Читать книгу Conjugal Rights - Rachel Jean-Baptiste - Страница 13
Оглавление2 Planning, Protest, and Prostitution
Libreville in the Era of Timber, 1910–1929
FROM 1910 TO 1929, the Estuary region witnessed vast social, economic, and political upheaval. Libreville was transformed from a fledgling colonial outpost characterized by interdependent African and European exchanges to a colonial capital city. The French endeavored to expand and rationalize colonial rule; the town was to be the headquarters from which the French could broadcast political control over the colony. Beginning in the 1910s and reaching a height in the mid-1920s, global markets clamored for Gabon’s okoumé wood, sparking the industry that was to become Gabon’s primary economic activity through political independence from French colonial rule in 1960.1 Greater numbers of Fang from northern Gabon migrated toward Libreville and other regions in southern Gabon to profit from the economic opportunities. Yet demographic decline and social disruption and dislocation brewed beneath the veneer of economic prosperity. Ecological disasters, food shortages, disease epidemics, and socioeconomic insecurity also arose.2 The French extracted increased labor, raw products, and money from Estuary residents to fund the campaigns of World War I against Germans in bordering Cameroon.3 In 1929, the global Depression made its way to Gabon, resulting in the near stoppage of timber production and a loss of work and money for Libreville residents. Through these fluctuations, a heterogeneous collection of African and European communities settled in, sojourned through, and departed from Libreville. Questions of urban planning regarding housing, health and hygiene, tax collection, work, policing, and governance were on the minds of state personnel and new and old residents alike. Couched in such questions were the dynamics of sexuality and marriage, between African women and men and between African women and European men.
An unintended consequence of economic shifts and the circulation of people through Libreville between 1910 and 1929 was that women’s sexuality provided paths for the generation of wealth in material goods and money. As had occurred in the nineteenth century, interracial sexual and domestic relationships between Mpongwé women and European men proliferated. Mpongwé men brokered such relationships for female dependents, often daughters who had received some formal French education. Some relationships were short-term sexual encounters and others long-term domestic and sexual relationships that Mpongwé societies viewed as marriages. These relationships occurred along local conjugal-sexual mores and were mutually beneficial for African and European societies. Some women accrued independent property and monetary wealth through interracial relationships, thereby disrupting hierarchies of gender and generation with elder kin and chiefs. Moreover, many Mpongwé women exercised a political voice, using their literacy to protest against colonial efforts to exact greater political and economic control over Libreville’s African communities. By World War I and its aftermath, some groups of elite African men, chiefs, and colonial officials—made anxious by the social mobility that some black and mixed-race women involved in interracial unions achieved—sought to limit the occurrences of interracial unions. For some Fang women, compensation for having sexual relations with West African men and Fang migrant laborers provided a means for their husbands and male kin to obtain cash to meet colonial tax directives.
Over the course of these first two decades of the existence of French Equatorial Africa (FEA), Gabon continued to experience population decline, diminished birth rates, and increased mortality. French colonial state and society settled upon African women’s sexual promiscuity and increased divorce as reflective of the “disorganization of the African family.” In Libreville, regulating African sexuality, particularly that of African women, in order to populate and safeguard social and biological reproduction in the colony was to become a key and contested process of urban planning and state-building.
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS: COLONIAL CONSOLIDATION AND OKOUMÉ, 1910–1929
Understanding the transformations in the manifestations of and anxieties about African women’s sexuality involves tracing the transformations in politics, economics, and demography that swept through the Estuary region. Following the official “on-paper” creation of French Equatorial Africa in 1910, the French endeavored to place an infrastructure for colonial rule over the colony of Gabon and its capital city. These efforts encompassed four means: (1) to complete the task of military conquest; (2) to establish geographic boundaries and delineate where Africans could live; (3) to facilitate governance through appointing French and African personnel; and (4) to direct the economic activities of Gabon’s population toward French profits. In the first ten years of FEA’s existence, political control beyond the Estuary region was tenuous. French officers and Senegalese tirailleurs (colonial infantry) mounted numerous campaigns to temper varied insurgencies in the interior. While southern Gabon remained relatively free of armed resistance to colonial rule, it was not until 1925 that insurgent Fang populations in the northern region of Woleu-Ntem ceded to colonial governance.4
Following the task of military conquest, colonial officials endeavored to divide the colony into administrative units and set up a political hierarchy of French personnel and African chiefs and civil servants who were to be auxiliaries in military defense, civil governance, and economic mobilization.5 The colony was divided into civil circumscriptions (circonscriptions), which were further divided into numerous subdivisions. The French subdivision heads reported to the circumscription leader, who then reported to the governor’s Office of Political and Administrative Affairs. Libreville sat in the Gabon-Como Estuary circumscription and was both the capital city of the colony of Gabon and the principal administrative center of the Estuary circumscription. As in French Occidental (West) Africa (FOA), administrators could maintain political control through the indigénat, a policy that allowed the imprisonment or other punishment of Africans without any judicial proceedings.6 By 1920, colonial personnel had put in place a system of African chieftaincy. In rural areas, French personnel appointed elder and often illiterate men to preside over administrative and territorial units classified in descending geographic territories called canton, terre, and tribu.7 Chiefs’ duties were ostensibly to conduct censuses, collect taxes, and recruit labor for colonial public works projects, and they had the authority to imprison those who failed to pay taxes or respond to forced-labor projects.8 Administrators sought to make the French presence more felt throughout the colony, increasing the numbers of colonial officials who could undertake frequent tours around circumscriptions to persuade local chiefs’ collaboration in these efforts.9
The infrastructure of governance in Libreville and its hinterlands was to reflect centralized political control in the colony’s administrative capital. The Estuary circumscription was composed of the capital city of Libreville and rural areas within a few days’ journey on foot or via riverways, Cocobeach to the west and Kango in the north. Libreville was governed by an administrator-mayor who was assisted by a commission of three French civil servants or private citizens plus one African.10 However, echoing the rest of the colony, turnover of Libreville’s French personnel was frequent.11 As early as 1906, the military commander appointed five chiefs in Libreville to collect taxes and mediate civil conflicts among African communities.12 African men who had received some basic French education, primarily Mpongwé, worked as civil servant clerks in varied administrative offices.13
MAP 2.1. Administrative Division of Gabon, 1916. (Reproduced from Christopher Gray, Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa, 178.)
