Conjugal Rights

Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon

Rachel Jean-Baptiste

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780821445037
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Conjugal Rights is a history of the role of marriage and other arrangements between men and women in Libreville, Gabon, during the French colonial era, from the mid–nineteenth century through 1960. Conventional historiography has depicted women as few in number and of limited influence in African colonial towns, but this book demonstrates that a sexual economy of emotional, social, legal, and physical relationships between men and women indelibly shaped urban life.

Bridewealth became a motor of African economic activity, as men and women promised, earned, borrowed, transferred, and absconded with money to facilitate interpersonal relationships. Colonial rule increased the fluidity of customary marriage law, as chiefs and colonial civil servants presided over multiple courts, and city residents strategically chose the legal arena in which to arbitrate a conjugal-sexual conflict. Sexual and domestic relationships with European men allowed some African women to achieve a greater degree of economic and social mobility. An eventual decline of marriage rates resulted in new sexual mores, as women and men sought to rebalance the roles of pleasure, respectability, and legality in having sex outside of kin-sanctioned marriage.

Rachel Jean-Baptiste expands the discourse on sexuality in Africa and challenges conventional understandings of urban history beyond the study of the built environment. Marriage and sexual relations determined how people defined themselves as urbanites and shaped the shifting physical landscape of Libreville. Conjugal Rights takes a fresh look at questions of the historical construction of race and ethnicity. Despite the efforts of the French colonial government and society to enforce boundaries between black and white, interracial sexual and domestic relationships persisted. Black and métisse women gained economic and social capital from these relationships, allowing some measure of freedom in the colonial capital city.

PART I

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

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

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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About Author
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Narrating a History of Domestic Life, Sexuality, Being, and Feeling in Urban Africa
• Part I: From Atlantic Ocean Trading Post To Colonial Capital City, 1849–1929
• Part II: Libreville’s Growth, 1930–1960
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index