marked by both opportunities and limitations. Dorothy Hodgson and Sheryl McCurdy have argued that the onset of colonial conquest and rule in the early twentieth century “intensified struggles over normative gender relations.” “Wicked women,” women who acted in ways outside the normative ideas of proper female comportment in urban areas across the continent, were at the forefront of historical change.²³ The early colonial period, for the most part, ushered in openings for women of increased autonomy as officials created legal institutions and wrote legislation in attempts to make African societies legible.²⁴ An unintended consequence was that women near European enterprises and colonial administrative centers brought marital disputes before officials, bypassing chiefs, who had been the “traditional” arbiters, and more easily obtained divorces.²⁵

By the 1920s and 1930s, many scholars concur, colonial states and elder African men sought to enact control over women’s labor, marriage options, and mobility by applying new varied regimes of indirect rule. In settler colonies in East and Southern Africa, land alienation and the expansion of male migrant labor fixed women in rural areas under the adjudication of chiefs and newly articulated bodies of customary laws that rigidified the control of senior men over women.²⁶ However, some researchers have countered, women’s status in rural areas was not so bleak, with young men and women contesting the control of senior men.²⁷ Moreover, codification did not evenly occur, nor did it inevitably result in the “crystallization” of senior men’s power over women and junior men.²⁸ Furthermore, scholars have demonstrated that the closing off of town life to women after the 1920s was not so categorical, showing that some women from Nairobi to Harare created niches for economic opportunity and social reproduction.²⁹

During and in the aftermath of World War II, migration to cities increased across the continent, and British and French colonial officials turned their attention to creating a stable urban population composed of African men and women. From the Copperbelt to Harare to Lagos, elite Africans invoked politics of respectability to argue that African town life incorporate married couples and their children into permanent housing.³⁰ After World War II, Africans surged to cities across Africa, even in apartheid South Africa, with redefined pass controls. As colonial officials in settler colonies viewed the presence of African women in towns with less approbation, they sought to encourage monogamous households of wage-earning men and women trained in European domestic arts. In towns such as Harare and Nairobi, an increased number of women circulated through cities, including wives joining their wage-laborer husbands for part of the year in town through “marital migrancy” and individual women working as small-scale traders.³¹

Research on women in West Africa, which included African societies with precolonial urban traditions and fewer European settlements, has demonstrated that restrictions on women’s and girls’ movement in urban areas and socioeconomic mobility were not so unilateral.³² Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian have shown that in 1930s Asante, Ghana women had possibilities for economic autonomy through cash cropping on their own farms, instead of husbands’ farms, in rural frontiers that bordered towns.³³ That some women were able to maintain control over land and cash proceeds facilitated their control over their sexuality and choice in marital status. In spite of the consolidation of indirect rule and the codification of customary law in the 1930s, some customs remained fluid and others rigid, resulting in a “shifting customary terrain” in which men and women reconfigured the meanings of customary marriage law in colonial courts.³⁴ Nevertheless, the dominant paradigm in the literature across East, West, and Southern Africa is that women did decline in economic, social, and legal status in the 1930s as chiefs, elder men, and colonial officials strove to limit their economic autonomy and ability to determine their marital lives and sexuality.

Research in women’s history in Francophone Africa, published in English or French, remains embryonic. In 1997, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch wrote that the history of African women was “almost unrecognized in French historiography.”³⁵ Since then a few edited volumes and essays have indicated some momentum toward this research theme.³⁶ Yet, by 2010, Pascale Barthélémy lamented the “as of yet little tread research path in France on the history of women and gender in Africa.”³⁷

The small body of research on women in French-speaking West and Central Africa has called into question some generalizations in the historiography on colonial Africa. For example, as argued by Frederick Cooper, in the minds of British and French colonial personnel, “the gendering of the African worker [as male] was so profound it was barely discussed.”³⁸ However, as demonstrated by Lisa Lindsay in her research on towns in southwest Nigeria, the ideal of “the male breadwinner” was not normative, but expanded in the 1950s and 1960s amid the debates of Nigerian men, women, colonial government officials, and employers about the intersections of wage labor and family life in an era of rapid change.³⁹ Additionally, Pascale Barthélémy’s book on the twelve hundred–odd women from throughout West Africa who received formal education and diplomas in Dakar as nurses and midwives between 1918 and 1956 demonstrates how African women entered professional and salaried labor.⁴⁰ Thus, the gender of the African worker, of the quintessential town dweller, and of the African city was not always normatively male. The work of Barbara Cooper on Maradi, Niger, and that of Phyllis Martin on Brazzaville, Congo, demonstrated how indelibly women, family life, and men’s and women’s marital aspirations were woven into processes of urban becoming well before the 1930s.⁴¹ Several factors contributed to the greater presence of women in towns in Francophone Africa versus Anglophone Africa. First, urbanism predated the implantation of colonial rule in some regions that became part of French West and Equatorial Africa. Second, the French weren’t as concerned as their British counterparts with impeding women from migrating to towns.⁴² In focusing on the intersections of the sexual economy and wage labor in Libreville, Conjugal Rights demonstrates that how to be male and how to be female were very much in question and shaped the true fabric of urban African life and modes of “urban becoming” in the years of colonial rule.