Rocked by the insolvency of the concessionary period and suffering from tepid funding from mainland France, colonial officials sought to maximize the colony’s local revenues.14 By 1908, administrators required taxes to be paid in currency, not in kind, in an effort to compel Africans to work for wages in the colonial economy.15 In 1910, the colonial state decreed that women in the Estuary region were also to pay taxes in addition to men; each woman was to pay 2 francs, while men were to pay 5 francs.16 Only children, the elderly, the infirm, soldiers, and colonial clerks were exempt from the tax. By the end of World War I, the colonial currency of the franc was in circulation, and this was changed to CFA (Communauté Financière Africaine) franc coins and notes after 1945.17 By 1920, individual tax rates had increased to 10 francs for Estuary residents, while tax rates remained at 3 to 5 francs elsewhere in the colony.18 Another new policy was that of forced labor. Beginning in 1915, each able-bodied adult man was to give seven days of work per year on public works projects or could buy out his days of forced labor at the rate of one-half franc per day.19
The historiography of 1910s and 1920s Gabon has emphasized these decades as “the timber era.”20 The increased export of okoumé wood changed the colony and the Estuary region’s fortunes, landscape, and peopling. The expansion of the timber industry had begun with the consolidation of FEA, with timber exports tripling between 1910 and 1913. The okoumé industry stagnated during World War I, when there was a near standstill in trade, but increased to unprecedented heights thereafter.21 Africans and Europeans alike rushed to forests in southern Gabon to work in the timber industry, the moment of the okoumé rush that characterized the 1920s.
In the beginning years of the okoumé rush, the felling and transport of timber by African communities was an affair of kin, men and women alike, and involving entire villages. The years of 1920–1924 saw an era of African “free wood-cutters.” Anyone with an ax could cut down okoumé trees to sell to European trading houses.22 Colonial reports relay that Fang men were turning away from “traditional” labor in hunting, fishing, and cutting down brush to focus solely on lending services as tree fellers.23 Taking about one month’s worth of labor, a clan leader managed a workforce of kin—wives, children, nephews, brothers, and other dependents—and then floated the logs to European trading locations that began to dot Gabon’s rivers.24 Rivers were key to the okoumé economy, as the waterways provided an exit and transportation route for the trees to reach the coast for export. Free woodcutters could accept the purchasing price of a given European buyer or refuse it and try to sell to another.25 In 1924, a head of a convoy of free woodcutters could earn the equivalent of 75–130 francs per person on his team for a period of work felling a tree.26 In the regions of the Bas-Ogooué and Ogooué, but also in the Estuary region, where a confluence of forests and rivers existed, subdivision heads reported a veritable “okoumé fever,” and that entire villages had abandoned their settlements in the bush and agricultural cultivation to work in felling timber.27
Historians Christopher Gray and Francois Ngolet have argued that the mid-1920s ushered in the decline of an economy in which Africans controlled their terms of engagement and work into an “economy of exploitation” in which African laborers lost the means to determine the nature, duration, and remuneration of their labor.28 European forestry societies came to hold control over the timber industry.29 Several factors contributed to this. First, the French more regularly implemented policies that required permits to cut wood and gain access to specific areas of forest plotted on maps.30 Only French businesses with significant capital could afford the fees for permits of larger hectares. Furthermore, increased mechanization in cutting down and transporting wood resulted in the hiring of European workers to man machinery, while African laborers were hired to float logs along interior waterways toward the ocean, more manual and dangerous yet lower-paid work.31 The amount of money that a wage laborer earned per month, 40 francs plus food rations, was lower than what a free woodcutter could earn for a month’s labor, which was about 70 francs.32
In contrast to the era of free woodcutting that involved the labor of men and women linked by ties of affinity, timber production from the mid-1920s stimulated migrant labor of Fang men and other ethnic groups toward southern Gabon. Thousands of Gabonese men migrated from interior regions to timber yards looking for work and money. Though the lower Ogooué region and areas around Lambaréné were the hubs of the timber industry, the Estuary region was a key center of forestry as well, housing a number of timber concessions in its hinterlands. A new site of living and work occupied the landscape: the timber yard. One of the largest in the Estuary region employed forty Europeans and fifteen hundred Africans, and was composed of separate African and European villages, with stores selling durable goods, silos filled with rice, and fish and agricultural goods for purchase.33 Libreville also housed the administrative headquarters of forestry and trading companies of varied European nationalities.
Historian Clotaire Messi Me Nang described the typical timber yard as a “monstrous devourer of men.”34 Work in timber camps was rough and dangerous—poor living and working conditions and little regulation contributed to the deaths of laborers, who were sometimes recruited through violence.35 Workers frequently abandoned contracts with complaints of insufficient food rations, beatings to compel them to work, and long workdays of twelve hours or more. Few worksites employed medical personnel, and workers died from illnesses such as sleeping sickness, beriberi, leprosy, and dysentery.36 In spite of these precarious conditions, okoumé wood continued to be king and was the sector of the colonial economy that employed the largest number of Gabonese laborers.37
By the end of the 1920s, nearly all economic production within African communities along the northern and southern Gabon coasts depended directly or indirectly on the timber industry.38 The okoumé rush supported the growth of other types of enterprises, with some Africans self-employed as transporters or owners of bars.39 Though few Mpongwé entered the industry as manual wage laborers, some Mpongwé men obtained new avenues of wage work as clerks, interpreters, and in finance. Though timber companies were owned by the French, the mid-1920s did appear to be a period of “extraordinary prosperity” for the state, French businessmen, and some Africans who worked in timber exploitation, as well as for the predominantly Fang village settlements near timber camps, who provided secondary services such as cultivating and selling agricultural products to feed the workers of timber camps.40
URBAN PLANNING AND THE HUMAN GEOGRAPHY OF LIBREVILLE, 1910–1929
Though the historiography of early twentieth-century Gabon has focused much attention on men and the expansion of the okoumé economy in the evolution of Libreville and the Estuary region, women were a key factor in the city’s demographic and socioeconomic evolution in the timber era. As male migrants populated the timber yards of the Estuary region, the population of the city of Libreville and villages of the region reflected gender parity and included a critical mass of children. Figure 2.1 outlines available census data for the city of Libreville from 1912 to 1929. Records do not detail how colonial officials determined who counted as a child, man, woman, or elderly person, yet these numbers are useful for outlining a generational and gender portrait of the town’s residents.
Census numbers suggest sharp increases and decreases in Libreville’s population in the first two decades of FEA’s existence. Through the fluctuations of Libreville’s population, these numbers suggest that Libreville was effectively a “city of women.” African women equaled or outnumbered African men, with the exception of the years 1916 and 1922, in which there appeared to be nominally more men than women. From 1912 to 1916, the beginning of expansion years for the okoumé industry and its decline during World War I, the population of the city gradually increased and peaked at 4,077 people. Fang clans, made up of men, women, and kin linked by affinity in polygamous households, contributed to the population growth. It appears that children were a significant portion of Libreville’s population, as high as about 30% in 1916.
