In 1929, the global Depression made its way to Gabon, resulting in the near stoppage of timber production and a loss of work and money for Libreville residents. Through these fluctuations, a heterogeneous collection of African and European communities settled in, sojourned through, and departed from Libreville. Questions of urban planning regarding housing, health and hygiene, tax collection, work, policing, and governance were on the minds of state personnel and new and old residents alike. Couched in such questions were the dynamics of sexuality and marriage, between African women and men and between African women and European men.
An unintended consequence of economic shifts and the circulation of people through Libreville between 1910 and 1929 was that women’s sexuality provided paths for the generation of wealth in material goods and money. As had occurred in the nineteenth century, interracial sexual and domestic relationships between Mpongwé women and European men proliferated. Mpongwé men brokered such relationships for female dependents, often daughters who had received some formal French education. Some relationships were short-term sexual encounters and others long-term domestic and sexual relationships that Mpongwé societies viewed as marriages. These relationships occurred along local conjugal-sexual mores and were mutually beneficial for African and European societies. Some women accrued independent property and monetary wealth through interracial relationships, thereby disrupting hierarchies of gender and generation with elder kin and chiefs. Moreover, many Mpongwé women exercised a political voice, using their literacy to protest against colonial efforts to exact greater political and economic control over Libreville’s African communities. By World War I and its aftermath, some groups of elite African men, chiefs, and colonial officials—made anxious by the social mobility that some black and mixed-race women involved in interracial unions achieved—sought to limit the occurrences of interracial unions. For some Fang women, compensation for having sexual relations with West African men and Fang migrant laborers provided a means for their husbands and male kin to obtain cash to meet colonial tax directives.
Over the course of these first two decades of the existence of French Equatorial Africa (FEA), Gabon continued to experience population decline, diminished birth rates, and increased mortality. French colonial state and society settled upon African women’s sexual promiscuity and increased divorce as reflective of the “disorganization of the African family.” In Libreville, regulating African sexuality, particularly that of African women, in order to populate and safeguard social and biological reproduction in the colony was to become a key and contested process of urban planning and state-building.
POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS: COLONIAL CONSOLIDATION AND OKOUMÉ, 1910–1929
Understanding the transformations in the manifestations of and anxieties about African women’s sexuality involves tracing the transformations in politics, economics, and demography that swept through the Estuary region. Following the official “on-paper” creation of French Equatorial Africa in 1910, the French endeavored to place an infrastructure for colonial rule over the colony of Gabon and its capital city. These efforts encompassed four means: (1) to complete the task of military conquest; (2) to establish geographic boundaries and delineate where Africans could live; (3) to facilitate governance through appointing French and African personnel; and (4) to direct the economic activities of Gabon’s population toward French profits. In the first ten years of FEA’s existence, political control beyond the Estuary region was tenuous. French officers and Senegalese tirailleurs (colonial infantry) mounted numerous campaigns to temper varied insurgencies in the interior. While southern Gabon remained relatively free of armed resistance to colonial rule, it was not until 1925 that insurgent Fang populations in the northern region of Woleu-Ntem ceded to colonial governance.4
Following the task of military conquest, colonial officials endeavored to divide the colony into administrative units and set up a political hierarchy of French personnel and African chiefs and civil servants who were to be auxiliaries in military defense, civil governance, and economic mobilization.5 The colony was divided into civil circumscriptions (circonscriptions), which were further divided into numerous subdivisions. The French subdivision heads reported to the circumscription leader, who then reported to the governor’s Office of Political and Administrative Affairs. Libreville sat in the Gabon-Como Estuary circumscription and was both the capital city of the colony of Gabon and the principal administrative center of the Estuary circumscription. As in French Occidental (West) Africa (FOA), administrators could maintain political control through the indigénat, a policy that allowed the imprisonment or other punishment of Africans without any judicial proceedings.6 By 1920, colonial personnel had put in place a system of African chieftaincy. In rural areas, French personnel appointed elder and often illiterate men to preside over administrative and territorial units classified in descending geographic territories called canton, terre, and tribu.7 Chiefs’ duties were ostensibly to conduct censuses, collect taxes, and recruit labor for colonial public works projects, and they had the authority to imprison those who failed to pay taxes or respond to forced-labor projects.8 Administrators sought to make the French presence more felt throughout the colony, increasing the numbers of colonial officials who could undertake frequent tours around circumscriptions to persuade local chiefs’ collaboration in these efforts.9
The infrastructure of governance in Libreville and its hinterlands was to reflect centralized political control in the colony’s administrative capital. The Estuary circumscription was composed of the capital city of Libreville and rural areas within a few days’ journey on foot or via riverways, Cocobeach to the west and Kango in the north. Libreville was governed by an administrator-mayor who was assisted by a commission of three French civil servants or private citizens plus one African.10 However, echoing the rest of the colony, turnover of Libreville’s French personnel was frequent.11 As early as 1906, the military commander appointed five chiefs in Libreville to collect taxes and mediate civil conflicts among African communities.12 African men who had received some basic French education, primarily Mpongwé, worked as civil servant clerks in varied administrative offices.13
MAP 2.1. Administrative Division of Gabon, 1916. (Reproduced from Christopher Gray, Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa, 178.)
Rocked by the insolvency of the concessionary period and suffering from tepid funding from mainland France, colonial officials sought to maximize the colony’s local revenues.14 By 1908, administrators required taxes to be paid in currency, not in kind, in an effort to compel Africans to work for wages in the colonial economy.15 In 1910, the colonial state decreed that women in the Estuary region were also to pay taxes in addition to men; each woman was to pay 2 francs, while men were to pay 5 francs.16 Only children, the elderly, the infirm, soldiers, and colonial clerks were exempt from the tax. By the end of World War I, the colonial currency of the franc was in circulation, and this was changed to CFA (Communauté Financière Africaine) franc coins and notes after 1945.17 By 1920, individual tax rates had increased to 10 francs for Estuary residents, while tax rates remained at 3 to 5 francs elsewhere in the colony.18 Another new policy was that of forced labor. Beginning in 1915, each able-bodied adult man was to give seven days of work per year on public works projects or could buy out his days of forced labor at the rate of one-half franc per day.19
The historiography of 1910s and 1920s Gabon has emphasized these decades as “the timber era.”20 The increased export of okoumé wood changed the colony and the Estuary region’s fortunes, landscape, and peopling. The expansion of the timber industry had begun with the consolidation of FEA, with timber exports tripling between 1910 and 1913. The okoumé industry stagnated during World War I, when there was a near standstill in trade, but increased to unprecedented heights thereafter.21 Africans and Europeans alike rushed to forests in southern Gabon to work in the timber industry, the moment of the okoumé rush that characterized the 1920s.
In