Conjugal Rights contributes to women’s history, but also seeks to engender central historiographical questions in African studies. In doing so, I follow Allman, Geiger, and Musisi’s call for “foregrounding women as historical actors,” with attention to “women as historical subjects in gendered colonial worlds.”⁴³ Yet I also heed Joan Scott’s critique that “gender” has become synonymous with “women” and her call for scholars to conceptualize gender as changing constructions of what it meant to be male and female.⁴⁴ The historiography of urban colonial Africa has detailed that colonial officials, African chiefs and elite men, and church personnel gendered colonial cities male. Yet this appears to be more ambiguous in Libreville. I trace the processes through which historical actors contested how men and women could occupy and interact with one another in the emerging cityscapes of streets, markets, homes, and rural suburbs. What constituted “feminine” and “masculine,” “public” and “private” space, and who could legitimately occupy such spaces in Libreville was not fixed, but fluid.

Examining the gendered processes of urban becoming in Libreville contributes to an emerging body of research that challenges the idea of patriarchal power and masculinity as monolithic in twentieth-century Africa. Twenty years after Luise White’s call for African history to “gender men,” a small but important number of monographs and articles on men and configurations of masculinity in twentieth-century Africa has demonstrated the contradictory and changing ways in which societies conceived of and performed male gender. Researchers examining gender as something that men have done in changing forms in twentieth-century Africa have focused on the themes of wage labor, generation, and ideas of land ownership, classic themes of African social history.⁴⁵ As argued by Lisa Lindsay in her study of men and wage labor in late colonial southwestern Nigeria, gender is not necessarily something that people have, but something that people do in various ways. Male rail workers in cities such as Lagos and Ibadan navigated practices and ideas of adult masculinity in a context in which men, their family members, employers, and government officials fashioned multiple ideas about how to be “men.”⁴⁶ Stephan Miescher’s work on colonial and postcolonial Ghana has analyzed the interplay of changing notions of masculinity with men’s self-representations and subjective experiences over the course of their life cycles, demonstrating that no single dominant notion of masculinity emerged over a generation that witnessed profound historical change.⁴⁷

In conversation with the emerging literature that genders men, I call into question the category of “men” as a normative social collectivity to outline how differentiation in ethnicity, religious affiliation, wealth, and age resulted in competing practices and ideas of how to be a man. In focusing on both men and women in relation to marriage and sexuality, I show the intersectionalities of intimate matters, political economy, and politics. In Libreville, defining ideas and practices about marriage and sex involved struggles to define masculinity as well as femininity. Conflicts erupted not only between husbands and wives, but also between men competing for rights and access to the same woman, thereby demonstrating the cracks in the patriarchal edifice. Status and generational tension between senior and junior men, men with ready access to cash and those without, and men who had received formal educations in French schools and those who were illiterate reveal the contested and slippery nature of male power.

