alongside Mpongwé men in efforts to assert African economic rights in face of colonial tax increases. In November 1919, Angélique Bouyé, an Mpongwé woman, wrote a letter to French officials complaining that the amount of poll tax to be paid had increased in the past year from 3 to 5 francs.107 Bouyé claimed to be writing on behalf of Libreville residents, and the inspector of colonies to whom she addressed the letter referred to her as the spokesperson for the city’s African residents. Bouyé requested that colonial officials cease in instituting further tax increases. Moreover, Bouyé’s letter included specific requests on behalf of women in Libreville. She complained that African soldiers collecting taxes wrongfully arrested African women on the pretext that they had not paid taxes.108 Bouyé concluded the letter with the request that female property owners who paid the land tax be exempt from the poll tax.
While French colonial personnel expressed anxiety about women’s sexual promiscuity and prostitution in Libreville, colonial economic policies set in motion the very currents in which women’s sexual labor was a viable path for earning money. Fang communities could also make money from women’s sexual labor, with African men of Equatorial African or West African origins.109 In a 1913 annual report, the governor of Gabon opined that the social ills of Mpongwé men’s laziness and their reliance on women’s sexual labor to make money had spread to other ethnic groups migrating to Libreville. The governor surmised, “Whatever the origin of the [native] inhabitant of Libreville, his mentality quickly becomes that of a Gabonese. The prostitution of women is elevated to the level of an institution; as a result the poll tax is an illusory obligation.”110 The governor’s words illuminate how cash had become the method of obtaining sex and how the money earned permitted some Fang men to pay the new and perpetually increasing tax requirements. Some Fang husbands in polygynous marriages consented for their wives to have sexual relationships for a certain number of nights with African laborers who had migrated to the Estuary region’s timber camps in search of work.111 The migrant men could travel with the women to another location and would return the wives after the stipulated amount of time and remit the agreed-upon payments of cash or goods to the husbands. In 1918, an inspector’s report of the Estuary region noted that tirailleurs would set up temporary unions with married or unmarried women in Fang villages in which they were sent to enforce the collection of taxes. Fathers or husbands would consent for sexual relationships with female dependents to occur. The soldiers would pay a “bridewealth” fee for sexual access to a woman, and the husband or father would in turn remit the money given by the tirailleur to the village chief as the tax payment.112 Turning to these relationships did not appear to be motivated by efforts of husbands or fathers to become wealthy, but was rather a desperate act to meet tax obligations when families didn’t have enough money.
As interracial unions continued to occur in early twentieth-century colonial Gabon, African and French societies shifted in their ideas about the desirability of interracial unions and of the respectability of women involved in such relationships. On a day-to-day basis, African women and European men engaged openly in domestic-sexual relationships, with little censure from French and African political figures. Yet, in moments of socioeconomic and political crisis, “native wives” appeared in public records as persons that impeded governance and contributed to a decline in moral and social order in Libreville. Particularly in moments of economic and food crisis that occurred in waves following World War I, some Myènè men sought to restrict Mpongwé women’s social, economic, and political mobility.
Some women who engaged in interracial unions held a privileged status, allowing them to escape colonial regulation of African communities, which resulted in the ire of African men. This especially was true when colonial officials extracted forced labor or increased taxes from African populations after World War I, yet seemed to exempt some Mpongwé women. In efforts to rationalize the production of timber toward the benefit of French interests, officials attempted to limit the autonomy of Myènè men who had managed to obtain permits for large forestry concessions and become wealthy from exporting timber. In 1921, a letter signed “The Inhabitants of Lambaréné” arrived on the desk of the lieutenant governor in Libreville. Since 1918, the colonial state had required male and female subjects to perform ten days of labor per year. However, a provision had allowed wealthy Gabonese, usually male Myènè forestiers (timber industry exploiters), to pay cash rather than serving forced labor. Yet a 1921 law took away this option, ordering that “all native forestiers are required to perform forced labor. . . . None among them will be allowed to pay cash in lieu of their days of obligatory labor.”113 The letter writers signaled the hypocrisy of this law, since European forestiers who did business in the same manner as African forestiers did not have to perform labor. They protested the existence of two systems of laws regulating forestiers: one for Europeans, the other for Africans.
Gabonese women’s relationships with European men allowed them to attain higher status in the new colonial order compared to Gabonese men, thereby disrupting an imagined gender relationship of women’s political and economic subjugation. The letter writers remonstrated that female lovers of Europeans occupied a privileged status that allowed them to escape the new racialized forced-labor requirements: “In enforcing this law, is the circumscription commissioner going to make his native wife, his domestic servant work! And the women who live in debauchery with Europeans, will he make them work or even have to buy out their days of obligatory labor? If he intends to execute orders as received, why apply regulations to some and not to all?”114 As implied in this letter, in the new colonial differentiation between Africans and Europeans, black and white, the woman lover of a European man occupied the status of “European.” The letter writers’ social status had declined. Reordering former hierarchies of men’s greater access to wealth, female lovers and live-in domestic companions to European men could now rise to a status of privilege formerly granted to Myènè men. The categorization of interracial relationships as “debauchery” also implied condemnation of these women as morally suspect, living outside normative sexual relationships that benefited male heads of households. No longer did a woman’s relationship with a European benefit an entire community, but it individually placed her at a level above other “natives.”
While Mpongwé women’s family members might have brokered, approved, or acquiesced to their unions with European men, involvement in these relations did reorder power relationships within Mpongwé communities. Conflict over property could sometimes escalate among kin, as represented in a story recounted by French journalist Albert Londres of his voyage to Libreville in the late 1920s. En route on a ship, Londres encountered a European man named Rass who said that he had lived with a woman whom he identified as “ma Gabonaise” in Libreville for seven years. Her aunts had poisoned and killed her, Rass claimed, in order to gain control of her clothing and the hut (case) that he had left to her after he departed.115 Poisoning was a common manifestation in Mpongwé communities to control recalcitrant members of society or to exact justice over a disagreement, and some older women were the most skilled practitioners.116 When Rass arrived with Londres at the house in which he and his wife had lived, Rass was shocked to find that the aunts whom he said poisoned her now lived in the case. He accused the aunts of killing her because with her death they inherited all of her property. The unnamed woman’s individual ownership of the house and clothing, and her unwillingness to allow her aunts to access this wealth, challenged the authority of senior women over junior women.
Mpongwé women’s independent accumulation of wealth through interracial relationships also provided a pathway to question the authority of Mpongwé chiefs, who claimed political control over residents, and of colonial officials, who sought to direct how women earned and spent their money. In earlier years of colonial rule, colonial projects had attempted to turn Mpongwé men into peasant producers of foodstuffs and cash crops or laborers on European plantations.117 Amid the food shortages of the 1920s, colonial officials blamed the shortages on the supposed laziness of Mpongwé populations and their lack of participation in agricultural production. Officials turned to Mpongwé chiefs in an effort to compel Mpongwé women to farm, as did women of other ethnicities, to produce more food for the town’s population. Yet a chief testified to a 1922 commission of inquiry on the availability
