Читать книгу Conjugal Rights - Rachel Jean-Baptiste - Страница 12

1 Sexual Economy in the Era of Trade and Politics

The Founding of Libreville, 1849–1910

WRITING IN 1975, historian K. David Patterson observed, “The early history of Gabon has received almost no attention from scholars. . . . The whole region of Western Equatorial Africa remains something of a historio-graphical void.”¹ Since Patterson wrote this, less than a handful of publications have filled the historiographical void. A few publications have focused on the period before European contact.² The few publications focusing on the nineteenth century can be characterized as the “trade and politics school,” focusing on the end of the transatlantic slave trade, the exchange of Western and equatorial forest goods, and increasing French ambitions toward colonial rule and African resistance to French attempts at domination as motors of historical change.³ Scholars have argued of marriage and family life as serving normative functions—to allow elder men to maintain political power and social control over women, slaves, and junior men that permitted them to control nodes of transatlantic trade in slaves and goods. Marriage was an important institution through which individuals achieved social adulthood and kin groups formed alliances. What is common in research on the nineteenth century is an absence of an analytical focus on women and gender, an empirical absence that has led to conceptual gaps in our understanding of historical change.

In chronicling how Libreville inhabitants negotiated dynamics of sexual economy over the course of the mid-nineteenth century to 1910, this chapter demonstrates that questions of how marriage was to be consecrated and the forms of socially acceptable sexual relations and gender roles were very much under contestation preceding and at the moment of colonial encounters. As the Estuary region transformed from a precolonial Atlantic Ocean trading port to a fledgling colonial outpost, changing meanings of gender roles in heterosexual relationships shaped infrastructures of town life. The written texts of French military personnel, Catholic proselytizers, multinational traders and men on the spot, American missionaries, and the remembrances of Fang and Mpongwé chiefs that I recorded in oral interviews tend to convey an androcentric perspective. Nevertheless, in these extant sources lie fragments that indicate how contours of changing notions of how to be male and female shaped economic, social, and political life. Marriage was not a normative social system that regularized sexual unions and status of offspring and reinforced patriarchal power. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sexual and conjugal politics within Mpongwé and Fang societies revealed fluidity in determining how individuals and groups exercised power along the axis of gender. By the late nineteenth century, it was common for European traders and Mpongwé women to engage in relationships of longterm concubinage, often sealed with a bridewealth bundle of goods or cash payments from the European companion. An Mpongwé moral economy dictated the terms of interracial sex and incorporated European men into shifting conceptualizations of respectable female sexuality, bridewealth, and marriage.

Conjugal-sexual politics were central to how African communities and the French converged and diverged to build the town and their lives in these decades. Libreville had a relatively equal gender ratio from the time of its founding due to a combination of local and external factors. First, African households—men, women, and children, free and slave—already inhabited the space that later became the administrative center of the colony. As brokers of the lucrative transatlantic trade that began in the late fifteenth century, the Mpongwé served as middlemen between Europeans and interior African societies. Second, French imperial expansion in the 1840s and 1850s intersected with waves of African communities—who originated north of Gabon’s modern-day borders—as they migrated toward the coast. Fang households that included men and women appeared near the Estuary in the 1840s. These new arrivals were to become the Estuary Fang, a group that would develop ways of life distinct from those of other members of their ethnolinguistic group in the interior. Third, the demographic fragility and sparse population density of the equatorial region meant that French state officials, missionaries, and private citizens were often eager to attract African populations, men and women alike, toward Libreville and other centers of colonial economic production.

The founding of Libreville and French efforts toward colonial rule created and intersected with a period of uncertainty, migration, and socioeconomic change within Gabon. Three historical turning points transformed the region: (1) the first of a series of treaties signed by Mpongwé political leaders in 1839 that ceded territory to the French and paved the way for French colonial rule and the “founding” of the town in 1849; (2) the parceling out of surrounding regions into concessionary control in 1898; and (3) the incorporation of the coastal town and interior regions into the more centralized colonial rule of French Equatorial Africa in 1910. Such political and economic changes were intimately tied to questions of the domestic lives of its inhabitants. As African and European strangers circulated through nineteenth-century Libreville, men and women strategized over how to ensure security, and weather the fluctuations of trade and politics, in formulating and reformulating their relationships with each other.