FIGURE 2.1. Population of the City of Libreville, 1912–192941 -Statistics not available for this year
As World War I continued and the French fought battles with Germans in neighboring Cameroon, economic constraints, disease, and food shortages decimated Libreville’s population, which decreased by 31 percent from 1916 to 1918. The population whom the French counted as permanent residents remained at less than three thousand people for nearly a decade to come. Yet, between 1914 and 1916, two to four thousand conscripts from throughout the colony—porters, laborers, and soldiers—took up residence in camps immediately outside Libreville. 42 With the influx of people and the resulting demand for agricultural produce, food prices increased as farmers could not produce greater yields.43 A series of food shortages that began in 1917 culminated in full-scale famine in 1918 and again in 1922.44 Germany had been the main trading partner and recipient of Gabonese wood. The stoppage of trade with Germany and the reduction of ships in ports resulted in a near standstill in the export of timber and a shortage of goods available for purchase.45 Prices increased dramatically for imported items such as salt, soap, tobacco, and pots that had become essential for quotidian existence.46 In spite of this shortage of cash, the colonial state increased taxes from an individual rate of 3 francs in 1914 to 10 francs in 1918 or equivalent amounts of palm oil, rubber, or wood.47 Furthermore, epidemics of sleeping sickness and men dying or fleeing from conscription and portage contributed to the population decrease. The most drastic demographic loss in Libreville’s population seems to have been in terms of the numbers of children, the population of which was reduced by about 50 percent from 1916 to 1918.
After the war, the population only gradually increased, from 2,400 in 1920 to a little over 3,400 inhabitants in 1929. Drought and other ecological factors further diminished agricultural yields in the 1920s, and it was hard for residents to obtain food. From 1920 to 1921, the price for manioc nearly doubled, from 350 to 750 francs. Famine broke out again in 1922, further crippling population growth. With the exception of 1922, in which the numbers of men, women, and children were nearly equal, census figures suggest that women continued to dominate the town’s population figures. Children and men each constituted about 30 percent of Libreville’s population. Women represented about 40 percent of the town’s population in 1924 and 1929, outnumbering men. This was most likely due to several factors. Alcoholism may have contributed to the death of some men. The okoumé rush may have resulted in the out-migration of men to forestry concessions. Moreover, it is probable that many of the Fang communities in the city limits were polygamous households. The Estuary-Como region, the immediate rural suburbs of Libreville in which Fang communities lived in villages, also reflected a greater number of women. Its total population grew from 8,561 men and women in 1910 to a population of 25,822 men and women in 1916. The average number of women in these rural regions exceeded the number of men by about 2,000.48 The currents of historical change in early twentieth-century Libreville entailed the processes of women and men shaping the meaning of town life in the era of timber and the consolidation of colonial rule.
Implementing centralized political control, directing where Africans would live, and controlling labor and economic resources would prove challenging for colonial officials, in part because of the sheer diversity of African societies that belied French conceptions of a singular “African” colonial subject. Libreville’s African population was a heterogeneous population with distinct cleavages in ethnicity, wealth, social status, and the degree to which they had adapted European mores. West Africans from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ghana worked as agents for various trading companies and as storekeepers, and hundreds of Senegalese tirailleurs circulated in and out of Libreville as they policed the colony. As at the founding of Libreville, the African population originating from Equatorial Africa within the city’s boundaries was predominantly Myènè, particularly Mpongwé. Mpongwé viewed themselves as superior to Fang societies who lived on the outskirts of Libreville. In addition to educational offerings afforded by American Protestant and French Catholic missionaries, Mpongwé boys could attend the secular state-operated school that sought to train students in French and basic math in preparation for jobs as writers and clerks for the colonial government and French trading companies.50
PHOTO 2.1. Village of Louis, ca. 1900. (Reproduced from a postcard in the personal collection of Patrick Ceillier, Saint-Malo, France.)49
Gabrielle Vassal, a French woman who was accompanying her civil servant husband to Brazzaville, stopped in Libreville for a few days in 1923. She was struck by the degree to which Libreville’s residents, meaning the Mpongwé, had adopted European cultural norms, remarking that “all the natives seemed to speak and understand French,” and that she found in “the natives of Libreville a veneer of civilization not to be found in the rest of Equatorial Africa nor in the hinterland of Gabon itself.”51 Libreville’s residents readily adopted the sartorial accouterments of Europeans, with African men wearing pith helmets. Vassal noted, “Natives passing by politely took off their hats (their chief reason for desiring a hat is to be able to imitate the white man).”52 Men wore shorts and shirts tailored from imported cloth. Mpongwé lived in neighborhoods such as Louis and Glass (named after nineteenth-century kings). Townspeople constructed houses on stilts to offer protection from flooding. Local raffia palms provided the materials for the roofs and planks for the walls of the houses, which featured wraparound verandas.53
An Mpongwé girl divided her time between domestic tasks at home and small-scale agricultural production that supplemented families’ diets. The daughters of elite families attended the school for girls that had been operated by the Soeurs Bleues since the late nineteenth century. Between 1916 and 1921, annual enrollment of boarding school pupils increased from 23 to 32 girls, and each year about 66 girls were day school students.54 The curriculum included instruction in basic reading and writing in French, morality, hygiene, the domestic arts, housekeeping, and sewing, skills that supported the nuns’ intention for the girls to be dutiful wives in monogamous marriages to Christian African men. Yet the Catholic efforts to mold a certain type of Mpongwé girl proved problematic. In a 1916 report, a nun characterized the typical student as follows: “The Gabonese student is talkative and vain. She has a difficult character and often sulks.”55 Many times girls’ families withdrew them from school or girls walked out and returned home, likely due to the conditions of beatings and their forced labor in fields and in cleaning the mission.56
Mpongwé women were consummate purchasers of imported cloth and European adornment.57 Vassal opined that “the native women with their gay-coloured cloths wound tightly round their supple bodies from breasts to knees had here a nonchalant, satisfied appearance which contrasted with the dreary impassive expressions we had seen in other ports.”58 British colonial civil servant Frederick Migeod, who traveled to Libreville in the early 1920s, described Mpongwé as “civilized,” speaking multiple European languages, well-educated, and “clean,” with the women often bathing themselves with soap several times a day.59
Libreville’s African populations were avid consumers of imported goods. Articles off-loaded from ships and sold in stores operated by European trading companies (factories) included tobacco, sewing machines, knives, pots, beads, belts, cloth, and manufactured clothes—shirts, hats, men’s boots, espadrilles, and women’s shoes.60 Townspeople readily incorporated European foodstuffs into their diets. Sugar, butter, rice, spirits and wine, preserves, and canned milk were part of daily intake.61 A 1928 annual report recorded that there were at least a half dozen bakeries in the town, and Africans were the main customers.62 Libreville residents viewed themselves as sophisticated and cosmopolitan, with men and women sporting European-style clothing and parading their fashions in Sunday strolls along the Ocean Boulevard or at public Bastille Day celebrations.
