purely commercial or political or functions of patriarchy, but tenuous social relations between individuals and groups that fluctuated between perpetuating and upsetting hierarchies of power. A husband’s rights over his wife did not appear to be immutable but provisional, dependent upon his desire to remain in the marriage, his wife’s desire to remain in or leave the marriage, and the volition of both kin groups. As was the case for Mpongwé women, even though Fang women appeared to be passive objects before groups of competing men, it was women’s actions that precipitated the skirmishes. A wife’s desertion of the conjugal home challenged the notion that she had been “sold” and could no longer negotiate rights in her person. A wife who was “kidnapped” by a lover was usually complicit in her displacement from her father’s or husband’s home. The wife’s engagement in extramarital sex called into question the idea that her husband’s remittance of bridewealth granted him control over her sexuality.
However, a husband could subject his wife to bodily harm in order to extract a confession if he suspected her of adultery or as a punishment if his suspicions turned out to be correct.103 Over the course of the nineteenth century, Fang husbands could turn to violence against their wives’ lovers to avenge ther wives’ adultery and seek economic compensation as a public means of rectifying the offense. Should the lover be a man who lived in a different village, the adultery could lead to war between villages; it was not only the lover who was at fault, but his entire village. The husband could kidnap and hold hostage livestock, girls, married women, or men living in the lover’s village until amends were made. This action frequently resulted in a series of fatal reprisals between villages.104 A recorded payment for an instance of adultery in the 1870s was about 30 francs’ worth of goods; for example, one trade gun, five portions of gunpowder, and a piece of cloth or livestock.105
As among the Mpongwé, men and women alike could initiate divorce, and this could be resolved through multiple forums, though seeking a divorce was often a prolonged process. One option for a wife who could not or did not wish to leave her marriage, but sought to alter her husband’s behavior, was to deliver a public curse on him. French observer Largeau emphasized the gravity of the curse—the husband would not be able to marry other wives nor succeed in any economic enterprises without having been publicly forgiven by his wife.106 A man could repudiate his wife, send her back to her village (a suu minga jan) on grounds that she did not adhere to the behavior expected of a wife—perhaps she engaged in witchcraft, was disobedient or lacked respect for her husband, or was sterile.107
Like Mpongwé women, a Fang woman’s success in obtaining a divorce depended on seeking refuge and support in her father’s house. She needed to obtain the consent of the senior male family members—particularly the person who had received bridewealth (nya ndômô)—to represent her case for dissolution.108 Women could claim divorce on grounds of excessive brutalization, witchcraft, or insult to her birth family by her husband or his kin. If the nya ndômô found another suitor to agree to reimburse the first husband’s bridewealth, the marriage could be terminated more easily. If a father sent his daughter back to her husband and she fled again without anyone reimbursing her husband, a violent clash between villages could result. A husband sometimes attempted to exact revenge by killing a member of his wife’s village, and the father of the wife in question was obligated to compensate the family members of those who had been killed.109 Another avenue for a wife who wished to leave a marriage was to allow herself to be kidnapped by another man; her father was then responsible for reimbursing the first husband. Thus, it appears that Fang women had means at their disposal to rupture marital contracts or influence their rapport with their husbands.
The historical landscape of conjugal-sexual politics from the mid-nineteenth century through the turn of that century was neither a story of the unmitigated patriarchal hold of men over women nor a celebratory tale of women’s social and economic autonomy prior to colonial rule. Rather, the portrait is one of a mobile terrain of relationships of power. Tracing the intersections of the town’s founding, and trade and politics, with questions of sexual economy demonstrates the fluidity of how men and women formulated and reformulated their relationships with one another, a fluidity that would carry over well into the colonial period.
CONCLUSION
Fifteen years after the founding of Libreville, the French presence in the town had barely expanded. The underfunded and modest nature of the colonial presence in late nineteenth-century Libreville foreshadowed the uneven nature of colonial rule through the twentieth century.110 In 1861, a British traveler described the colonial trading post (comptoir) as in a rather desultory state, noting a ship docked in the Estuary to provide defense; Fort d’Aumale, which housed naval officers and also served as the hospital; a few “wood huts” surrounding the fort that housed administrative personnel; and the Saint Mary Catholic mission and a convent for the Soeurs Bleues.111 The French had not been able to establish either political or commercial ascendancy in the colony. A few feet away from Fort d’Aumale stood the trading houses of mainly German and British merchants. In 1875, the staff of colonial administration consisted of four people on a budget of 72,000 francs.112
In spite of the lack of a visible built environment of colonial society and state, colonial rule in Gabon was also marked by violence. In 1899, the French Congo was divided into about forty concession companies, with each land area roughly the size of France. The insolvent colony of Gabon was parceled into territories controlled by private concession companies. The brutal concessionary system unleashed further instability in a period already characterized by social fluctuation. In exchange for retaining exclusive rights over agricultural and industrial exploitation of their territories—mainly the exploitation of rubber and ivory—companies would give the state a percentage of their profits.113 By the turn of the century, the brutalities inflicted upon African populations in the French Congo became public and created scandal internationally and in France.114 The collection of rubber and other forest products under conditions of forced labor and violence resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, disease, and the decrease in agricultural production that contributed to massive food shortages and famine.
The creation of the French Equatorial Africa federation in 1910 signaled the attempt to enforce centralized colonial state control over Gabon’s diverse African communities and European men on the spot. The paucity of documentation of the period of concessionary rule means that we can know little about domestic politics in the Estuary region in these years. Yet, as the French attempted to transition from colonial conquest to colonial rule, townspeople’s shifting aspirations toward emerging forms of marriage and sexual relationships shaped transformations in political economy, and changes in politics and economics shaped domestic relationships in the next century of Libreville’s existence.
2
Libreville in the Era of Timber, 1910–1929
FROM 1910 TO 1929, the Estuary region witnessed vast social, economic, and political upheaval. Libreville was transformed from a fledgling colonial outpost characterized by interdependent African and European exchanges to a colonial capital city. The French endeavored to expand and rationalize colonial rule; the town was to be the headquarters from which the French could broadcast political control over the colony. Beginning in the 1910s and reaching a height in the mid-1920s, global markets clamored for Gabon’s okoumé wood, sparking the industry that was to become Gabon’s primary economic activity through political independence from French colonial rule in 1960.1 Greater numbers of Fang from northern Gabon migrated toward Libreville and other regions in southern Gabon to profit from the economic opportunities. Yet demographic decline and social disruption and dislocation brewed beneath the veneer of economic prosperity. Ecological disasters, food shortages, disease epidemics, and socioeconomic insecurity also arose.2 The French extracted increased labor, raw products, and money from Estuary residents to fund the campaigns of