MPONGWÉ BEGINNINGS: THE GENDERED POLITICS OF SOCIETY, TRADE, AND EUROPEAN-AFRICAN ENCOUNTERS, 1600S TO 1840S

The equatorial climate and the environment—dense rain forests, lakes, rivers, and mountains—shaped the lives and livelihoods of Estuary inhabitants. Rain and humidity characterize the climate for most of the year, with seven to eight months of high humidity. The average temperature in a calendar year is twenty-six degrees Celsius. There are two rainy seasons, which result in rainfall for most of the year, with the longer season extending from January to May and the shorter one from September to December. In a normal season, about 2.5 meters of rain fall per year.⁴ There are two dry seasons, the longer one during the period of May to September and a short dry season from December to January. Several types of topography mark Gabon. In the east, there is a small savannah region. A mountainous region extends north and to the west of Libreville across the center of Gabon and includes elevations up to eight hundred meters in the Monts de Cristal and Massif du Chaillu (named by European explorers in the nineteenth century). As far as three hundred kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean, the coastal plains are covered by dense rain forest, with trees as tall as twenty-sixty meters.⁵ Rain forest is the dominant geographical feature, and it encompasses two-thirds of the region. Swampy regions next to the forested regions of the coast present an area of mangrove. The presence of tsetse flies and outbreaks of trypanosomiasis limit the possibilities of animal husbandry and the upkeep of many types of cattle. A French sociologist described Gabon as “a country of water.”⁶ A total of thirty-five hundred kilometers of rivers offer transportation routes, the longest of which is the Ogooué River at one thousand kilometers. These rivers provided transportation arteries foundational to economic transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lakes and lagoons dot the country, particularly in the Moyen-Ogooué.⁷ Bounded by one thousand meters of the Atlantic Ocean along the south, a series of estuaries provide shelter. The northern coast, between the Bay of Rio Muni and the Fernan Vaz Lagoon, harbors one such estuary that became the site of Libreville.⁸ Fed by the Como River, the Gabon Estuary is sixty-four kilometers long and fourteen kilometers wide at its mouth. It was this area, in mangroves surrounded by forests, that the Mpongwé would settle and that would come to be called the Estuary region. Europeans came to consider the Gabon Estuary “one of the best natural harbors on the coast of West Africa” after it was reached by the Portuguese in the 1470s.⁹ It was this factor that contributed to the increased convergence of varied African and European communities in the Estuary in the nineteenth century and the founding of Libreville.

Most of present-day Gabon’s fifty-two ethnic groups are of Bantu origins. By the seventeenth century, peoples of the Myènè ethnolinguistic group inhabited the northern and southern Gabon coasts.¹⁰ It is not possible to determine a precise chronology of their migrations and settlements, but scholars date their movements toward the coast between 1600 and 1800.¹¹ The Myènè were composed of Orungu, Nkomi, Galoa, Enenga, and Adyumba matrilineal ethnic groups who concentrated along the Ogooué River in southern Gabon. The patrilineal Mpongwé concentrated along the right and left banks of the Gabon Estuary.¹² By the nineteenth century, Mpongwé clans were concentrated into approximately three politically dominant clans and fourteen less important ones.¹³

Mpongwé communities prospered from Atlantic Ocean trade in goods over the course of three centuries. Between the 1500s and 1600s, the Mpongwé received cloth and products made of iron, such as nails, knives, and axes, from Portuguese and Dutch traders in exchange for ivory, honey, and beeswax that they procured from African societies who lived farther inland. From the sixteenth century onward, the Estuary was a crucial docking station for Portuguese and other European ships that needed to restock food and water and undergo repairs as they headed to or from the former Loango and Kongo kingdoms for trade.¹⁴ The Sékiani, who inhabited the area just beyond the Gabon River, and the Bakalai, who settled farther inland, encircled the Mpongwé. Until the Fang eclipsed them in the late nineteenth century, the Mpongwé represented the largest concentration of an African population in the Estuary region. The map below indicates the peopling of the Estuary circa the late nineteenth century, with several Mpongwé clans along the Estuary and the Fang in the Estuary’s interior.

MAP 1.1. Mpongwé Settlement in the Gabon Estuary, Mid-Nineteenth Century. (Reproduced from André Raponda-Walker, Notes d’histoire du Gabon, with authorization from the Fondation Raponda-Walker pour la Science et la Culture.)

Early to mid-nineteenth-century Mpongwé were organized around several commercially, politically, and socially connected yet independent settlements. The political organization was composed of extended kin groups, among which “big men” emerged; these male leaders exerted a sphere of influence over a given geographic locale.¹⁵ The basic unit of Mpongwé communities was a household headed by a male (nago), his wives and children, his sons, his sons’ wives and their children, and other dependents. Several households combined into a clan, headed by the senior patriarch (oga), in which members followed exogamy. A few of the most powerful clan leaders or “kings” (oga w’inongo) exercised a degree of influence over several clans in a given region.¹⁶ The most powerful clan heads, among which an oga was chosen, were also often affluent traders.¹⁷ By the mid-nineteenth century, there were four principal Mpongwé political units, headed by “kings” Glass, Denis, Georges, and Quaben. European observers referred to each kingdom by the name of its king. Though European observers mistook the oga of an Mpongwé settlement as a centralized figure of authority, in reality, political, social, and economic power was decentralized.¹⁸

The period between 1698 and 1818 was an era of political change along the southern and northern coasts. Internecine wars took place between numerous clans, and gradual resettlement took place when newly arrived clans displaced those already settled. This period also witnessed efforts by powerful Orungu and Mpongwé oga to consolidate their power. Individual heads of household maintained their own spheres of influence and engaged in commercial activities with other African communities and Europeans without deferring to the ogas. By the 1880s, European observers estimated the Mpongwé population at between three and six thousand free inhabitants and slaves, men, women, and children.¹⁹ The slave population ranged from one-third to one-half of the total population of Mpongwé villages. Nearly all households had at least one slave, and the wealthiest households had one hundred or more slaves.²⁰

The expansion of the transatlantic trade in forest goods and slaves—which began in the 1500s and reached its height from 1815 to 1840 in the period of clandestine trade after many European nations had declared the slave trade illegal—profoundly altered Mpongwé societies.²¹ By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Mpongwé and other littoral Myènè societies had established themselves as middlemen to facilitate the trade of rubber, ivory, and slaves from interior peoples with European and American customers. It was the neighboring region of Loango that dominated the trade in slaves for this region of West-Central Africa, but Mpongwé middlemen trafficked in a smaller volume of slaves.²² In 1788, the Estuary region and Cape Lopez, farther south along the Atlantic Ocean, exported 500 slaves, as compared to the 13,500 slaves leaving the coasts of Loango and Kongo. Following the legal decrees of some European countries to abolish the slave trade in the early nineteenth century, lesser-known and more clandestine trading ports off the Estuary expanded their slave-trading enterprises, but continued to be eclipsed by the volume of slaves emerging from Cape Lopez. Between 1815 and 1850, estimates are that a few thousand slaves were exported from both the Estuary and Cape Lopez. Estimates of the annual demographic loss due to slave exports within Gabon range from 1 to 4 percent.²³ European goods sought by Mpongwé included cloth, manufactured clothing, alcohol, metal objects, and weapons.

