In Lambaréné, a European suitor might remit 600 francs’ worth of cloth, guns, and alcohol to an Mpongwé companion’s family.63 Alternatively, European men in Libreville might have given anywhere from 15 to 25 francs per month to their Mpongwé wives, who would then transfer the money to their Mpongwé fathers or uncles.64
An Mpongwé moral economy dictated the terms of interracial sex and incorporated European men into normative conceptions of respectable female sexuality, bridewealth, and marriage. Moreover, the circulation of and sexual access to women solidified Mpongwé men’s commercial and political alliances. European traders with Mpongwé wives held an advantage over those who were not married to an Mpongwé woman, as their marriages indicated acceptance into the “trust system” of trade along Gabon’s coasts.65 Interracial unions also consisted of short-term and episodic sexual relationships. Interracial sexual interactions were so commonplace in the Estuary region in the nineteenth century that missionaries referred to the area as “the Black Babylon.”66 French nuns groused in an 1860 report that not only did the roles of Mpongwé men change within the context of increased attention to trade, but a “certain emancipation modified in turn the Gabonese woman. Sly and prideful the gabonaise, used as a mistress by Europeans soon imposed on her male congeners the demands of her coquettishness, her nonchalance, and degradation.”67 It cannot be said that Mpongwé women voluntarily entered into intimate relationships with European men, in the same way that it cannot be said that marriage and sexual relationships between Mpongwé men and women did not involve some level of coercion. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Senegal, black and mixed-race women, often referred to as signares, who engaged in relationships with European merchants were able to amass wealth in property and slaves.68 Unlike the signares, there is little indication that Mpongwé women involved in interracial unions established independent homes, trading networks, or amassed immense wealth.69 As subsequent chapters will show, interracial domestic and sexual relationships between Mpongwé women and white men would continue to occur into the twentieth century, with some women accumulating independent wealth that would disrupt gender and generational hierarchies within Mpongwé communities.
Yet, to return to the story of Libreville in the nineteenth century, the mid-nineteenth century signaled a period of social dislocation, epidemic disease, economic change, and political flux along the coast in the Estuary region. It appears that by the 1840s the Mpongwé population had precipitously decreased. David Patterson cautions that demographic estimates for this period may reflect inaccuracies but indicates that it is probable that Mpongwé settlements experienced as much as a 50 percent decline in population between 1840 and 1860.70 A series of smallpox and other disease epidemics undoubtedly caused many deaths. Yet, downplaying factors such as these, European observers attributed the population decline to alcohol consumption, abortion, and venereal diseases that spread through polygyny and the prostitution of Mpongwé women. French Catholic observers portrayed the Mpongwé as “drunken, promiscuous, dishonest, and effete, a people obsessed with the lure of trade wealth and willing to do almost anything for a profit,” whose degeneration was due to their adoption of the vices of European civilization.71 The Estuary region also experienced a decline in trading fortunes. By the turn of the century, Cape Lopez supplanted it as the principal port of commercial activity, and new commercial centers such as Lambaréné emerged as European fortune seekers followed new nodes of trade upcountry and sought to bypass Mpongwé middlemen. A series of nuanced localized and regional historical processes set in motion a movement of persons toward the coast. These demographic shifts—the presence of new arrivals and the lessening numbers of Mpongwé residents—facilitated the gradual but not inevitable transition to colonial rule.
MIGRATION, MARRIAGE AND GENDER, AND THE TRANSITING TO COLONIAL RULE, 1840S–1899
As Mpongwé and Europeans converged along the coast, the migration of the Fang toward the Estuary was a phenomenon that would alter the social, political, and economic landscape of the region. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the demographic and ethnic makeup of the Estuary region began to be reordered, as were commercial networks and exchanges.72 How and why Fang groups migrated has been a topic of scholarly debate, yet most scholars agree that Fang migration commenced from the region of modern-day Cameroon.73 Fang clans migrated along the Woleu and N’Tem Rivers, down the Ogooué, and into the Gabon Estuary.74 Fang men who had previously hunted or procured forest goods that they transferred to Myènè middlemen now sought direct access to European traders. By the 1830s, the Fang appeared in the hinterlands of the Estuary region, near the Como River. Mpongwé kings, in turn, sought to protect their monopoly over direct access to European traders and consolidate their sphere of influence over smaller Mpongwé communities. Simultaneously, the French sought to overturn the dominance of British and German traders along the Gabon coast. Seeking to protect Mpongwé trading interests, King Denis signed a treaty in 1839 that granted the right to the French to construct “all buildings and fortifications” deemed necessary.75 In 1843, King Louis also signed a treaty of alliance with the French that permitted the establishment of a naval post on the Estuary’s right bank, paving the way for inland movement of French military personnel, traders, and missionaries.76 Even as the French declared the name of Libreville in 1849, varied African and European parties jockeyed for ascendancy over lucrative trade and political power.
The aspirations of Fang and European traders to bypass Mpongwé middlemen and directly engage in commercial exchanges eroded the Mpongwé monopoly as trade brokers. By 1853, French adventurer Compiègne reported that Fang scouts had arrived at the coast; in 1857, an American missionary reported that Fang had erected housing settlements on the Como River.77 European observers estimated the numbers of Fang who migrated over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century to be in the tens of thousands, but this was an exaggeration. Historians think the number was a maximum of a few thousand. French naval officers directed their aspirations for the imagined economic productivity of the nascent colony toward attracting Fang to locate villages near French posts and harnessing Fang labor. By the 1870s, European trading houses set up factories along inland fluvial systems, particularly along the Ogooué River, which facilitated the direct exchange of European and forest goods with Fang and other procurers. Many Mpongwé men now worked as managers of European factories that dotted the Ogooué or as traders who obtained European goods from the coast on credit and traveled inland to sell the goods in exchange for forest products.78 Libreville became the center of trade, where multinational trading houses set up their headquarters, and where the French set up a fledgling government in an attempt to wrest control over the heterogeneous collection of Africans and Europeans who circulated through the region. Residents of Fang villages located near Libreville engaged in limited day-today interaction with Europeans and often battled in violent skirmishes with French officials and Senegalese militia well into the early decades of the twentieth century.
The intersectionalities of marriage and economic production of newly arriving Fang communities also indelibly shaped the fabric of Libreville’s founding. The decentralization of political power, spatial dispersal of clans, and the mobility of villages were defining aspects of late nineteenth-century Fang sociopolitical organization.79 The basic social, religious, military, and economic unit of Fang societies was a family unit called the nda bôt.80 It included the founding patriarch, referred to as the ésa, his elderly relatives, his wives and children, his younger brothers, and his unmarried sisters and their illegitimate children. Each nda bôt was a self-sustaining economic and political unit, and members recognized only the authority of the ésa or other designated male leader.81 Each nda bôt claimed membership to a clan (ayon) in which members shared a male ancestor. The ésa exercised ultimate authority and arbitrated conflicts between those who belonged in his nda bôt, though external arbiters could settle interclan conflicts. Affiliation with a clan did not entail territorial or political centralization, but exogamy was observed among members of the same ayon in the maternal and paternal lines.82 Several nda bôt might inhabit a common geographical location that formed a village (nlam).
Among the ésa in a given village
