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