Europeans traveling in Gabon in the mid-1850s described Mpongwé traders as accomplished middlemen, enabling the transfer of goods from the inland to the coast through specialized trading networks based on the “trust” system.²⁴ Dutch, American, British, and French traders competed to profit from the trade as each nation sought to monopolize the commercial exchange along the coast. Over the course of the nineteenth century, wood and ivory were also among the products that Mpongwé traded to Europeans. It was common for an Mpongwé trader to speak French, Portuguese, and English; and skill in trade was “the epitome of manhood,” argues Henry Bucher.²⁵ The Mpongwé affluent traders who had slaves and access to a large volume of goods from upriver societies were differentiated from the more numerous petty traders, who sold agricultural goods and fish to European ships and who worked as porters and provided other types of labor in expeditions.²⁶ By virtue of their geographical proximity to the Ogooué region, the most extensive slave-trading community in Gabon consisted of the Mpongwé on the left bank of the Estuary. Rivers connecting inland locations to the coast acted as highways, with a particular ethnic group specializing in and facilitating the transfer of specific goods from one branch of a river to another and extracting their commission. Mpongwé served as middlemen between African communities and Europeans, exclusively in control of direct trade with European representatives.²⁷

The increase in trade as the primary economic activity of Mpongwé men, particularly young men, altered their roles within their communities.²⁸ As more Mpongwé men turned toward trade as their primary economic activity in the nineteenth century, their contributions to agricultural production and community labor decreased and the numbers of slaves increased.²⁹ Some free men continued to clear the fields during the dry season, while women and slaves planted, cultivated, and harvested plantations located several kilometers from the towns.³⁰ Crops included indigenous and imported produce such as cassava, plantains, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, and beans cultivated for subsistence and trade with local communities. Mpongwé also maintained small livestock such as goats and chickens, and men hunted and fished to add to their diets.³¹ Historian K. David Patterson suggests that by the early nineteenth-century Mpongwé societies had achieved a prosperous way of life.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the region that was to become Libreville was cosmopolitan. The Mpongwé viewed their societies as superior to surrounding African communities due to their wealth in imported goods, their knowledge of white languages and cultures, and access to formal education. Americans established a Protestant mission in 1842, under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, in the area of King Glass that was also the center of German, American, and British commercial activity. Within two years the Catholic French Spiritan Fathers constructed the Saint Mary mission in the region of King Louis, and the Soeurs Bleues arrived to work with Gabonese women. Both missions included houses of worship and small medical dispensaries. Beginning in 1844, French missionaries operated a primary school, to which Mpongwé political leaders sent their sons for basic education in the French language and math. In 1850, the Soeurs Bleues opened a school for Mpongwé girls. Though families sent more sons than daughters to missionary schools, the daughters of wealthy families attended school. Nuns administered courses in the French language and domestic arts in addition to directing the girls’ labor in growing manioc and other food staples to feed the mission. American Protestants also opened a school and taught in English in the village of Baraka. Protestant and Catholic missionaries struggled with each other to convert Libreville residents toward their respective faiths. By the end of the nineteenth century, a small group of literate elite—nearly all men, but including some women—Mpongwé existed.³² That some Mpongwé women also received formal education in the mid- to late nineteenth century would set a precedent for girls of future generations to attend school and for the subsequent unfolding of renegotiations of gender, political influence, and wealth.

Women played key roles in constituting wealth and power in Mpongwé societies. There is no evidence that women held formal political roles or were active traders. However, women’s agricultural production was crucial to the sustenance of Mpongwé communities and the increased numbers of foreigners living along the coast, as they were the primary farmers of manioc and other produce on plots located several kilometers from villages.³³ In more affluent households, nonslave women removed themselves from farming, labor undertaken by women of lower status and male and female slaves.³⁴

Access to European goods was an indication of elite social status and wealth, but power in mid- to late nineteenth-century Equatorial Africa also depended on a person’s wealth in people, including slaves and other dependents, but particularly in wives, both slave and free.³⁵ As outlined by Jan Vansina, in the political tradition of big men in West-Central Africa, to acquire honor and to become rich required having many wives.³⁶ Marriage, which was a crucial yet contested practice for nineteenth-century Mpongwé societies, established reciprocal obligations of assistance and networks of allies among affines that household heads could tap into for the purpose of strengthening social, commercial, and political status.³⁷ Since marriage conferred adult status, single men and women remained rare. An Mpongwé man seeking to crystallize alliances with a more powerful man could offer him a female dependent as a wife.³⁸ By the age of three or four, and sometimes at birth, some girls were already betrothed.³⁹ Prepubescent brides lived in their husbands’ households, where they assisted and were raised by the mothers or senior wives of their husbands. Mothers could also play a key role in selecting their daughters’ husbands. For women married at or after the age of puberty, some sources relay that the bride’s consent was necessary, while other sources indicate that a father could marry his daughter with or without her consent.⁴⁰ A woman was at liberty to engage in sexual relations with chosen suitors until her family had entered into a marriage agreement for her and she left her birth family to live in her husband’s household.