PHOTO 2.2. Maritime Boulevard, ca. 1927. (Reproduced from a postcard in the personal collection of Patrick Ceillier.)63
The Estuary region’s thin population density worried French colonial officials and businessmen, who were eager to increase Libreville’s African population and harness the labor of Fang communities. Colonial personnel, who viewed Mpongwé as “lazy” people who refused to perform manual labor, looked toward African societies other than Mpongwé to populate the town. In a 1916 report, the governor outlined efforts to draw people from the interior regions to Libreville and receive primary education at the state school so that they could increase the number of African auxiliaries from Gabon’s varied ethnic groups. He urged the subdivision heads from interior regions to send their most serious students to Libreville for schooling, where they would receive a scholarship.64
Officials worried about how to exact greater control over “elusive” Fang populations living in the forested suburbs of Libreville.65 Fang populations circulated in and out of Libreville to sell agricultural products and fish, sell forest products for export, purchase imported goods, and to seek out medical services from the French, but often eluded French efforts to extract forced labor and taxes. Frederick Migeod traveled through some Fang Estuary villages and described the houses as composed of raffia palm and flattened bark; he also noted that everything was laid out in “perfectly straight lines,” of houses, trees, and streets.67 In comparing Fang to Mpongwé, Migeod viewed Fang as “a dirty race” whose women “make no pretention to ornamental dress,” with some tattooing and red dye on their bodies and men sporting a cloth around their waists.68 The few Fang men who worked as clerks or interpreters differentiated themselves from other Fang by wearing a European trouser and shirt.
PHOTO 2.3. Bastille Day celebration, 1929. (Reproduced from a postcard in the personal collection of Patrick Ceillier.)66
Though they lived on the outskirts, Fang were essential to Libreville as they cultivated the agricultural produce that fed the city’s African and European inhabitants. Fang women, the principal farmers, worked daily on individual cropland plots. In contrast to Mpongwé women, whom European observers described as independent and exhibiting a certain liberty, Fang women were portrayed as “beasts of burden” and “veritable slaves,” who toiled in farming and then walked to town carrying thirty to forty kilograms of produce in baskets on their backs with a band around the forehead that helped stabilize the loads.69 Fang women sold the produce in markets to African and European purchasers and reportedly gave their husbands the money. While Migeod and other European observers rarely recorded Mpongwé women carrying children, the Fang woman always had her child with her, with “the babies carried on the right hip. One woman I noticed with a big basket on her back, had a child too big to carry on her hip, so she had it astride her shoulders above the basket.”70 As hunters and fishermen, Fang men procured the little meat present in the diets of Estuary residents.71 While most Estuary Fang communities lived outside of what colonial officials recognized as Libreville’s boundaries, some clans did move within Libreville in the 1910s and 1920s, further fueling the concerns of French personnel about how to maintain social control over townspeople and manage Libreville’s built environment.
French efforts to consolidate political power in Libreville involved attempts to expand European living, business, and administrative quarters. Executing this urban planning entailed displacing African communities who occupied land desired by the French. Mpongwé and Fang societies refuted French conceptions of urban planning on the grounds of gender, clan and ethnic differentiation, and rights to land and to construct their own housing. Early administrators sought to diminish Libreville’s nineteenth-century landscape of Africans and Europeans living in close proximity. Between 1912 and 1913, military officers expelled Fang who had been living near the military fort in order to create the area named the “plateau” that was to serve as the segregated European administrative and residential neighborhood.72 The French envisioned that they would segregate Africans into distinct neighborhoods by ethnicity and designated plots of land. Yet, in June 1912, a group of Fang men refused to move from the designated plateau area into a single area of the city that was to serve as the Fang neighborhood. In a letter to the mayor, these men refused on the grounds that Fang clans were not part of a single collectivity and were distinct from one another. Such close proximity to other Fang groups, the men argued, would encourage their wives’ infidelity.73 The mayor accused government-employed Fang of being at the head of the revolt and punished some of the protesters for their refusal.74 Mpongwé communities also protested French urban-planning efforts to displace them from land on which they lived, as well as against new colonial restrictions on economic and educational privileges that they previously held. Parallel to protests by Fang men, a group of Mpongwé writers and clerks in the colonial service wrote letters to French officials against the 1912 urban plan, claiming that their descent from Mpongwé kings gave them ancestral rights to the land.75
Libreville’s Mpongwé residents viewed themselves as equal to whites and chafed against French colonial efforts to categorize them as “natives” (indigènes), colonial subjects who had few economic and educational privileges. After the creation of FEA, administrators expelled the Saint Gabriel Fathers who had been providing secondary education to Mpongwé students. In 1918, some Mpongwé men founded a branch of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme in Libreville. League members wrote letters to colonial officials asking for the return of the Saint Gabriel Fathers to provide secondary school education and for Gabon to be autonomous from the new FEA, which members viewed as a turning point in which new racialist attitudes of the French emerged.76 That same year, a group called the Professional Association of African Native Employees, composed of West Africans and Myènès, lobbied against the lower salaries that African civil servants received in comparison to French employees.77 While in exile in Senegal and France in the 1920s, discontented Mpongwé elite men published the newspaper L’Echo Gabonais, later called La Voie Coloniale, to decry increased colonial taxes and limitations on education.78 The letter and newspaper campaigns against tax increases, reductions in educational opportunities, and low salaries, what the authors interpreted as racial discrimination, did little to stop such colonial directives. Nevertheless, these campaigns do demonstrate moments in which varied constituencies of Libreville’s African residents coalesced to forward alternative visions of the town life imagined by the French.