The gendered history of Libreville reorders our understanding of how urban spaces and selves unfolded in colonial-era Africa. Exploration of these questions in Libreville causes us to rethink some central concepts and time lines of African historiography, both of African urban history and of African gender history. First, let us reconsider the understanding of labor agitation and unions as a watershed in constituting the possibility of permanent urban settlement. As argued by Frederick Cooper, before the wave of strikes by male African workers in the 1930s and 1940s, British and French alike thought of a sociology of Africa that divided its populations into peasants and educated elites and treated everyone else as residual “detribalized Africans” or a “floating population.” Only in the aftermath of this labor agitation did French colonial officials think about “more complex realities in African cities.”⁴⁸ However, the marriage revolt at the mid-nineteenth-century founding of Libreville points to an earlier time in which African men drew attention to the questions of conjugal households, of social and biological reproduction, and of relationships with women as constitutive of lives in town. Libreville’s newest inhabitants claimed that domestic life was part and parcel of urban life, compelling French representatives to perpetually renegotiate the very contours of colonial policy. Furthermore, many Gabonese men of varied ethnicities disavowed agricultural labor in favor of trade as early as the mid-to late nineteenth century. By the 1920s, men from throughout Gabon migrated to work in timber camps or other forms of wage labor, configuring Libreville and the Estuary region as a place of permanent settlement. Entire lineages of men, women, and children moved into the region, and men who settled without wives struggled to marry and build households. Farming became a low-status occupation, one in which women and some men of ethnic groups from Gabon’s interior labored in plots kilometers away from Libreville. Mirroring what Tsuneo Yoshikuni found in 1920s Harare, urban life in Libreville included “dual participation in wage employment and agricultural production,” with some women growing the food that fed the critical mass of wage laborers.⁴⁹ By the mid-1920s, the reality of an Estuary region in which many men were wage laborers, and in which women reached near parity or superseded the number of men, compelled colonial officials, missionaries, and African political leaders to grapple with the question of permanent African settlement in urban areas.

As was the case elsewhere in Africa, the 1930s in Gabon did usher in the attempts of colonial officials and some chiefs to work in concert to limit the autonomy of African women in marriage choices and sexuality. However, the patriarchy-state alliance was not unilateral. The category of “elder African men” in Libreville was differentiated by ethnicity, social and economic status, and individual interests. No single codified version of customary law emerged, but rather multiple articulations. Mirroring the “shifting customary terrain” in post-1930s Ghana, in the Estuary region litigants articulated varied definitions of customary marriage in colonial courts. After World War II, when Libreville experienced increased immigration and expansion, public debates over the male and the female spaces and sexual respectability erupted in the streets and legislative halls.

Some scholars have criticized the emphasis on urban women in African women’s history and the dearth of research on women in rural areas.⁵⁰ However, we have barely begun to scratch the surface of uncovering the complexities of women’s and gender history and urban history in Africa. In recent publications on music, dress and fashion, and sexual politics in late colonial and postcolonial Luanda and Dar es Salaam, Marissa Moorman and Andrew Ivaska, respectively, demonstrate how male and female urbanites constructed their understandings of nation and culture.⁵¹ This body of work has highlighted the improvisational and fluid dynamics of demarcating gender, generation, wealth, and culture in African towns from the 1950s into recent times. We need to further complicate our understanding of gender in African cities in the years of colonialism as well, unpacking the complex processes of social change in African societies, and understanding the multifaceted strategies of men and women for migrating to and creating lives in towns.

SEXUALITY AND AFFECT

In tracing the history of sexuality as imagined and practiced by Gabonese, this book expands an emerging body of research that challenges the dominant paradigm of sexuality in Africa as “other” in comparison to Europe or within the context of research of AIDS.⁵² In challenging this paradigm, historians of sexuality in Africa have focused primarily on two themes: political economy and reproductive rights and circumcision. In her seminal book on prostitution in Nairobi, Luise White has shown that prostitutes and the domestic and sexual services they provided for African men in Nairobi were key to maintaining social reproduction of Kenyan societies under British colonial rule. Women’s cash earnings from their labor maintained rural households, supported migrant men in negotiating harsh and racist labor conditions, and permitted women to purchase property in the city.⁵³ Lynn Thomas has shown how “the politics of the womb,” female excision, pregnancy, birth, and abortion, occupied the center of how Meru women, girls, elder men and young men, and British colonial officials, missionaries, and feminists sought to configure political power and moral order in twentieth-century colonial Kenya.⁵⁴

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?

I heed the arguments and engage the threads of previous works on the history of sexuality in Africa, that sex inherently shapes and is shaped by political economy, that contestations over sexuality were about the contours of generation, gender, and the state, that attention to shifting colonial discourses about African sexualities reveals the fissures of colonial rule, and that colonialism profoundly shaped the landscape of practices and ideas about sexuality. However, analyses of the history of sexuality in Africa have insufficiently considered that sexual expression is also about emotions—such as desire, pleasure, yearning, and pain. I argue for the need to step back from deterministic analyses of sexuality and also analyze the subjective and interpersonal realms in which historical actors engaged in and conceived of sex. Analyzing the varied sexual landscapes and relationships in Libreville and historical actors’ often simultaneous expressions and experiences of the physical, emotional, and pragmatic offers a new window into the changing meanings and praxes of sexualities in African history.