Contrary to functionalist interpretations of nineteenth-century marriage—the “trade and politics” paradigm that focuses on the “customary” use-value of sexual access to women—gender roles and sexual relationships were negotiated and renegotiated in the context of dynamic lived experiences.⁴¹ Prior to the nineteenth century, marriage between Mpongwé took place by the exchange of women (mipenda) between two clan groups or by the groom’s family remitting bridewealth consisting of iron bars (ikwèliki). But by the mid-nineteenth century, marriage by bridewealth was more prevalent than marriage by exchange and consisted almost entirely of imported goods. The incorporation of imported goods into bridewealth changed the universal attainability of marriage.⁴² Bridewealth costs increased along the Gabon coast. Thus, heads of households could expand their wealth in goods in addition to their wealth in people through the marriage of female dependents. Bridewealth negotiations were a man’s domain, and representatives from both parties debated the amount to be remitted based on the age, physical appearance, and work habits of the bride-to-be.⁴³ European observers recorded bridewealth transactions as including items such as liquor, guns, ammunition, knives, tobacco, china, cutlery, and European clothing, with a total value of 100–300 francs.⁴⁴ It is challenging to quantify what 100 francs was worth in the late nineteenth century, yet missionaries indicated that the amount was an astronomical sum that took a man many years to amass. Additionally, an Mpongwé fiancé had to furnish his bride with a dwelling and two years’ worth of cloth.⁴⁵ Escalating bridewealth costs meant that some Mpongwé men delayed marriage well beyond postpuberty rites until they could collect enough goods.⁴⁶

Marital ties could be tenuous. Husbands did not appear to exercise absolute power over their wives, nor was it certain that marriage severed ties between a woman and her family of origin. The most frequent node of conjugal conflict was adultery, defined as the act of a married woman engaging in extramarital sex without her husband’s authorization.⁴⁷ A wife’s adultery could result in corporal punishment and public shaming. Armed conflicts between groups of Mpongwé men from different villages were often sparked by a dispute between two men over who had rights to a specific woman.⁴⁸ Married men could have lovers other than their wives with social and legal impunity. By all accounts, divorce occurred frequently. Either husbands or wives could initiate divorce proceedings, but wives did so more often.⁴⁹ A husband could repudiate his wife or demand a divorce if she failed to produce offspring or if she was too infirm to perform domestic tasks.⁵⁰

Male and female kin and elder men assessed and made the final judgment on the validity of women’s requests for divorce, thereby maintaining elders’ social control over women’s maneuverability in dissolving their marriages. A woman seeking to depart from her marriage would often take refuge with her family of origin to air her grievances and request a divorce.⁵¹ Her husband would then approach her father or male guardian and request her return. If the woman’s kin conceded, the husband would pay her father a penalty, usually in bottles of alcohol, to make amends for ill treatment.⁵² If the woman’s kin agreed to consider divorce, they convened a public discussion, presided over by clan elders, in which the husband and the wife’s male representatives could both make their cases.⁵³

Justifiable grounds for a divorce appeared to include the indication of ill-treatment between spouses or a physical ailment that hampered biological reproduction. Elders seem to have granted a divorce if a husband’s drunkenness or physical abuse was excessive, and, following this decision, the husband and the wife’s male kin debated over the reimbursement of bridewealth. At stake were both the reimbursement of goods and the custody of children. In cases in which the husband had not yet paid bridewealth, the woman’s family retained custody of children born during their cohabitation. The reimbursement of bridewealth was not absolute. Under certain conditions, women’s kin did not have to reimburse the bridewealth; for example, if children born during the marriage were to remain in the husband’s custody or if the husband was found at fault for ill-treatment of his wife.⁵⁴ If a man’s impotence was the grounds for divorce, then reimbursement by a woman’s family was not necessary. If the elders judged that a man had repudiated his wife without cause, not only was her family exempt from reimbursing bridewealth, but they also retained custody of her children.⁵⁵

With their husbands’ approval, married women could have sexual relationships with men other than their husbands, and these extramarital sexual encounters were not considered to be adultery. In nineteenth-century Mpongwé societies, men could accord to male visitors sexual access to Mpongwé women—their wives, slaves, and daughters—as a gesture of hospitality, in exchange for compensation, and to solidify commercial and political alliances.⁵⁶ While doing fieldwork in Gabon in 2001, I asked Mpongwé chiefs—individuals who self-identified as being knowledgeable about customs “before the time of the white man,” which the Gabonese call the years prior to French rule—about these practices. Joseph Lasseny Ntchoveré, an Mpongwé chief, elaborated, “These were old systems which existed. Sometimes it occurred for security reasons, sometimes when one arrives at a friend’s home in a foreign land, to avoid you having to go elsewhere, he would allow you to go with his wife, to ensure your well-being.”⁵⁷ Husbands could also recognize a wife’s lover as her legal lover (nokndyè) on the condition that the lover remitted the agreed-upon compensation to the husband.⁵⁸ These occurrences of married women engaging in extramarital sex with impunity could occur only if the husband granted permission. Husbands sanctioned their wives’ extramarital sex within the context that the husband chose the lover and that the relationship would benefit his own material wealth or cultivate political or economic alliances.