Recalcitrance toward French urban-planning efforts continued into the 1920s, and the diagrams and maps created by several architects of what Libreville should look like went unimplemented.79 Forecasting what other European observers would note later in the twentieth century, visitors in the 1920s described the city as dominated by the naturally occurring—rather than a built—environment.80 Gabrielle Vassal’s impressions of the town were of a sleepy seaside hamlet: “huge trees left standing, either isolated or in clusters about the town, the overgrown path, the spaces abandoned to the undergrowth of coarse grass and tangled bushes give a picturesque appearance to the town.”81 As his ship approached Libreville, Frederick Migeod summarized the view as, “the northern bank being hilly, though the hills were of no great height, while the southern bank was covered with mangroves. The town lies spread out three miles along the north side of the Estuary.” He also noted that the town was “pretty,” with palm, mango, coconut, and almond trees along its avenues.82 He signaled, as would urban planners to come for several decades, that the town was swampy and needed better drainage. There was only one road of four miles along which the only car owned by a European could traverse. He repeated the perpetual complaint that Libreville was an unhealthy place for Europeans, noting the low availability of meat, and because there was “no real segregation from the natives,” which resulted in whites’ being diseased.83 Africans lived in a variety of huts constructed of materials ranging from straw and bark to cloth. Libreville remained a rather unplanned city.
Though the French endeavored to consolidate colonial rule, hegemony was on a shoestring in Libreville in the first decade of FEA’s existence.84 A lack of colonial personnel, poor infrastructure, low population density, and the topography of dense forests and winding waterways provided shelter for Fang communities who wished to escape colonial control and enter into and leave Libreville at will.85 Furthermore, townspeople, insisting upon differentiation by clan, gender, ethnicity, and social status, claimed rights to housing and to shape the physical geography of the town, as well as to retain control over the wealth that their labor generated. Nevertheless, the expansion of colonial control was transformative, adding new political power brokers such as chiefs, diminishing some of the prestige that Mpongwé male elites held, and bringing about new economic opportunities and constraints with the export of Gabonese timber to global markets. These political and economic transformations shaped gender, marriage, and sexual relationships, and Estuary residents shaped the contours of historical change in their interpersonal relationships.
INTERRACIAL RELATIONSHIPS, PROSTITUTION, AND PROTEST: GENDER AND GENERATIONAL HIERARCHIES REORDERED
As Libreville was transformed from a nineteenth-century trading port to a colonial capital city, interracial sexual relationships, variably referred to by historical actors as “prostitution,” “debauchery,” or “marriage,” continued. Though the numbers of French women in colonies elsewhere in the French Empire increased after World War I, few traveled to FEA. In 1900, of 130 whites in Libreville, only 28 were women.86 By 1910, the European population of Libreville slowly grew to 200 people and remained at that level for the next twenty years. By 1931, about 1,300 Europeans lived throughout the colony, but white women represented only 29 percent of this population.87 The French cited disease epidemics, inadequate supplies of potable water and electricity, a lack of roads, and the small number of colonial personnel as making FEA unsuitable for women and children. Interracial relationships were prevalent in urban centers—Libreville, Lambaréné, and Port-Gentil—where European adventurers, traders, and government personnel converged.88 Myènè peoples, particularly the Mpongwé, established a monopoly in sexual-domestic unions with Europeans.
It is challenging to quantify the extent of interracial relationships. According to early twentieth-century missionary and colonial records, nearly every Mpongwé family sent their daughters to engage in relationships with European men. A 1914 letter by the governor of Gabon to the governor-general of FEA indicated that attached was a sixty-nine-page report listing the names of women engaged in interracial relationships and the names and ages of their mixed-race children. But the referenced report is missing from the archives.89 Interracial relationships of Mpongwé women and European men continued beyond Gabon’s borders. As French soldiers traveled toward Cameroon to fight Germans during World War I, Mpongwé women followed them. In a 1914 report, the governor complained that women native to Libreville were clandestinely leaving to carry out a “licentious life.”90 In a 1915 letter to superiors in France, a Catholic priest stationed in Libreville bemoaned the difficulty of cultivating monogamous Christian marriages among the region’s African communities, as well as among the European residents. Father Matrou, from the Sainte Marie missionary station, conveyed in his letter that “the presence of Europeans in Libreville and their dubious morality has introduced the commonplace existence of temporary unions between blacks and whites; this [is a] pernicious example.”91 Citing a 1918 colonial political report (the document is now missing from the archives), Georges Balandier wrote that of the 935 African women of marriageable age, as many as 400 remained single. Of these single women, 65 “cohabited with European men” and 100 lived by “prostitution.”92 Balandier did not detail if those categorized as living by prostitution engaged with white or African men or perhaps both. However, given the disdain that Mpongwé expressed toward Fang, it is likely that the women’s clients were Europeans and, if African, originated from West Africa. That about one-half of Mpongwé women were not married in 1918 is a vast change from Mpongwé women of the previous generation, for whom normative societal expectations were of universal marriage for men and women. Several factors likely diminished the possibility of Mpongwé women marrying Mpongwé men: mores of consanguinity that limited the available pool of marriage partners, the diminished numbers of Mpongwé men, and the presence of European men unaccompanied by European women.93 Gabrielle Vassal maintained that Libreville women “exercise a charm on Europeans” and “they are quite unlike all other native women throughout this vast colony, who admire and envy them.”94 It does not appear that every Mpongwé woman was in an interracial union, but that interracial domestic and sexual relationships between Mpongwé women and white men were commonplace.
Mpongwé and some Europeans described interracial sexual and domestic relationships that lasted over the course of months or years as “marriages.” It appears that women’s engagements in interracial relationships were family affairs. Male kin—fathers, uncles, or brothers—often initiated, sanctioned, and brokered Mpongwé women’s relationships. Missionaries noted that it was sometimes mothers who incited their daughters to enter interracial unions, which was in keeping with Mpongwé practices in which a woman’s mother had some influence in determining whom and when her daughter married.95 Many women’s families required that European men give them bridewealth, the jural and social confirmation of a relationship as a marriage in Mpongwé customary practice. Simone Agnoret Iwenga St. Denis, an Mpongwé woman with a mixed-race father, recounted the setting up of her grandmother’s union: “We demanded from the Norwegian white man to give bridewealth. He did this. It’s only following this that my grandmother began to regularly go to the man’s house.”96
Based on interviews with French businessmen and colonial personnel who had traveled to Gabon after World War I, French journalist France Renucci published a fictionalized account of an interracial relationship in Libreville. In the book Souvenirs de femmes, a newly disembarked French banker in 1920s Libreville accompanied colleagues to the home of his potential wife and her family, declaring his desire to marry “in the Gabonese way.”97 The young woman’s father initially refused the Frenchman’s request, needing to first consult with his wife. The mother responded with her demands for bridewealth: a demijohn of wine, a colored umbrella, bags of rice, packets of sugar, a dog, and 500 francs.98 This list represented a combination of luxury items, such as the umbrella and sugar, and basic items, such as the rice, which supplemented the family’s diet in times of low harvest.99 It would have taken an Mpongwé man several years to amass such a bundle of goods and currency.
