African communities was an affair of kin, men and women alike, and involving entire villages. The years of 1920–1924 saw an era of African “free wood-cutters.” Anyone with an ax could cut down okoumé trees to sell to European trading houses.22 Colonial reports relay that Fang men were turning away from “traditional” labor in hunting, fishing, and cutting down brush to focus solely on lending services as tree fellers.23 Taking about one month’s worth of labor, a clan leader managed a workforce of kin—wives, children, nephews, brothers, and other dependents—and then floated the logs to European trading locations that began to dot Gabon’s rivers.24 Rivers were key to the okoumé economy, as the waterways provided an exit and transportation route for the trees to reach the coast for export. Free woodcutters could accept the purchasing price of a given European buyer or refuse it and try to sell to another.25 In 1924, a head of a convoy of free woodcutters could earn the equivalent of 75–130 francs per person on his team for a period of work felling a tree.26 In the regions of the Bas-Ogooué and Ogooué, but also in the Estuary region, where a confluence of forests and rivers existed, subdivision heads reported a veritable “okoumé fever,” and that entire villages had abandoned their settlements in the bush and agricultural cultivation to work in felling timber.27
Historians Christopher Gray and Francois Ngolet have argued that the mid-1920s ushered in the decline of an economy in which Africans controlled their terms of engagement and work into an “economy of exploitation” in which African laborers lost the means to determine the nature, duration, and remuneration of their labor.28 European forestry societies came to hold control over the timber industry.29 Several factors contributed to this. First, the French more regularly implemented policies that required permits to cut wood and gain access to specific areas of forest plotted on maps.30 Only French businesses with significant capital could afford the fees for permits of larger hectares. Furthermore, increased mechanization in cutting down and transporting wood resulted in the hiring of European workers to man machinery, while African laborers were hired to float logs along interior waterways toward the ocean, more manual and dangerous yet lower-paid work.31 The amount of money that a wage laborer earned per month, 40 francs plus food rations, was lower than what a free woodcutter could earn for a month’s labor, which was about 70 francs.32
In contrast to the era of free woodcutting that involved the labor of men and women linked by ties of affinity, timber production from the mid-1920s stimulated migrant labor of Fang men and other ethnic groups toward southern Gabon. Thousands of Gabonese men migrated from interior regions to timber yards looking for work and money. Though the lower Ogooué region and areas around Lambaréné were the hubs of the timber industry, the Estuary region was a key center of forestry as well, housing a number of timber concessions in its hinterlands. A new site of living and work occupied the landscape: the timber yard. One of the largest in the Estuary region employed forty Europeans and fifteen hundred Africans, and was composed of separate African and European villages, with stores selling durable goods, silos filled with rice, and fish and agricultural goods for purchase.33 Libreville also housed the administrative headquarters of forestry and trading companies of varied European nationalities.
Historian Clotaire Messi Me Nang described the typical timber yard as a “monstrous devourer of men.”34 Work in timber camps was rough and dangerous—poor living and working conditions and little regulation contributed to the deaths of laborers, who were sometimes recruited through violence.35 Workers frequently abandoned contracts with complaints of insufficient food rations, beatings to compel them to work, and long workdays of twelve hours or more. Few worksites employed medical personnel, and workers died from illnesses such as sleeping sickness, beriberi, leprosy, and dysentery.36 In spite of these precarious conditions, okoumé wood continued to be king and was the sector of the colonial economy that employed the largest number of Gabonese laborers.37
By the end of the 1920s, nearly all economic production within African communities along the northern and southern Gabon coasts depended directly or indirectly on the timber industry.38 The okoumé rush supported the growth of other types of enterprises, with some Africans self-employed as transporters or owners of bars.39 Though few Mpongwé entered the industry as manual wage laborers, some Mpongwé men obtained new avenues of wage work as clerks, interpreters, and in finance. Though timber companies were owned by the French, the mid-1920s did appear to be a period of “extraordinary prosperity” for the state, French businessmen, and some Africans who worked in timber exploitation, as well as for the predominantly Fang village settlements near timber camps, who provided secondary services such as cultivating and selling agricultural products to feed the workers of timber camps.40
URBAN PLANNING AND THE HUMAN GEOGRAPHY OF LIBREVILLE, 1910–1929
Though the historiography of early twentieth-century Gabon has focused much attention on men and the expansion of the okoumé economy in the evolution of Libreville and the Estuary region, women were a key factor in the city’s demographic and socioeconomic evolution in the timber era. As male migrants populated the timber yards of the Estuary region, the population of the city of Libreville and villages of the region reflected gender parity and included a critical mass of children. Figure 2.1 outlines available census data for the city of Libreville from 1912 to 1929. Records do not detail how colonial officials determined who counted as a child, man, woman, or elderly person, yet these numbers are useful for outlining a generational and gender portrait of the town’s residents.
Census numbers suggest sharp increases and decreases in Libreville’s population in the first two decades of FEA’s existence. Through the fluctuations of Libreville’s population, these numbers suggest that Libreville was effectively a “city of women.” African women equaled or outnumbered African men, with the exception of the years 1916 and 1922, in which there appeared to be nominally more men than women. From 1912 to 1916, the beginning of expansion years for the okoumé industry and its decline during World War I, the population of the city gradually increased and peaked at 4,077 people. Fang clans, made up of men, women, and kin linked by affinity in polygamous households, contributed to the population growth. It appears that children were a significant portion of Libreville’s population, as high as about 30% in 1916.
FIGURE 2.1. Population of the City of Libreville, 1912–192941 -Statistics not available for this year
As World War I continued and the French fought battles with Germans in neighboring Cameroon, economic constraints, disease, and food shortages decimated Libreville’s population, which decreased by 31 percent from 1916 to 1918. The population whom the French counted as permanent residents remained at less than three thousand people for nearly a decade to come. Yet, between 1914 and 1916, two to four thousand conscripts from throughout the colony—porters, laborers, and soldiers—took up residence in camps immediately outside Libreville. 42 With the influx of people and the resulting demand for agricultural produce, food prices increased as farmers could not produce greater yields.43 A series of food shortages that began in 1917 culminated in full-scale famine in 1918 and again in 1922.44 Germany had been the main trading partner and recipient of Gabonese wood. The stoppage of trade with Germany and the reduction of ships in ports resulted in a near standstill in the export of timber and a shortage of goods available for purchase.45 Prices increased dramatically for imported items such as salt, soap, tobacco, and pots that had become essential for quotidian existence.46 In spite of this shortage of cash, the colonial state increased taxes from an individual rate of 3 francs in 1914 to 10 francs in 1918 or equivalent amounts of palm oil, rubber, or wood.47 Furthermore, epidemics of sleeping sickness and men dying or fleeing from conscription and portage contributed to the population decrease. The most drastic demographic loss in Libreville’s population seems to have been in terms of the numbers