Sexual and domestic relationships between Mpongwé women and white men of varied nationalities shaped sociality, economics, and politics in precolonial Gabon. Mpongwé women of varied statuses played a crucial role in facilitating the transatlantic trade via short- and long-term sexual-domestic relationships with European men. Historian Owen White argued that European men sought out “African women as companions from the earliest days of their presence” in Africa.⁵⁹ Yet African societies in Libreville also negotiated and benefited from interracial relationships. As African and European communities encountered each other along the coast, the Mpongwé adapted conjugal-sexual practices to incorporate interracial unions, and European men seeking partnerships with African women adapted to these conditions. As early as the 1600s, European traders docking in Gabon noted the commonplace occurrence of women from Mpongwé societies, who could have been slaves or other low-status women, boarding European vessels to engage in sex in exchange for goods.⁶⁰ Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European visitors recorded that Mpongwé traders would offer wives, likely slave wives, as pawns to European traders for receiving a cargo of imported goods. European traders could have sexual access to female pawns until Mpongwé traders returned with the amount of forest goods that they had agreed to furnish in exchange for the European goods.⁶¹

By the late nineteenth century, it was common for European traders and Mpongwé women to engage in long-term relationships, often sealed with a bridewealth bundle of goods or a cash payment from the European companion. Unlike previous centuries in which Mpongwé women in relationships with European men were often low-status women, women in interracial relationships in the nineteenth century were often the daughters of elite families. Some Mpongwé and Europeans alike referred to these relationships as marriages.⁶² European merchants trading along the coast could meet the bridewealth requests of Mpongwé households more readily than Mpongwé suitors. In Lambaréné, a European suitor might remit 600 francs’ worth of cloth, guns, and alcohol to an Mpongwé companion’s family.⁶³ Alternatively, European men in Libreville might have given anywhere from 15 to 25 francs per month to their Mpongwé wives, who would then transfer the money to their Mpongwé fathers or uncles.⁶⁴

An Mpongwé moral economy dictated the terms of interracial sex and incorporated European men into normative conceptions of respectable female sexuality, bridewealth, and marriage. Moreover, the circulation of and sexual access to women solidified Mpongwé men’s commercial and political alliances. European traders with Mpongwé wives held an advantage over those who were not married to an Mpongwé woman, as their marriages indicated acceptance into the “trust system” of trade along Gabon’s coasts.⁶⁵ Interracial unions also consisted of short-term and episodic sexual relationships. Interracial sexual interactions were so commonplace in the Estuary region in the nineteenth century that missionaries referred to the area as “the Black Babylon.”⁶⁶ French nuns groused in an 1860 report that not only did the roles of Mpongwé men change within the context of increased attention to trade, but a “certain emancipation modified in turn the Gabonese woman. Sly and prideful the gabonaise, used as a mistress by Europeans soon imposed on her male congeners the demands of her coquettishness, her nonchalance, and degradation.”⁶⁷ It cannot be said that Mpongwé women voluntarily entered into intimate relationships with European men, in the same way that it cannot be said that marriage and sexual relationships between Mpongwé men and women did not involve some level of coercion. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Senegal, black and mixed-race women, often referred to as signares, who engaged in relationships with European merchants were able to amass wealth in property and slaves.⁶⁸ Unlike the signares, there is little indication that Mpongwé women involved in interracial unions established independent homes, trading networks, or amassed immense wealth.⁶⁹ As subsequent chapters will show, interracial domestic and sexual relationships between Mpongwé women and white men would continue to occur into the twentieth century, with some women accumulating independent wealth that would disrupt gender and generational hierarchies within Mpongwé communities.

Yet, to return to the story of Libreville in the nineteenth century, the mid-nineteenth century signaled a period of social dislocation, epidemic disease, economic change, and political flux along the coast in the Estuary region. It appears that by the 1840s the Mpongwé population had precipitously decreased. David Patterson cautions that demographic estimates for this period may reflect inaccuracies but indicates that it is probable that Mpongwé settlements experienced as much as a 50 percent decline in population between 1840 and 1860.⁷⁰ A series of smallpox and other disease epidemics undoubtedly caused many deaths. Yet, downplaying factors such as these, European observers attributed the population decline to alcohol consumption, abortion, and venereal diseases that spread through polygyny and the prostitution of Mpongwé women. French Catholic observers portrayed the Mpongwé as “drunken, promiscuous, dishonest, and effete, a people obsessed with the lure of trade wealth and willing to do almost anything for a profit,” whose degeneration was due to their adoption of the vices of European civilization.⁷¹ The Estuary region also experienced a decline in trading fortunes. By the turn of the century, Cape Lopez supplanted it as the principal port of commercial activity, and new commercial centers such as Lambaréné emerged as European fortune seekers followed new nodes of trade upcountry and sought to bypass Mpongwé middlemen. A series of nuanced localized and regional historical processes set in motion a movement of persons toward the coast. These demographic shifts—the presence of new arrivals and the lessening numbers of Mpongwé residents—facilitated the gradual but not inevitable transition to colonial rule.

MIGRATION, MARRIAGE AND GENDER, AND THE TRANSITING TO COLONIAL RULE, 1840S–1899

As Mpongwé and Europeans converged along the coast, the migration of the Fang toward the Estuary was a phenomenon that would alter the social, political, and economic landscape of the region. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the demographic and ethnic makeup of the Estuary region began to be reordered, as were commercial networks and exchanges.⁷² How and why Fang groups migrated has been a topic of scholarly debate, yet most scholars agree that Fang migration commenced from the region of modern-day Cameroon.⁷³ Fang clans migrated along the Woleu and N’Tem Rivers, down the Ogooué, and into the Gabon Estuary.⁷⁴ Fang men who had previously hunted or procured forest goods that they transferred to Myènè middlemen now sought direct access to European traders. By the 1830s, the Fang appeared in the hinterlands of the Estuary region, near the Como River. Mpongwé kings, in turn, sought to protect their monopoly over direct access to European traders and consolidate their sphere of influence over smaller Mpongwé communities. Simultaneously, the French sought to overturn the dominance of British and German traders along the Gabon coast. Seeking to protect Mpongwé trading interests, King Denis signed a treaty in 1839 that granted the right to the French to construct “all buildings and fortifications” deemed necessary.⁷⁵ In 1843, King Louis also signed a treaty of alliance with the French that permitted the establishment of a naval post on the Estuary’s right bank, paving the way for inland movement of French military personnel, traders, and missionaries.⁷⁶ Even as the French declared the name of Libreville in 1849, varied African and European parties jockeyed for ascendancy over lucrative trade and political power.