In living with and/or maintaining the homes of European men, Mpongwé women completed the quotidian tasks of wives, of housekeeping and sexual labor, sustaining colonial manhood. Women’s care provided the “comforts of home” to European men.100 European travel narratives and fiction of the 1910s and 1920s convey that nearly all white men stationed in Libreville, from the governor-general to subordinate civil servants, from managers to lower-skilled laborers in the timber industry and trading companies, encompassing European men of high social status to those of lower social status, engaged a “mistress” or “native wife.”101 Joseph Blache, a sailor who sojourned in and out of Gabon in the 1920s, described the wife of a French colleague (or perhaps his own) as a “housekeeper, tailor, laundress, unrolling her mat in the bedroom of the white, each night!”102 However, Blache qualified, many a “black marriage of Gabon” involved only sex as Mpongwé women lived in their family homes in Mpongwé villages by day and came to their European husbands’ houses only at night. The care of métis children fell to Mpongwé kin. As children grew beyond infancy, their white fathers, or more commonly Mpongwé mothers and kin, often conferred métis boys or girls respectively to Catholic priests or nuns at the mission station of Sainte Marie for rearing and education.103
Interracial relationships brought material and monetary wealth to women’s families, prompting critiques by Catholic missionaries and some European observers of the prostitution of women that benefited Mpongwé men. Some women’s families gained a monthly monetary payment from their female dependents’ European lovers, bringing about a relationship that a study funded by the Anti-Slavery Society described as “a rental contract.”104 Others portrayed Mpongwé male intermediaries as “pimps.” French journalist Albert Londres, visiting Gabon in 1928, relayed that as he arrived in the port he witnessed, “a Gabonese woman, followed by a nègre who appeared to want to offer her to the newly disembarked, walked along on high heels, her black legs in yellow silk hose, swaying in a rose dress a body for rent, if not for sale.”105
Women’s sexual labor permitted some Mpongwé families to maintain their elite social status as fortunes changed in Libreville’s shifting economic currents and the colonial state sought to curtail African economic autonomy. In the early twentieth century, a Catholic missionary stationed in Libreville reflected that women acquired money, linens, dishes, canned goods, and rice during the time with their European husbands. Once the European men left Gabon, the missionary concluded, “they return to their parental home and the family struggles with a difficult problem: how to live comfortably without having done anything.”106 In the new era of colonial restrictions on African social and economic ascendency, Mpongwé women facilitated the continued flow of imported prestige goods. Women’s labor also brought in cash, of increasing necessity in Libreville. In instituting a head tax, colonial officials hoped to compel African men to work for European enterprises or in agricultural labor producing cash crops. However, daughters’ sexual labor allowed some Mpongwé men to avoid such colonial directives.
Mpongwé women also used their wealth and literacy to claim economic rights for all of Libreville’s African residents. For some women, the provision of sexual and domestic services to European men also resulted in their ownership of property. After departing from Gabon, some European men left the cement homes in which they had lived to their Mpongwé wives. This made some Mpongwé women among the most wealthy of Libreville’s African inhabitants. Women’s independent wealth paved the way for them to have a political voice alongside Mpongwé men in efforts to assert African economic rights in face of colonial tax increases. In November 1919, Angélique Bouyé, an Mpongwé woman, wrote a letter to French officials complaining that the amount of poll tax to be paid had increased in the past year from 3 to 5 francs.107 Bouyé claimed to be writing on behalf of Libreville residents, and the inspector of colonies to whom she addressed the letter referred to her as the spokesperson for the city’s African residents. Bouyé requested that colonial officials cease in instituting further tax increases. Moreover, Bouyé’s letter included specific requests on behalf of women in Libreville. She complained that African soldiers collecting taxes wrongfully arrested African women on the pretext that they had not paid taxes.108 Bouyé concluded the letter with the request that female property owners who paid the land tax be exempt from the poll tax.
While French colonial personnel expressed anxiety about women’s sexual promiscuity and prostitution in Libreville, colonial economic policies set in motion the very currents in which women’s sexual labor was a viable path for earning money. Fang communities could also make money from women’s sexual labor, with African men of Equatorial African or West African origins.109 In a 1913 annual report, the governor of Gabon opined that the social ills of Mpongwé men’s laziness and their reliance on women’s sexual labor to make money had spread to other ethnic groups migrating to Libreville. The governor surmised, “Whatever the origin of the [native] inhabitant of Libreville, his mentality quickly becomes that of a Gabonese. The prostitution of women is elevated to the level of an institution; as a result the poll tax is an illusory obligation.”110 The governor’s words illuminate how cash had become the method of obtaining sex and how the money earned permitted some Fang men to pay the new and perpetually increasing tax requirements. Some Fang husbands in polygynous marriages consented for their wives to have sexual relationships for a certain number of nights with African laborers who had migrated to the Estuary region’s timber camps in search of work.111 The migrant men could travel with the women to another location and would return the wives after the stipulated amount of time and remit the agreed-upon payments of cash or goods to the husbands. In 1918, an inspector’s report of the Estuary region noted that tirailleurs would set up temporary unions with married or unmarried women in Fang villages in which they were sent to enforce the collection of taxes. Fathers or husbands would consent for sexual relationships with female dependents to occur. The soldiers would pay a “bridewealth” fee for sexual access to a woman, and the husband or father would in turn remit the money given by the tirailleur to the village chief as the tax payment.112 Turning to these relationships did not appear to be motivated by efforts of husbands or fathers to become wealthy, but was rather a desperate act to meet tax obligations when families didn’t have enough money.
As interracial unions continued to occur in early twentieth-century colonial Gabon, African and French societies shifted in their ideas about the desirability of interracial unions and of the respectability of women involved in such relationships. On a day-to-day basis, African women and European men engaged openly in domestic-sexual relationships, with little censure from French and African political figures. Yet, in moments of socioeconomic and political crisis, “native wives” appeared in public records as persons that impeded governance and contributed to a decline in moral and social order in Libreville. Particularly in moments of economic and food crisis that occurred in waves following World War I, some Myènè men sought to restrict Mpongwé women’s social, economic, and political mobility.
