the war, the population only gradually increased, from 2,400 in 1920 to a little over 3,400 inhabitants in 1929. Drought and other ecological factors further diminished agricultural yields in the 1920s, and it was hard for residents to obtain food. From 1920 to 1921, the price for manioc nearly doubled, from 350 to 750 francs. Famine broke out again in 1922, further crippling population growth. With the exception of 1922, in which the numbers of men, women, and children were nearly equal, census figures suggest that women continued to dominate the town’s population figures. Children and men each constituted about 30 percent of Libreville’s population. Women represented about 40 percent of the town’s population in 1924 and 1929, outnumbering men. This was most likely due to several factors. Alcoholism may have contributed to the death of some men. The okoumé rush may have resulted in the out-migration of men to forestry concessions. Moreover, it is probable that many of the Fang communities in the city limits were polygamous households. The Estuary-Como region, the immediate rural suburbs of Libreville in which Fang communities lived in villages, also reflected a greater number of women. Its total population grew from 8,561 men and women in 1910 to a population of 25,822 men and women in 1916. The average number of women in these rural regions exceeded the number of men by about 2,000.48 The currents of historical change in early twentieth-century Libreville entailed the processes of women and men shaping the meaning of town life in the era of timber and the consolidation of colonial rule.
Implementing centralized political control, directing where Africans would live, and controlling labor and economic resources would prove challenging for colonial officials, in part because of the sheer diversity of African societies that belied French conceptions of a singular “African” colonial subject. Libreville’s African population was a heterogeneous population with distinct cleavages in ethnicity, wealth, social status, and the degree to which they had adapted European mores. West Africans from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ghana worked as agents for various trading companies and as storekeepers, and hundreds of Senegalese tirailleurs circulated in and out of Libreville as they policed the colony. As at the founding of Libreville, the African population originating from Equatorial Africa within the city’s boundaries was predominantly Myènè, particularly Mpongwé. Mpongwé viewed themselves as superior to Fang societies who lived on the outskirts of Libreville. In addition to educational offerings afforded by American Protestant and French Catholic missionaries, Mpongwé boys could attend the secular state-operated school that sought to train students in French and basic math in preparation for jobs as writers and clerks for the colonial government and French trading companies.50
PHOTO 2.1. Village of Louis, ca. 1900. (Reproduced from a postcard in the personal collection of Patrick Ceillier, Saint-Malo, France.)49
Gabrielle Vassal, a French woman who was accompanying her civil servant husband to Brazzaville, stopped in Libreville for a few days in 1923. She was struck by the degree to which Libreville’s residents, meaning the Mpongwé, had adopted European cultural norms, remarking that “all the natives seemed to speak and understand French,” and that she found in “the natives of Libreville a veneer of civilization not to be found in the rest of Equatorial Africa nor in the hinterland of Gabon itself.”51 Libreville’s residents readily adopted the sartorial accouterments of Europeans, with African men wearing pith helmets. Vassal noted, “Natives passing by politely took off their hats (their chief reason for desiring a hat is to be able to imitate the white man).”52 Men wore shorts and shirts tailored from imported cloth. Mpongwé lived in neighborhoods such as Louis and Glass (named after nineteenth-century kings). Townspeople constructed houses on stilts to offer protection from flooding. Local raffia palms provided the materials for the roofs and planks for the walls of the houses, which featured wraparound verandas.53
An Mpongwé girl divided her time between domestic tasks at home and small-scale agricultural production that supplemented families’ diets. The daughters of elite families attended the school for girls that had been operated by the Soeurs Bleues since the late nineteenth century. Between 1916 and 1921, annual enrollment of boarding school pupils increased from 23 to 32 girls, and each year about 66 girls were day school students.54 The curriculum included instruction in basic reading and writing in French, morality, hygiene, the domestic arts, housekeeping, and sewing, skills that supported the nuns’ intention for the girls to be dutiful wives in monogamous marriages to Christian African men. Yet the Catholic efforts to mold a certain type of Mpongwé girl proved problematic. In a 1916 report, a nun characterized the typical student as follows: “The Gabonese student is talkative and vain. She has a difficult character and often sulks.”55 Many times girls’ families withdrew them from school or girls walked out and returned home, likely due to the conditions of beatings and their forced labor in fields and in cleaning the mission.56
Mpongwé women were consummate purchasers of imported cloth and European adornment.57 Vassal opined that “the native women with their gay-coloured cloths wound tightly round their supple bodies from breasts to knees had here a nonchalant, satisfied appearance which contrasted with the dreary impassive expressions we had seen in other ports.”58 British colonial civil servant Frederick Migeod, who traveled to Libreville in the early 1920s, described Mpongwé as “civilized,” speaking multiple European languages, well-educated, and “clean,” with the women often bathing themselves with soap several times a day.59
Libreville’s African populations were avid consumers of imported goods. Articles off-loaded from ships and sold in stores operated by European trading companies (factories) included tobacco, sewing machines, knives, pots, beads, belts, cloth, and manufactured clothes—shirts, hats, men’s boots, espadrilles, and women’s shoes.60 Townspeople readily incorporated European foodstuffs into their diets. Sugar, butter, rice, spirits and wine, preserves, and canned milk were part of daily intake.61 A 1928 annual report recorded that there were at least a half dozen bakeries in the town, and Africans were the main customers.62 Libreville residents viewed themselves as sophisticated and cosmopolitan, with men and women sporting European-style clothing and parading their fashions in Sunday strolls along the Ocean Boulevard or at public Bastille Day celebrations.
PHOTO 2.2. Maritime Boulevard, ca. 1927. (Reproduced from a postcard in the personal collection of Patrick Ceillier.)63
The Estuary region’s thin population density worried French colonial officials and businessmen, who were eager to increase Libreville’s African population and harness the labor of Fang communities. Colonial personnel, who viewed Mpongwé as “lazy” people who refused to perform manual labor, looked toward African societies other than Mpongwé to populate the town. In a 1916 report, the governor outlined efforts to draw people from the interior regions to Libreville and receive primary education at the state school so that they could increase the number of African auxiliaries from Gabon’s varied ethnic groups. He urged the subdivision heads from interior regions to send their most serious students to Libreville for schooling, where they would receive a scholarship.64
Officials worried about how to exact greater control over “elusive” Fang populations living in the forested suburbs of Libreville.65 Fang populations circulated in and out of Libreville to sell agricultural products and fish, sell forest products for export, purchase imported goods, and to seek out medical services from the French, but often eluded French efforts to extract forced labor and taxes. Frederick Migeod traveled through some Fang Estuary villages and described the houses as composed of raffia palm and flattened bark; he also noted that everything was laid out in “perfectly straight lines,” of houses, trees, and streets.67 In comparing Fang to Mpongwé, Migeod viewed Fang as “a dirty race” whose women “make no pretention to ornamental dress,” with some tattooing and red