The aspirations of Fang and European traders to bypass Mpongwé middlemen and directly engage in commercial exchanges eroded the Mpongwé monopoly as trade brokers. By 1853, French adventurer Compiègne reported that Fang scouts had arrived at the coast; in 1857, an American missionary reported that Fang had erected housing settlements on the Como River.⁷⁷ European observers estimated the numbers of Fang who migrated over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century to be in the tens of thousands, but this was an exaggeration. Historians think the number was a maximum of a few thousand. French naval officers directed their aspirations for the imagined economic productivity of the nascent colony toward attracting Fang to locate villages near French posts and harnessing Fang labor. By the 1870s, European trading houses set up factories along inland fluvial systems, particularly along the Ogooué River, which facilitated the direct exchange of European and forest goods with Fang and other procurers. Many Mpongwé men now worked as managers of European factories that dotted the Ogooué or as traders who obtained European goods from the coast on credit and traveled inland to sell the goods in exchange for forest products.⁷⁸ Libreville became the center of trade, where multinational trading houses set up their headquarters, and where the French set up a fledgling government in an attempt to wrest control over the heterogeneous collection of Africans and Europeans who circulated through the region. Residents of Fang villages located near Libreville engaged in limited day-today interaction with Europeans and often battled in violent skirmishes with French officials and Senegalese militia well into the early decades of the twentieth century.

The intersectionalities of marriage and economic production of newly arriving Fang communities also indelibly shaped the fabric of Libreville’s founding. The decentralization of political power, spatial dispersal of clans, and the mobility of villages were defining aspects of late nineteenth-century Fang sociopolitical organization.⁷⁹ The basic social, religious, military, and economic unit of Fang societies was a family unit called the nda bôt.⁸⁰ It included the founding patriarch, referred to as the ésa, his elderly relatives, his wives and children, his younger brothers, and his unmarried sisters and their illegitimate children. Each nda bôt was a self-sustaining economic and political unit, and members recognized only the authority of the ésa or other designated male leader.⁸¹ Each nda bôt claimed membership to a clan (ayon) in which members shared a male ancestor. The ésa exercised ultimate authority and arbitrated conflicts between those who belonged in his nda bôt, though external arbiters could settle interclan conflicts. Affiliation with a clan did not entail territorial or political centralization, but exogamy was observed among members of the same ayon in the maternal and paternal lines.⁸² Several nda bôt might inhabit a common geographical location that formed a village (nlam).

Among the ésa in a given village a leader would emerge, but there is no Fang term for a person who held permanent political power. “Chiefs” of given villages held temporary centralized power for purposes such as leading a group in war or to represent their interests in political or trade negotiations; another man could always assume leadership.⁸³ Key factors that determined which men would be selected as leaders were their oratory skills and wealth in people. Thus, the chief was often the person who was referred to as the rich man (kouma) or the orator (nzôé) in his community.⁸⁴

Labor in the small and readily mobile Fang settlements was divided along gender lines. Mobile kin groups searched for fertile land, following the paths of elephants and hunting trails, and by the beginning of the mid-nineteenth century, sought direct access to European traders and bypassed Mpongwé middlemen. When the soil was exhausted, an entire village would relocate, a practice that resulted in only five to ten years being spent in a given location.⁸⁵ Once a clan decided upon a part of the forest to inhabit, during the dry season the men would clear the area of forest growth with machetes to make it habitable and agriculturally productive. Men were also responsible for defending the settlement, building the foundations of huts, doing the hunting, and, according to areas of specialization, forging iron or maintaining small livestock such as pigs and goats.⁸⁶ Fang men who lived near the Estuary and Ogooué regions traded ivory and rubber with European traders for guns, cloth, metal objects, and beads.⁸⁷ Women labored in shifting subsistence agriculture as they planted, maintained, and cultivated bananas, corn, peanuts, and the staple of manioc during the rainy seasons in plots located within walking distance from homesteads. Women might also maintain smaller gardens next to their homes in which they grew items such as tomatoes, yams, and eggplants.⁸⁸ By the 1890s, Fang were the primary producers of food for the Estuary region as fewer Mpongwé farmed. Fang women carried baskets of manioc and plantains to sell in Libreville. Written sources mention nothing about the distribution of income in Fang households from the sale of produce. Historian Jeremy Rich conducted oral interviews in 2000 with Fang male informants who relayed that wives had to give all proceeds to their husbands, yet he doubts the veracity of these claims as they may reflect contemporary gender tensions over control of wealth. ⁸⁹ Women also fished and assisted in the construction of homes by using branches to cover huts built by their husbands. The Fang did not employ domestic slavery nor directly participate in the transatlantic slave trade, although they did sell war captives, criminals, and debtors to traders of other ethnolanguage groups.⁹⁰

