and electricity, a lack of roads, and the small number of colonial personnel as making FEA unsuitable for women and children. Interracial relationships were prevalent in urban centers—Libreville, Lambaréné, and Port-Gentil—where European adventurers, traders, and government personnel converged.88 Myènè peoples, particularly the Mpongwé, established a monopoly in sexual-domestic unions with Europeans.
It is challenging to quantify the extent of interracial relationships. According to early twentieth-century missionary and colonial records, nearly every Mpongwé family sent their daughters to engage in relationships with European men. A 1914 letter by the governor of Gabon to the governor-general of FEA indicated that attached was a sixty-nine-page report listing the names of women engaged in interracial relationships and the names and ages of their mixed-race children. But the referenced report is missing from the archives.89 Interracial relationships of Mpongwé women and European men continued beyond Gabon’s borders. As French soldiers traveled toward Cameroon to fight Germans during World War I, Mpongwé women followed them. In a 1914 report, the governor complained that women native to Libreville were clandestinely leaving to carry out a “licentious life.”90 In a 1915 letter to superiors in France, a Catholic priest stationed in Libreville bemoaned the difficulty of cultivating monogamous Christian marriages among the region’s African communities, as well as among the European residents. Father Matrou, from the Sainte Marie missionary station, conveyed in his letter that “the presence of Europeans in Libreville and their dubious morality has introduced the commonplace existence of temporary unions between blacks and whites; this [is a] pernicious example.”91 Citing a 1918 colonial political report (the document is now missing from the archives), Georges Balandier wrote that of the 935 African women of marriageable age, as many as 400 remained single. Of these single women, 65 “cohabited with European men” and 100 lived by “prostitution.”92 Balandier did not detail if those categorized as living by prostitution engaged with white or African men or perhaps both. However, given the disdain that Mpongwé expressed toward Fang, it is likely that the women’s clients were Europeans and, if African, originated from West Africa. That about one-half of Mpongwé women were not married in 1918 is a vast change from Mpongwé women of the previous generation, for whom normative societal expectations were of universal marriage for men and women. Several factors likely diminished the possibility of Mpongwé women marrying Mpongwé men: mores of consanguinity that limited the available pool of marriage partners, the diminished numbers of Mpongwé men, and the presence of European men unaccompanied by European women.93 Gabrielle Vassal maintained that Libreville women “exercise a charm on Europeans” and “they are quite unlike all other native women throughout this vast colony, who admire and envy them.”94 It does not appear that every Mpongwé woman was in an interracial union, but that interracial domestic and sexual relationships between Mpongwé women and white men were commonplace.
Mpongwé and some Europeans described interracial sexual and domestic relationships that lasted over the course of months or years as “marriages.” It appears that women’s engagements in interracial relationships were family affairs. Male kin—fathers, uncles, or brothers—often initiated, sanctioned, and brokered Mpongwé women’s relationships. Missionaries noted that it was sometimes mothers who incited their daughters to enter interracial unions, which was in keeping with Mpongwé practices in which a woman’s mother had some influence in determining whom and when her daughter married.95 Many women’s families required that European men give them bridewealth, the jural and social confirmation of a relationship as a marriage in Mpongwé customary practice. Simone Agnoret Iwenga St. Denis, an Mpongwé woman with a mixed-race father, recounted the setting up of her grandmother’s union: “We demanded from the Norwegian white man to give bridewealth. He did this. It’s only following this that my grandmother began to regularly go to the man’s house.”96
Based on interviews with French businessmen and colonial personnel who had traveled to Gabon after World War I, French journalist France Renucci published a fictionalized account of an interracial relationship in Libreville. In the book Souvenirs de femmes, a newly disembarked French banker in 1920s Libreville accompanied colleagues to the home of his potential wife and her family, declaring his desire to marry “in the Gabonese way.”97 The young woman’s father initially refused the Frenchman’s request, needing to first consult with his wife. The mother responded with her demands for bridewealth: a demijohn of wine, a colored umbrella, bags of rice, packets of sugar, a dog, and 500 francs.98 This list represented a combination of luxury items, such as the umbrella and sugar, and basic items, such as the rice, which supplemented the family’s diet in times of low harvest.99 It would have taken an Mpongwé man several years to amass such a bundle of goods and currency.
In living with and/or maintaining the homes of European men, Mpongwé women completed the quotidian tasks of wives, of housekeeping and sexual labor, sustaining colonial manhood. Women’s care provided the “comforts of home” to European men.100 European travel narratives and fiction of the 1910s and 1920s convey that nearly all white men stationed in Libreville, from the governor-general to subordinate civil servants, from managers to lower-skilled laborers in the timber industry and trading companies, encompassing European men of high social status to those of lower social status, engaged a “mistress” or “native wife.”101 Joseph Blache, a sailor who sojourned in and out of Gabon in the 1920s, described the wife of a French colleague (or perhaps his own) as a “housekeeper, tailor, laundress, unrolling her mat in the bedroom of the white, each night!”102 However, Blache qualified, many a “black marriage of Gabon” involved only sex as Mpongwé women lived in their family homes in Mpongwé villages by day and came to their European husbands’ houses only at night. The care of métis children fell to Mpongwé kin. As children grew beyond infancy, their white fathers, or more commonly Mpongwé mothers and kin, often conferred métis boys or girls respectively to Catholic priests or nuns at the mission station of Sainte Marie for rearing and education.103
Interracial relationships brought material and monetary wealth to women’s families, prompting critiques by Catholic missionaries and some European observers of the prostitution of women that benefited Mpongwé men. Some women’s families gained a monthly monetary payment from their female dependents’ European lovers, bringing about a relationship that a study funded by the Anti-Slavery Society described as “a rental contract.”104 Others portrayed Mpongwé male intermediaries as “pimps.” French journalist Albert Londres, visiting Gabon in 1928, relayed that as he arrived in the port he witnessed, “a Gabonese woman, followed by a nègre who appeared to want to offer her to the newly disembarked, walked along on high heels, her black legs in yellow silk hose, swaying in a rose dress a body for rent, if not for sale.”105
Women’s sexual labor permitted some Mpongwé families to maintain their elite social status as fortunes changed in Libreville’s shifting economic currents and the colonial state sought to curtail African economic autonomy. In the early twentieth century, a Catholic missionary stationed in Libreville reflected that women acquired money, linens, dishes, canned goods, and rice during the time with their European husbands. Once the European men left Gabon, the missionary concluded, “they return to their parental home and the family struggles with a difficult problem: how to live comfortably without having done anything.”106 In the new era of colonial restrictions on African social and economic ascendency, Mpongwé women facilitated the continued flow of imported prestige goods. Women’s labor also brought in cash, of increasing necessity in Libreville. In instituting a head tax, colonial officials hoped to compel African men to work for European enterprises or in agricultural labor producing cash crops. However, daughters’ sexual labor allowed some Mpongwé men to avoid such colonial directives.
Mpongwé women also used their wealth and literacy to claim economic rights for all of Libreville’s African residents. For some women, the provision of sexual and domestic services to European men also resulted in their ownership of property. After departing from Gabon, some European men left the cement homes in which they had lived to their Mpongwé wives. This made some Mpongwé women among the most wealthy
