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PART I

From Atlantic Ocean Trading Post to Colonial Capital City, 1849–1929

PART 1 ANALYZES TRANSFORMATIONS in marriage and sex in Libreville prior to 1930. Chapter 1 explores Libreville’s transformation from a small but strategic hub of Atlantic trade in slaves and forest and imported goods in the mid- to late nineteenth century to a nascent colonial capital city in 1910. I track the gendered dynamics of moving to and setting up homes in the emerging town and how the sexual economy shaped the political economy, legal infrastructures, and geographic layout. Chapter 2 picks up this thread from 1910 to 1929, years in which efforts by the French to consolidate colonial rule and direct the labor of Africans toward the colonial economy and timber production fundamentally altered daily life. I trace the unintended processes of women’s sexual labor in generating cash and other forms of wealth and how worries about the sexual economy compelled transformations in French conceptualizations of customary law and governance. These two chapters set the stage for how the dynamics of conjugal and sexual relations demonstrate cracks in the edifice of colonial rule and spaces for Gabonese to shape the lived realities of urban life in the decades to come.