It is challenging to portray the interior architecture of Estuary Fang households of the nineteenth century and the transformations in domestic politics given the limited availability of firsthand accounts. As with the Mpongwé, it appears that the transference of women in marriage facilitated commercial and political alliances between Fang men and households and between the Fang and other African communities. Marriage (aluk) among Fang was to be negotiated by male kin of the bride and groom. A woman would leave her family of origin to live with her husband once he had made a good-faith deposit on the agreed-upon bridewealth (nsua bikeng), but this marriage was only provisionary until he paid the entire amount. Nsua bikeng literally means “bridewealth of iron”; the payment of bikwela (ekwala in the singular), about four pieces of iron held together, was the standard payment prior to the incorporation of European goods into bridewealth in the late nineteenth century.⁹¹ This particular form of iron was not used for purposes other than a marriage payment. Gabonese historian A. Nguema Allogo underlines the value of iron for its rarity and that it symbolized the cohesion of two families joined by marriage, given that it could be procured only from collective labor.⁹² Prior to the transference of bridewealth, a woman could engage in sexual relations with men of her choosing. Marriage conferred adulthood. A man older than sixteen years old who remained single was called a nkoé, a pejorative term meaning a boy.⁹³ Marriage transferred rights over a woman’s labor, sexual access, and reproductive capacities to the husband’s kin group, and through the practice of levirate, could become the wife of another man in her husband’s family should he pass away. As with the Mpongwé, a Fang husband could authorize sexual access to his wife to another man—including a guest in his home, a neighbor with whom he hoped to establish a promise of mutual aid by exchanging wives for a period of time, or an unmarried man in the village—in exchange for some form of compensation.⁹⁴ As with the Mpongwé, a girl could be betrothed as early as infancy, though it was not usually until the age of seven or eight that she left her paternal house to become a part of her husband’s household. Given the sex-segregated living quarters of Fang compounds (abeng), the child bride resided in the quarters with other women in the household. Expected practice was that a husband would not begin to have sexual relations with his young wife until after she had reached her first menstrual cycle (ivoum).

Though fathers had the final authority in contracting marriages, there was a variety of ways in which daughters and sons could influence or subvert their decisions. Sometimes a father submitted to his daughter’s wishes if she refused a suitor.⁹⁵ Though a father usually selected a son’s bride, a young man might approach his father and request a specific bride. Also, a young woman and man could undermine patriarchal authority through the practice of marriage by kidnapping (abom). The suitor would “kidnap” the woman, and her father or male guardian would then have to accept the bridewealth.⁹⁶ Having many wives and children represented wealth, but few men could obtain this status. It was mainly “chiefs” who had “harems” of five to twenty wives, as noted by European observers in the 1870s.⁹⁷ In fact, increased bridewealth expenses over the course of the nineteenth century made it difficult for many men to marry at all.

Escalating bridewealth expenses not only made it difficult for younger men to marry but also resulted in conflict between households if a husband proved unable to complete bridewealth payments after his wife had moved in with him. As was occurring in Mpongwé communities, imported goods displaced iron in the composition of bridewealth among Fang over the course of the nineteenth century. Moreover, bridewealth amounts among the Fang exceeded bridewealth costs in Mpongwé communities. For example, an 1875 bridewealth list for a Fang marriage in the Gabon Estuary consisted of one or two pieces of ivory, two or three goats or sheep, three or four baskets of spears, small Fang knives, small bars of iron, and indigenous salt, worth about 500 francs.⁹⁸ Bridewealth might also include likis, currency made of iron that circulated among only the Fang. For better-off Fang communities who resided near trade factories or missions, bridewealth was composed mainly of imported goods valued at around 770 francs.⁹⁹ Bridewealth payments could also include salt, cloth, tobacco, and gunpowder. Given the paucity of data about the costs of such goods, it is difficult to ascertain how much value this would hold if adjusted for inflation. However, commentary by European observers relays that Fang marriage payments of the era represented an enormous sum that would take young men years of labor in collecting rubber, ivory, or wood to exchange for the imported goods to compose bridewealth. Some armed skirmishes that broke out between villages near Libreville were the result of unpaid bridewealth. The wife’s kin would attempt to kidnap her or an unmarried woman from the son-in-law’s village as compensation if a husband defaulted on promised bridewealth. A French colonial administrator named Largeau recounted a particular outbreak of violence that resulted in fatalities among inhabitants of clashing villages in the 1890s. A husband had not completed the promised bridewealth ten years after his marriage. His wife was a prepubescent girl for whom an exorbitant bridewealth list had been demanded: 100 spears, 100 war knives, 50 trade knives, 20 mirrors, 30 small trade trunks, 3,000 iron links, 50 trade guns, 50 small barrels of gunpowder, 4 iron barrel covers, 40 earthen pots, 300 trade plates, 1 large canoe, 10 goats, 4 straw hats, 3 white trade shirts, 30 bunches of tobacco, 10 pieces of trade cloth, 12 bottles of liquor, and 4 dogs.¹⁰⁰

Fang men, French missionaries argued, fought for, bartered, and sold women like chattel. Catholic missionaries and French observers described Fang women as “beasts of burden condemned to complete the most arduous work.”¹⁰¹ Having been “purchased” at a high cost, Fang women were subject to lives of servitude until their husbands abandoned them for younger wives once they reached old age and could no longer work or were postmenopausal.¹⁰²

However, marriages in Fang communities were not static relationships that were purely commercial or political or functions of patriarchy, but tenuous social relations between individuals and groups that fluctuated between perpetuating and upsetting hierarchies of power. A husband’s rights over his wife did not appear to be immutable but provisional, dependent upon his desire to remain in the marriage, his wife’s desire to remain in or leave the marriage, and the volition of both kin groups. As was the case for Mpongwé women, even though Fang women appeared to be passive objects before groups of competing men, it was women’s actions that precipitated the skirmishes. A wife’s desertion of the conjugal home challenged the notion that she had been “sold” and could no longer negotiate rights in her person. A wife who was “kidnapped” by a lover was usually complicit in her displacement from her father’s or husband’s home. The wife’s engagement in extramarital sex called into question the idea that her husband’s remittance of bridewealth granted him control over her sexuality.

