men who worked as clerks or interpreters differentiated themselves from other Fang by wearing a European trouser and shirt.
PHOTO 2.3. Bastille Day celebration, 1929. (Reproduced from a postcard in the personal collection of Patrick Ceillier.)66
Though they lived on the outskirts, Fang were essential to Libreville as they cultivated the agricultural produce that fed the city’s African and European inhabitants. Fang women, the principal farmers, worked daily on individual cropland plots. In contrast to Mpongwé women, whom European observers described as independent and exhibiting a certain liberty, Fang women were portrayed as “beasts of burden” and “veritable slaves,” who toiled in farming and then walked to town carrying thirty to forty kilograms of produce in baskets on their backs with a band around the forehead that helped stabilize the loads.69 Fang women sold the produce in markets to African and European purchasers and reportedly gave their husbands the money. While Migeod and other European observers rarely recorded Mpongwé women carrying children, the Fang woman always had her child with her, with “the babies carried on the right hip. One woman I noticed with a big basket on her back, had a child too big to carry on her hip, so she had it astride her shoulders above the basket.”70 As hunters and fishermen, Fang men procured the little meat present in the diets of Estuary residents.71 While most Estuary Fang communities lived outside of what colonial officials recognized as Libreville’s boundaries, some clans did move within Libreville in the 1910s and 1920s, further fueling the concerns of French personnel about how to maintain social control over townspeople and manage Libreville’s built environment.
French efforts to consolidate political power in Libreville involved attempts to expand European living, business, and administrative quarters. Executing this urban planning entailed displacing African communities who occupied land desired by the French. Mpongwé and Fang societies refuted French conceptions of urban planning on the grounds of gender, clan and ethnic differentiation, and rights to land and to construct their own housing. Early administrators sought to diminish Libreville’s nineteenth-century landscape of Africans and Europeans living in close proximity. Between 1912 and 1913, military officers expelled Fang who had been living near the military fort in order to create the area named the “plateau” that was to serve as the segregated European administrative and residential neighborhood.72 The French envisioned that they would segregate Africans into distinct neighborhoods by ethnicity and designated plots of land. Yet, in June 1912, a group of Fang men refused to move from the designated plateau area into a single area of the city that was to serve as the Fang neighborhood. In a letter to the mayor, these men refused on the grounds that Fang clans were not part of a single collectivity and were distinct from one another. Such close proximity to other Fang groups, the men argued, would encourage their wives’ infidelity.73 The mayor accused government-employed Fang of being at the head of the revolt and punished some of the protesters for their refusal.74 Mpongwé communities also protested French urban-planning efforts to displace them from land on which they lived, as well as against new colonial restrictions on economic and educational privileges that they previously held. Parallel to protests by Fang men, a group of Mpongwé writers and clerks in the colonial service wrote letters to French officials against the 1912 urban plan, claiming that their descent from Mpongwé kings gave them ancestral rights to the land.75
Libreville’s Mpongwé residents viewed themselves as equal to whites and chafed against French colonial efforts to categorize them as “natives” (indigènes), colonial subjects who had few economic and educational privileges. After the creation of FEA, administrators expelled the Saint Gabriel Fathers who had been providing secondary education to Mpongwé students. In 1918, some Mpongwé men founded a branch of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme in Libreville. League members wrote letters to colonial officials asking for the return of the Saint Gabriel Fathers to provide secondary school education and for Gabon to be autonomous from the new FEA, which members viewed as a turning point in which new racialist attitudes of the French emerged.76 That same year, a group called the Professional Association of African Native Employees, composed of West Africans and Myènès, lobbied against the lower salaries that African civil servants received in comparison to French employees.77 While in exile in Senegal and France in the 1920s, discontented Mpongwé elite men published the newspaper L’Echo Gabonais, later called La Voie Coloniale, to decry increased colonial taxes and limitations on education.78 The letter and newspaper campaigns against tax increases, reductions in educational opportunities, and low salaries, what the authors interpreted as racial discrimination, did little to stop such colonial directives. Nevertheless, these campaigns do demonstrate moments in which varied constituencies of Libreville’s African residents coalesced to forward alternative visions of the town life imagined by the French.
Recalcitrance toward French urban-planning efforts continued into the 1920s, and the diagrams and maps created by several architects of what Libreville should look like went unimplemented.79 Forecasting what other European observers would note later in the twentieth century, visitors in the 1920s described the city as dominated by the naturally occurring—rather than a built—environment.80 Gabrielle Vassal’s impressions of the town were of a sleepy seaside hamlet: “huge trees left standing, either isolated or in clusters about the town, the overgrown path, the spaces abandoned to the undergrowth of coarse grass and tangled bushes give a picturesque appearance to the town.”81 As his ship approached Libreville, Frederick Migeod summarized the view as, “the northern bank being hilly, though the hills were of no great height, while the southern bank was covered with mangroves. The town lies spread out three miles along the north side of the Estuary.” He also noted that the town was “pretty,” with palm, mango, coconut, and almond trees along its avenues.82 He signaled, as would urban planners to come for several decades, that the town was swampy and needed better drainage. There was only one road of four miles along which the only car owned by a European could traverse. He repeated the perpetual complaint that Libreville was an unhealthy place for Europeans, noting the low availability of meat, and because there was “no real segregation from the natives,” which resulted in whites’ being diseased.83 Africans lived in a variety of huts constructed of materials ranging from straw and bark to cloth. Libreville remained a rather unplanned city.
Though the French endeavored to consolidate colonial rule, hegemony was on a shoestring in Libreville in the first decade of FEA’s existence.84 A lack of colonial personnel, poor infrastructure, low population density, and the topography of dense forests and winding waterways provided shelter for Fang communities who wished to escape colonial control and enter into and leave Libreville at will.85 Furthermore, townspeople, insisting upon differentiation by clan, gender, ethnicity, and social status, claimed rights to housing and to shape the physical geography of the town, as well as to retain control over the wealth that their labor generated. Nevertheless, the expansion of colonial control was transformative, adding new political power brokers such as chiefs, diminishing some of the prestige that Mpongwé male elites held, and bringing about new economic opportunities and constraints with the export of Gabonese timber to global markets. These political and economic transformations shaped gender, marriage, and sexual relationships, and Estuary residents shaped the contours of historical change in their interpersonal relationships.
INTERRACIAL RELATIONSHIPS, PROSTITUTION, AND PROTEST: GENDER AND GENERATIONAL HIERARCHIES REORDERED
As Libreville was transformed from a nineteenth-century trading port to a colonial capital city, interracial sexual relationships, variably referred to by historical actors as “prostitution,” “debauchery,” or “marriage,” continued. Though the numbers of French women in colonies elsewhere in the French Empire increased after World War I, few traveled to FEA. In 1900, of 130 whites in Libreville, only 28 were women.86 By 1910, the European population of Libreville slowly grew to 200 people and remained at that level for the next twenty years. By 1931, about 1,300 Europeans lived throughout
