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