Some women who engaged in interracial unions held a privileged status, allowing them to escape colonial regulation of African communities, which resulted in the ire of African men. This especially was true when colonial officials extracted forced labor or increased taxes from African populations after World War I, yet seemed to exempt some Mpongwé women. In efforts to rationalize the production of timber toward the benefit of French interests, officials attempted to limit the autonomy of Myènè men who had managed to obtain permits for large forestry concessions and become wealthy from exporting timber. In 1921, a letter signed “The Inhabitants of Lambaréné” arrived on the desk of the lieutenant governor in Libreville. Since 1918, the colonial state had required male and female subjects to perform ten days of labor per year. However, a provision had allowed wealthy Gabonese, usually male Myènè forestiers (timber industry exploiters), to pay cash rather than serving forced labor. Yet a 1921 law took away this option, ordering that “all native forestiers are required to perform forced labor. . . . None among them will be allowed to pay cash in lieu of their days of obligatory labor.”113 The letter writers signaled the hypocrisy of this law, since European forestiers who did business in the same manner as African forestiers did not have to perform labor. They protested the existence of two systems of laws regulating forestiers: one for Europeans, the other for Africans.
Gabonese women’s relationships with European men allowed them to attain higher status in the new colonial order compared to Gabonese men, thereby disrupting an imagined gender relationship of women’s political and economic subjugation. The letter writers remonstrated that female lovers of Europeans occupied a privileged status that allowed them to escape the new racialized forced-labor requirements: “In enforcing this law, is the circumscription commissioner going to make his native wife, his domestic servant work! And the women who live in debauchery with Europeans, will he make them work or even have to buy out their days of obligatory labor? If he intends to execute orders as received, why apply regulations to some and not to all?”114 As implied in this letter, in the new colonial differentiation between Africans and Europeans, black and white, the woman lover of a European man occupied the status of “European.” The letter writers’ social status had declined. Reordering former hierarchies of men’s greater access to wealth, female lovers and live-in domestic companions to European men could now rise to a status of privilege formerly granted to Myènè men. The categorization of interracial relationships as “debauchery” also implied condemnation of these women as morally suspect, living outside normative sexual relationships that benefited male heads of households. No longer did a woman’s relationship with a European benefit an entire community, but it individually placed her at a level above other “natives.”
While Mpongwé women’s family members might have brokered, approved, or acquiesced to their unions with European men, involvement in these relations did reorder power relationships within Mpongwé communities. Conflict over property could sometimes escalate among kin, as represented in a story recounted by French journalist Albert Londres of his voyage to Libreville in the late 1920s. En route on a ship, Londres encountered a European man named Rass who said that he had lived with a woman whom he identified as “ma Gabonaise” in Libreville for seven years. Her aunts had poisoned and killed her, Rass claimed, in order to gain control of her clothing and the hut (case) that he had left to her after he departed.115 Poisoning was a common manifestation in Mpongwé communities to control recalcitrant members of society or to exact justice over a disagreement, and some older women were the most skilled practitioners.116 When Rass arrived with Londres at the house in which he and his wife had lived, Rass was shocked to find that the aunts whom he said poisoned her now lived in the case. He accused the aunts of killing her because with her death they inherited all of her property. The unnamed woman’s individual ownership of the house and clothing, and her unwillingness to allow her aunts to access this wealth, challenged the authority of senior women over junior women.
Mpongwé women’s independent accumulation of wealth through interracial relationships also provided a pathway to question the authority of Mpongwé chiefs, who claimed political control over residents, and of colonial officials, who sought to direct how women earned and spent their money. In earlier years of colonial rule, colonial projects had attempted to turn Mpongwé men into peasant producers of foodstuffs and cash crops or laborers on European plantations.117 Amid the food shortages of the 1920s, colonial officials blamed the shortages on the supposed laziness of Mpongwé populations and their lack of participation in agricultural production. Officials turned to Mpongwé chiefs in an effort to compel Mpongwé women to farm, as did women of other ethnicities, to produce more food for the town’s population. Yet a chief testified to a 1922 commission of inquiry on the availability of food: “He [the mayor of Libreville] advised us to work in food cultivation like in other countries, that those who put in real efforts would be compensated. We responded that this was good! But it is you others, Europeans, who prevent our women from working because they earn too much with you.”118 The chief relayed that the cash and material resources that European men gave their Mpongwé wives provided women with enough earnings to refuse agricultural work. Another chief argued, “In the past, our women worked on the land, but today they no longer want to and they no longer listen to us!”119 Mpongwé patriarchs could not fully control Mpongwé women’s labor or how Mpongwé women would participate in the colonial economy.
On a January morning in 1922, a group of sixty mainly Mpongwé women, some holding children in their arms, mounted a cacophonous demonstration at the town hall before the mayor, his deputy, and the police commissioner.120 The group of women arrived at the mayor’s office in response to a rumor. Officials had allegedly announced the day before that all farmers, mainly Fang inhabitants of Libreville’s hinterlands, were to bring produce to city hall, where colonial officials would purchase their products at preset prices, instead of to the public market, where Fang farmers could control the prices. Colonial officials would then ration and distribute food to the city’s African and European inhabitants. The investigative report following the women’s protest summarized the assembled women as “Mpongwé, without a profession or living in concubinage with Europeans; three or four among them claimed to be seamstresses or washerwomen who have found themselves to be without work or money, although they were luxuriously dressed and well shod.”121 The report characterized the women as “lazy,” refusing to work in agricultural labor that would have yielded produce to relieve the shortage of food. Rather, the women would arrive at the market early and purchase large quantities of food, leaving nothing for wage laborers, who could not reach the market until the end of their workday.
Libreville’s colonial officials reacted angrily to the women’s demonstrations, noting that they had asked the women to present themselves individually, not in a group, and that a committee of male Mpongwé notables had already convened earlier in the week to address native concerns over food rationing. It was the male chiefs, not this ad hoc gathering of women, whom officials viewed as the authorized intermediaries with the colonial state. Though the women were asked to leave the premises, some refused, and four were arrested in an attempt to compel those who remained to disband.
This gathering of an all-female Mpongwé delegation asserted that women could claim a political voice and directly address the colonial state without African men as intermediaries.122 The Mpongwé women gathered at city hall challenged Mpongwé gender and colonial stratifications—thereby proving to be “dangerous” women, as seen by colonial officials and elder Mpongwé men. Women’s provision of sexual and domestic services to European men simultaneously circulated colonial capital into African communities, yet threatened colonial plans for socioeconomic and political management. As alluded to in the summary of the encounter, many of these women were currently or had been previously engaged in relationships with European men. They invoked their visible positions as taxed property owners and conspicuous consumers with money to protest state attempts to restrict their purchasing power and redirect their labor into agricultural production. Carrying children in their arms, some perhaps the métis children of colonial officials, the women cited their roles as mothers and caretakers of children as justification for their privileged access to food. Unlike the Igbo women’s protests in 1929 Nigeria, Mpongwé women did not protest in order to reclaim roles of the precolonial past.123 Mpongwé women were protesting in order to maintain the privileged existence that they had gained within the transition to colonial rule. The investigation concluded that other African inhabitants of Libreville applauded the women’s arrests. The approbation of townspeople at the women’s imprisonment indicates how less-affluent African urbanites might have resented the privileged status that the women sought to retain as others went hungry and felt the impact of colonial efforts to increase their labor and constrain the money that they could make.