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

By analyzing a multiplicity of ways in which historical actors experienced their heterosexual relationships—as material well-being, deprivation, honor, respectability, desire, violence, pleasure, biological or social reproduction, criminality, legality—I seek to demonstrate the multivalent meanings of sexuality in this urban, West-Central African context. Scholars have debated the definition of sexuality as a unit of analysis, drawing a line between sexuality as ideology (“what ought to be”) and sexuality in behavior (“what was”).⁶⁴ Historical actors in Libreville debated sexuality both as actualized and in discourse. Thus, I combine two definitions to analyze the history of sexuality in Libreville: Michel Foucault’s conception of sexuality as “a field of mobile power relations,” and Robert A. Padgug’s definition of sexuality as “praxis, a group of social relations, of human interactions.”⁶⁵

I did not assume heterosexuality as normative when embarking upon research on the history of sexuality in Gabon. I was attuned to the multidisciplinary literature of queer theory, as well as emerging work on same-sex relationships and desire in African history that has disrupted ideas of heteronormativity.⁶⁶ I mined documentary sources for and asked interviewees about same-sex desire. Informants vehemently denied same-sex desire as manifesting in Gabon; nor could I find traces of homosocial sexualities in colonial reports. I questioned interviewees on the ideas of homosexuality as “un-African” that some expressed. However, I also began to realize that there has been relatively little scholarly attention to the history of heterosexuality in Africa. In tracing the changing practices and meanings of heterosexuality, this book does heed the call of queer theory to call into question the idea that sexual and gender identities are normative.⁶⁷

SOURCES AND METHODS

This book draws on historical, ethnographic, and cultural studies methodologies and text-based and oral source materials. I followed AbdouMaliq Simone’s formulation of “systematic social research” as the path to “immerse myself in various settings under whatever conditions and rubrics were possible” and for “multiple engagements as methodology.”⁶⁸ I have utilized archival sources such as political reports, correspondence, legislation, policy debates, and ethnographies by colonial bureaucrats and military officers, as well as the correspondence of private French citizens with colonial officials and newspaper articles and editorials. Furthermore, the records of French Catholic and American Protestant missionaries are an important body of source materials, particularly for the nineteenth century.

Literary discourse analysis is a useful tool for demystifying the aura of “fact” that surrounds colonial and missionary documents. Literary theorist David Spurr argues that documents of imperial administrations involve some level of representations. Rather than reading colonial documents as only conveying history as it occurred, “scholars should consider these texts as snapshots of how [a] Western writer constructed a coherent representation out of the strange and often incomprehensible (to the writer) realities confronted in the non-Western world.”⁶⁹ This interpretive lens allows the excavation of the anxieties and contradictions of colonial societies.

Though few registers have survived (only for scattered years in the 1930s through the 1950s), civil and criminal colonial court records housed at Gabon’s national archives are a particularly precious body of sources that allow a view into interior recesses of Gabonese households. Customary law, aptly defined by Martin Chanock as the laws and practices recognized by European and African political leaders in the colonial period as “tradition,” has been a crucial theme of African social historical inquiry since the 1980s.⁷⁰ Richard Roberts and Kristin Mann’s 1991 edited volume, Law in Colonial Africa, advocated for the critical use of neglected colonial court cases to illustrate transformations in African social history.⁷¹ Since then, scholars have utilized the records of colonial courts, under the adjudication of Europeans, chiefs, and imams, to trace the transformations in the meanings of marriage, land rights, inheritance, and the end of slavery across Africa.⁷² Court records, however, have their limitations. Court records tend to reify conflict as normative.⁷³ Furthermore, colonial court records may overstate the role of state institutions in people’s daily lives.⁷⁴ Another limitation of court records stems from the question of language and translation. Though deliberations may have taken place in an African language, an African interpreter, with his own interests in presenting particular renderings of the case to a French judge, translates and writes the transcript into French, flattening out the nuances of orality and body language.⁷⁵

Court records, nevertheless, remain an invaluable source material that permits the periodization and analysis of fundamental transformations in marriage and sex in the Estuary region. Contrary to elsewhere in British and French Africa, customary law was not decisively codified in colonial Gabon, and, thus, colonial courts remained an important arena in which litigants reworked legal and social understandings of the law. Colonial court records surviving in the Gabon national archives range from long-form summaries of testimony and biographical information about litigants to one- or two-sentence summaries of the conflict without identification of the litigants. The “option of the judicial path,” as one female defendant phrased it in a 1950 Libreville court case, was an option that many Libreville and Estuary residents strategically sought out to adjucaticate domestic conflict.⁷⁶ Furthermore, the varied expressions of reconciliation, betrayal, disappointment, hope, and possibility that litigants conveyed have provided insight into the interior recesses of households. Courts presided over by chiefs in Estuary villages and Libreville neighborhoods were scattered across the region, and residents petitioned them—often bypassing the authority of elder kin—to attempt to obtain a desired outcome. Furthermore, over the course of the twentieth century, Libreville residents also increasingly brought problems of marital disagreement before French colonial officials, electing “to go before the white man,” often overwhelming the capacity of colonial personnel to hear cases.