However, a husband could subject his wife to bodily harm in order to extract a confession if he suspected her of adultery or as a punishment if his suspicions turned out to be correct.¹⁰³ Over the course of the nineteenth century, Fang husbands could turn to violence against their wives’ lovers to avenge ther wives’ adultery and seek economic compensation as a public means of rectifying the offense. Should the lover be a man who lived in a different village, the adultery could lead to war between villages; it was not only the lover who was at fault, but his entire village. The husband could kidnap and hold hostage livestock, girls, married women, or men living in the lover’s village until amends were made. This action frequently resulted in a series of fatal reprisals between villages.¹⁰⁴ A recorded payment for an instance of adultery in the 1870s was about 30 francs’ worth of goods; for example, one trade gun, five portions of gunpowder, and a piece of cloth or livestock.¹⁰⁵

As among the Mpongwé, men and women alike could initiate divorce, and this could be resolved through multiple forums, though seeking a divorce was often a prolonged process. One option for a wife who could not or did not wish to leave her marriage, but sought to alter her husband’s behavior, was to deliver a public curse on him. French observer Largeau emphasized the gravity of the curse—the husband would not be able to marry other wives nor succeed in any economic enterprises without having been publicly forgiven by his wife.¹⁰⁶ A man could repudiate his wife, send her back to her village (a suu minga jan) on grounds that she did not adhere to the behavior expected of a wife—perhaps she engaged in witchcraft, was disobedient or lacked respect for her husband, or was sterile.¹⁰⁷

Like Mpongwé women, a Fang woman’s success in obtaining a divorce depended on seeking refuge and support in her father’s house. She needed to obtain the consent of the senior male family members—particularly the person who had received bridewealth (nya ndômô)—to represent her case for dissolution.¹⁰⁸ Women could claim divorce on grounds of excessive brutalization, witchcraft, or insult to her birth family by her husband or his kin. If the nya ndômô found another suitor to agree to reimburse the first husband’s bridewealth, the marriage could be terminated more easily. If a father sent his daughter back to her husband and she fled again without anyone reimbursing her husband, a violent clash between villages could result. A husband sometimes attempted to exact revenge by killing a member of his wife’s village, and the father of the wife in question was obligated to compensate the family members of those who had been killed.¹⁰⁹ Another avenue for a wife who wished to leave a marriage was to allow herself to be kidnapped by another man; her father was then responsible for reimbursing the first husband. Thus, it appears that Fang women had means at their disposal to rupture marital contracts or influence their rapport with their husbands.

The historical landscape of conjugal-sexual politics from the mid-nineteenth century through the turn of that century was neither a story of the unmitigated patriarchal hold of men over women nor a celebratory tale of women’s social and economic autonomy prior to colonial rule. Rather, the portrait is one of a mobile terrain of relationships of power. Tracing the intersections of the town’s founding, and trade and politics, with questions of sexual economy demonstrates the fluidity of how men and women formulated and reformulated their relationships with one another, a fluidity that would carry over well into the colonial period.

CONCLUSION

Fifteen years after the founding of Libreville, the French presence in the town had barely expanded. The underfunded and modest nature of the colonial presence in late nineteenth-century Libreville foreshadowed the uneven nature of colonial rule through the twentieth century.¹¹⁰ In 1861, a British traveler described the colonial trading post (comptoir) as in a rather desultory state, noting a ship docked in the Estuary to provide defense; Fort d’Aumale, which housed naval officers and also served as the hospital; a few “wood huts” surrounding the fort that housed administrative personnel; and the Saint Mary Catholic mission and a convent for the Soeurs Bleues.¹¹¹ The French had not been able to establish either political or commercial ascendancy in the colony. A few feet away from Fort d’Aumale stood the trading houses of mainly German and British merchants. In 1875, the staff of colonial administration consisted of four people on a budget of 72,000 francs.¹¹²

In spite of the lack of a visible built environment of colonial society and state, colonial rule in Gabon was also marked by violence. In 1899, the French Congo was divided into about forty concession companies, with each land area roughly the size of France. The insolvent colony of Gabon was parceled into territories controlled by private concession companies. The brutal concessionary system unleashed further instability in a period already characterized by social fluctuation. In exchange for retaining exclusive rights over agricultural and industrial exploitation of their territories—mainly the exploitation of rubber and ivory—companies would give the state a percentage of their profits.¹¹³ By the turn of the century, the brutalities inflicted upon African populations in the French Congo became public and created scandal internationally and in France.¹¹⁴ The collection of rubber and other forest products under conditions of forced labor and violence resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, disease, and the decrease in agricultural production that contributed to massive food shortages and famine.

The creation of the French Equatorial Africa federation in 1910 signaled the attempt to enforce centralized colonial state control over Gabon’s diverse African communities and European men on the spot. The paucity of documentation of the period of concessionary rule means that we can know little about domestic politics in the Estuary region in these years. Yet, as the French attempted to transition from colonial conquest to colonial rule, townspeople’s shifting aspirations toward emerging forms of marriage and sexual relationships shaped transformations in political economy, and changes in politics and economics shaped domestic relationships in the next century of Libreville’s existence.