REGULATING AFRICAN MARRIAGE PRACTICES: CODIFYING CUSTOMARY MARRIAGE LAW
Amid the political, social, and economic upheavals, colonial and health personnel assessing demographic data in the first two decades of the twentieth century determined that African populations throughout the colony were decreasing.124 By the 1920s, French medical officials and missionaries reported the disappearances of entire villages that they had visited in the early years of the twentieth century.125 In a 1920 article, a French doctor who headed the colony’s health service described Gabon as “a sick country” with a diminishing population, insufficient food supply, elevated rates of morbidity, and reduced fertility.126 By 1929, a colonial medical report estimated that the population of the entire colony was 334,000 inhabitants, reduced from estimates of 403,000 people in 1924.127 Furthermore, the document conveyed, 10 percent of women in some villages were sterile, and the infant mortality rate was about 50 percent. Colonial states and societies in the Belgian Congo, Kenya, and Malawi reported similar anxieties regarding population stagnation or decrease.128 Among the factors of communicable disease epidemics, forced labor, and food shortages that contributed to demographic decline and mortality in Gabon, colonial state and society settled upon African marital and sexual practices, transformed by colonial rule, as the principal culprit.
A chorus of colonial health personnel, colonial officials, and Christian missionaries settled upon the reduced fertility and morbidity as primarily caused by the prevalence of African women’s extramarital sexuality, particularly in the coastal regions of southern Gabon such as the Estuary region. A 1930 publication on marriage and sexual practices, commissioned by an antislavery society and based on written surveys completed by colonial administrators in the 1910s and 1920s throughout French-controlled Africa, encapsulates these views. Written by West African colonial administrator Maurice Delafosse, the monseigneur for French Africa Le Roy, and a medical professional identified as Dr. Poutrin, the introduction argued that colonial rule thwarted the establishment of stable marriages and fecund families by making women into commodities. First, African women’s sexual promiscuity with African and European men spread sexually transmitted diseases that compromised male and female fertility and were often passed on to children.129 Second, the expansion of the timber economy and the circulation of money had resulted in increased bridewealth prices. Delafosse, Poutrin, and Le Roy reported that the 1910 bridewealth list for the marriage of a Fang woman and a man of unspecified ages in the Estuary region was 3,000 francs’ worth of goods: 15 stone guns, 80 small barrels of gunpowder, 20 pieces of cloth, 10 machetes, 8 crates, 5 bags of salt, 1 vest, and 1 mutton or dog.130 By the 1920s, bridewealth in coastal regions ranged from 1,000 to 3,000 francs, the same worth of goods as in the 1910s, but it was now composed of 70 percent cash, a large sum that made marriage difficult for young men.131
Customary practices already allowed for divorce, but women and their families increasingly sought out divorce in order to earn the higher bride-wealth amounts paid by new suitors. To save the colony and ensure the biological reproduction of African societies would require the regulation of African women’s and men’s bodies, French colonial state and society and Catholic representatives would argue. As noted by Lynn Thomas, European states exhibited great interest in questions of “regulating sexual behavior and promoting the growth of national populations” in the early twentieth century, and “colonial rule in Asia and Africa fueled these reproductive concerns by situating the definition of and maintenance of racial, cultural, and sexual boundaries as important state projects.”132
With the view toward forming African families that would buttress the colony’s demographic growth, the French argued for the need to codify and regulate marital and conjugal relationships in Gabon. Between 1918 and 1925, state and Catholic personnel launched the first efforts toward codifying customary laws. Such efforts came later than elsewhere in colonial-era Africa. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in French West Africa, colonial administrators, armchair ethnologists, and missionaries had compiled customary practices of many African societies.133 By the 1920s, codified versions of customary law existed in many British colonies.134 The 1921 eleven-member customary law commission in Gabon included mostly Frenchmen: medical and administrative civil servants, representatives from Protestant and Catholic missions, and the president of the Planter, Businessmen, and Settler Association. The two African members, one a Fang and the other an Mpongwé, were civil servants of the colonial state. The governor’s annual report summarized the committee’s mandate to “reorganize the native family” through facilitating marriage for young people by decreasing bridewealth amounts, limiting adultery and the prostitution of wives by husbands, making divorce more difficult, and prohibiting the marriage of prepubescent girls.135 The commission was charged with producing a set of laws that would serve as a blueprint for local administrators and African auxiliaries in enforcing social order. Documents do not detail the opinions of the African members of the committee. However, a report by member Monsignor Matrou encapsulated the common goal of state and church members of the commission, which was to establish immutable written laws to ensure that all African men could find a wife and to make marriages last. Stable marriages, in turn, would increase birth rates.136
The various drafts of customary marriage law that emerged from 1922 to 1925 reveal the conflict between church and state regarding which institutions had the authority to determine what types of marriages would be allowable. Catholic officials viewed marriage as a spiritual contract, of monogamous men and women, consecrated by priests who were intermediaries between humans and God. Colonial bureaucrats viewed marriage as a civil contract, to be consecrated and recorded before those appointed by the colonial state. Church officials argued that polygamy should be discouraged and eventually made illegal. The church sought to add “liberty of consciousness” as grounds for divorce—women could leave a polygamous marriage in order to enter a monogamous one.137 Colonial administrators viewed polygamy as ingrained in African practice and feared that efforts to abolish polygamy could result in revolt against the colonial state. Church officials also argued that bridewealth was equivalent to the sale of women and argued for strict limits on bridewealth.138 Yet some colonial administrators viewed the monetization of bridewealth payments as a transformation that benefited the colonial economy, given that the need for bridewealth cash provided incentive for African men to participate in wage labor. Bridewealth amounts should, the governor argued, fluctuate according to wages. Colonial officials did worry that elder men with female dependents would ask for high cash payments in order to tap into the cash earnings of young men.139 However, the governor concluded that the need to alleviate the acute labor shortage for French enterprises was a greater imperative.