I have contextualized court records, framing the interpersonal conflicts presented in testimony with questions of social, cultural, economic, and political changes occurring in the time period. As argued by Sally Falk Moore in her study of customary courts in 1960s and 1970s Tanzania, small-scale “legal events . . . bear the imprints of the complex, large-scale transformations.”⁷⁷ Tracing the dialectical relationships between small-scale legal events in colonial court records and large-scale transformations entails contextualizing court records within broader currents of historical change. Furthermore, I followed the methodology articulated by Richard Roberts in his analysis of court cases in early twentieth-century Mali. Roberts urges researchers to identify the “trouble spots” of conflict that emerge in individual court cases, to illustrate “the detail of these general patterns,” and to track trends in aggregate data.⁷⁸ I mined extant criminal and civil court registries to identify the nature of the conflict that brought people to court. I categorized cases according to the various “trouble spots” of disagreement as articulated by litigants—divorce, adultery, wife-kidnapping, bridewealth, levirate marriage, child custody, and abandonment of the conjugal home. I have analyzed the terms of disagreements, outcomes desired by litigants, and, when available, the decisions of judges to chart transformations in praxes of marriage and sexual relationships.

The analysis of texts written by Gabonese opens a window into the discursive arenas in which elite African men, chiefs, and, on occasion, poor African men employed the French language and writing to claim rights in marriage and sex. Scholars such as Nancy Rose Hunt have critiqued methodologies of Africanist scholarship that emphasize “to Africa for voices, to Europe for texts.”⁷⁹ In this paradigm, historians research European perspectives in archives and create “authentic” African historical records in gathering oral interviews in indigenous languages during fieldwork. In Libreville, French was the lingua franca of Africans, and access to basic education in mission schools meant that literacy in French was a symbol of status that many sought. As such, documents authored by Africans—correspondence to colonial officials, letters to newspapers in other colonies in French Equatorial Africa (FEA) and in France, ethnographies, and proposals of laws and policies—are another important body of source materials for this book.

Other types of documents I had hoped to find in my archival research in Gabon, France, Italy, and the United States proved to be nonexistent. Scholars of African history often navigate significant lacunae in source materials, yet Gabon and all of FEA are particularly challenging. Few oral or written sources exist to document the history of Gabon before the mid-nineteenth century.⁸⁰ The gaps continue into the colonial period. The political, economic, and social dislocation in the period of concessionary rule from 1899 to 1909 has made this period little-documented.⁸¹ Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch summed up the period of 1900 to 1920 as marked by the “poverty of the bibliography,” with little documentary and oral evidence available.⁸² The entire federation of FEA perpetually lacked funding and staffing that would promote systematic record keeping, and scholars refer to Gabon as the “Cinderella” of French Africa.⁸³ Moreover, the entire body of documentary archives of the municipality of Libreville, which may have included police reports, detailed censuses, and the mayor’s reports, has disappeared from the archives in Gabon.⁸⁴ Another potentially rich source of documents, the local records of the two Catholic parishes of Sainte Marie and Sainte Pierre in Libreville, are unavailable to researchers. Documentary records of the Soeurs Bleues in their archives in Rome and Libreville are threadbare. No newspapers were produced in Gabon over the course of about one hundred years of French colonial rule. The postcolonial state of Gabon has been particularly autocratic, with one-man party rule over several decades, resulting in the virtual absence of documentation since 1960 in the national archives. Thus, my research on Gabon focused on creating historical records, in the form of oral histories, as much as mining existing historical sources.

