person who held permanent political power. “Chiefs” of given villages held temporary centralized power for purposes such as leading a group in war or to represent their interests in political or trade negotiations; another man could always assume leadership.83 Key factors that determined which men would be selected as leaders were their oratory skills and wealth in people. Thus, the chief was often the person who was referred to as the rich man (kouma) or the orator (nzôé) in his community.84
Labor in the small and readily mobile Fang settlements was divided along gender lines. Mobile kin groups searched for fertile land, following the paths of elephants and hunting trails, and by the beginning of the mid-nineteenth century, sought direct access to European traders and bypassed Mpongwé middlemen. When the soil was exhausted, an entire village would relocate, a practice that resulted in only five to ten years being spent in a given location.85 Once a clan decided upon a part of the forest to inhabit, during the dry season the men would clear the area of forest growth with machetes to make it habitable and agriculturally productive. Men were also responsible for defending the settlement, building the foundations of huts, doing the hunting, and, according to areas of specialization, forging iron or maintaining small livestock such as pigs and goats.86 Fang men who lived near the Estuary and Ogooué regions traded ivory and rubber with European traders for guns, cloth, metal objects, and beads.87 Women labored in shifting subsistence agriculture as they planted, maintained, and cultivated bananas, corn, peanuts, and the staple of manioc during the rainy seasons in plots located within walking distance from homesteads. Women might also maintain smaller gardens next to their homes in which they grew items such as tomatoes, yams, and eggplants.88 By the 1890s, Fang were the primary producers of food for the Estuary region as fewer Mpongwé farmed. Fang women carried baskets of manioc and plantains to sell in Libreville. Written sources mention nothing about the distribution of income in Fang households from the sale of produce. Historian Jeremy Rich conducted oral interviews in 2000 with Fang male informants who relayed that wives had to give all proceeds to their husbands, yet he doubts the veracity of these claims as they may reflect contemporary gender tensions over control of wealth. 89 Women also fished and assisted in the construction of homes by using branches to cover huts built by their husbands. The Fang did not employ domestic slavery nor directly participate in the transatlantic slave trade, although they did sell war captives, criminals, and debtors to traders of other ethnolanguage groups.90
It is challenging to portray the interior architecture of Estuary Fang households of the nineteenth century and the transformations in domestic politics given the limited availability of firsthand accounts. As with the Mpongwé, it appears that the transference of women in marriage facilitated commercial and political alliances between Fang men and households and between the Fang and other African communities. Marriage (aluk) among Fang was to be negotiated by male kin of the bride and groom. A woman would leave her family of origin to live with her husband once he had made a good-faith deposit on the agreed-upon bridewealth (nsua bikeng), but this marriage was only provisionary until he paid the entire amount. Nsua bikeng literally means “bridewealth of iron”; the payment of bikwela (ekwala in the singular), about four pieces of iron held together, was the standard payment prior to the incorporation of European goods into bridewealth in the late nineteenth century.91 This particular form of iron was not used for purposes other than a marriage payment. Gabonese historian A. Nguema Allogo underlines the value of iron for its rarity and that it symbolized the cohesion of two families joined by marriage, given that it could be procured only from collective labor.92 Prior to the transference of bridewealth, a woman could engage in sexual relations with men of her choosing. Marriage conferred adulthood. A man older than sixteen years old who remained single was called a nkoé, a pejorative term meaning a boy.93 Marriage transferred rights over a woman’s labor, sexual access, and reproductive capacities to the husband’s kin group, and through the practice of levirate, could become the wife of another man in her husband’s family should he pass away. As with the Mpongwé, a Fang husband could authorize sexual access to his wife to another man—including a guest in his home, a neighbor with whom he hoped to establish a promise of mutual aid by exchanging wives for a period of time, or an unmarried man in the village—in exchange for some form of compensation.94 As with the Mpongwé, a girl could be betrothed as early as infancy, though it was not usually until the age of seven or eight that she left her paternal house to become a part of her husband’s household. Given the sex-segregated living quarters of Fang compounds (abeng), the child bride resided in the quarters with other women in the household. Expected practice was that a husband would not begin to have sexual relations with his young wife until after she had reached her first menstrual cycle (ivoum).
Though fathers had the final authority in contracting marriages, there was a variety of ways in which daughters and sons could influence or subvert their decisions. Sometimes a father submitted to his daughter’s wishes if she refused a suitor.95 Though a father usually selected a son’s bride, a young man might approach his father and request a specific bride. Also, a young woman and man could undermine patriarchal authority through the practice of marriage by kidnapping (abom). The suitor would “kidnap” the woman, and her father or male guardian would then have to accept the bridewealth.96 Having many wives and children represented wealth, but few men could obtain this status. It was mainly “chiefs” who had “harems” of five to twenty wives, as noted by European observers in the 1870s.97 In fact, increased bridewealth expenses over the course of the nineteenth century made it difficult for many men to marry at all.
Escalating bridewealth expenses not only made it difficult for younger men to marry but also resulted in conflict between households if a husband proved unable to complete bridewealth payments after his wife had moved in with him. As was occurring in Mpongwé communities, imported goods displaced iron in the composition of bridewealth among Fang over the course of the nineteenth century. Moreover, bridewealth amounts among the Fang exceeded bridewealth costs in Mpongwé communities. For example, an 1875 bridewealth list for a Fang marriage in the Gabon Estuary consisted of one or two pieces of ivory, two or three goats or sheep, three or four baskets of spears, small Fang knives, small bars of iron, and indigenous salt, worth about 500 francs.98 Bridewealth might also include likis, currency made of iron that circulated among only the Fang. For better-off Fang communities who resided near trade factories or missions, bridewealth was composed mainly of imported goods valued at around 770 francs.99 Bridewealth payments could also include salt, cloth, tobacco, and gunpowder. Given the paucity of data about the costs of such goods, it is difficult to ascertain how much value this would hold if adjusted for inflation. However, commentary by European observers relays that Fang marriage payments of the era represented an enormous sum that would take young men years of labor in collecting rubber, ivory, or wood to exchange for the imported goods to compose bridewealth. Some armed skirmishes that broke out between villages near Libreville were the result of unpaid bridewealth. The wife’s kin would attempt to kidnap her or an unmarried woman from the son-in-law’s village as compensation if a husband defaulted on promised bridewealth. A French colonial administrator named Largeau recounted a particular outbreak of violence that resulted in fatalities among inhabitants of clashing villages in the 1890s. A husband had not completed the promised bridewealth ten years after his marriage. His wife was a prepubescent girl for whom an exorbitant bridewealth list had been demanded: 100 spears, 100 war knives, 50 trade knives, 20 mirrors, 30 small trade trunks, 3,000 iron links, 50 trade guns, 50 small barrels of gunpowder, 4 iron barrel covers, 40 earthen pots, 300 trade plates, 1 large canoe, 10 goats, 4 straw hats, 3 white trade shirts, 30 bunches of tobacco, 10 pieces of trade cloth, 12 bottles of liquor, and 4 dogs.100
Fang men, French missionaries argued, fought for, bartered, and sold women like chattel. Catholic missionaries and French observers described Fang women as “beasts of burden condemned to complete the most arduous work.”101 Having been “purchased” at a high cost, Fang women were subject to lives of servitude until their husbands abandoned them for younger wives once they reached old age and could no longer work or were postmenopausal.102
However,