The field of African history was founded on the commitment to use African sources, oral sources, given that few sub-Saharan African societies had written languages, as a means to pursue the accompanying commitment to demonstrate African agency. Yet as researchers began to set the methodological and epistemological parameters of using oral sources, debates about which types of oral sources were empirically sound abounded. Jan Vansina’s publications stood as foundational texts that argued for the validity and accuracy of oral traditions as evidence for the reconstruction of the African past. Vansina specified that oral traditions were spoken, sung, or instrumental renditions of verbal messages originating at least one generation removed from the informant who relayed them. If analyzed according to a set of rules of evidence, history as what really happened could be parsed out from any embellishments or untruths that later generations may have added to the original messages.⁸⁵ Subsequent scholars unearthed the limitations of oral traditions in that they reflected the viewpoint of the powerful in African societies and represented normative accounts of social order.⁸⁶ Historians of colonial Africa turned to oral history, interviews of informants that yielded narratives about events in living memory or a person’s lifetime, to elucidate the histories of the less powerful. Life histories, a particular form of oral history, encompassed an interviewee’s entire life span. Many historians, particularly feminist scholars, publishing research in the 1980s and 1990s, used the words of women, peasants, and other marginalized actors to narrate everyday experiences of colonialism and emphasize African agency.⁸⁷ Oral histories, scholars argued, were “more authentic, and thus more objective than any colonial text could be,” conveying the “truth” of historical experiences.⁸⁸

Yet some scholars urged a more critical methodological and epistemological use of oral histories.⁸⁹ Belinda Bozzoli and Mmantho Nkotsoe, in their analysis of twentieth-century life histories of South Africans, forwarded a multifaceted reading of life histories as “documents, stories, histories, incoherent rumblings, interlinked fragments of consciousness, and conversations and/ or recital of facts,” as well as a “product of the unique formal and informal exchanges between interviewer and interviewee.”⁹⁰ Bozzoli and other scholars have called attention to the asymmetrical relationships of power between informants and interviewers and the need for self-reflexivity in how both parties shaped the content, form, and interpretation of oral history.⁹¹ Perhaps the most trenchant reassessment of oral history came from Luise White, who in a 2004 article described her uncritical use of oral sources in The Comforts of Home as “perhaps the most arrogant defense of oral history ever written” in her assertion of their greater authority and truth compared to other sources.⁹² White’s words of caution call attention to how informants also play an active role in interpreting lives in the context of historical change and the figurative meanings of the accounts people give.

Oral histories are central to this book’s analysis of how sojourners to Libreville lived in and framed their marital and sexual relationships. Between 1999 and 2005, I conducted and recorded about one hundred oral interviews with Gabonese men and women of varied ages and ethnic groups. Informants included individuals born from the late 1920s through the 1960s who lived in Libreville and peri-urban villages located along the Kango-Libreville road, people who made the Estuary region a place of permanent settlement. I conducted some interviews in Mpongwé and Fang languages with the aid of research assistants and translators Thanguy Obame and the late Edidie Nkolo. I conducted other interviews in French without interpreters. I recorded the interviews using directed questions, asking participants specific questions about their marital and conjugal careers, as well as allowing informants to discuss topics of importance to them. I and the men and women I interviewed were aware of my woeful ignorance about Gabon, and my interviewees sought to “school me” in the history of their lifetimes, often pushing back against the questions I asked and the assumptions embedded in them. As a woman, I sometimes faced reticence from male interviewees to talk with me, and, indeed, some men told me they would reveal only so much to me, since “women must not know men’s secrets.” I have changed the names of some of my interviewees per their requests, while others wished to be identified.

In critically utilizing these oral histories, I reject the binary of using oral sources either as history as lived or as representations of the past. Instead, I follow Stephan Miescher in “taking the middle road” by using oral histories to glean both data about the past as well as evidence of interviewees’ conceptions of “how it should or could have been” and “a reflection of the past’s meanings for the present and this reflection of a speaker’s subjectivity.”⁹³ The middle road allows for the uncovering of how the researcher and the interviewee produce history in the questions and conversations that unfold over the course of the interview, as well as the researcher’s contextualization of oral sources with other sources and within broader historical processes. The middle road also heeds calls for critical distance from interviewees’ words to explore how people give meaning to their lives and their places in their worlds. In endeavoring to critically analyze subjectivities in oral histories, I follow Corinne Kratz’s suggestion that historians pay attention to how “narrators combine episodes in sequences based on particular notions of time, social relations, and self.”⁹⁴ Building on Miescher and Katz, I have excavated the sexual and marital careers that narrators present in their interviews, their expectations, joys, and dismay, to analyze how historical actors have attempted to shape normative conceptions of order in their own lives and in relationship to strangers, neighbors, intimate partners, and kin in changing historical contexts.