like in other countries, that those who put in real efforts would be compensated. We responded that this was good! But it is you others, Europeans, who prevent our women from working because they earn too much with you.”118 The chief relayed that the cash and material resources that European men gave their Mpongwé wives provided women with enough earnings to refuse agricultural work. Another chief argued, “In the past, our women worked on the land, but today they no longer want to and they no longer listen to us!”119 Mpongwé patriarchs could not fully control Mpongwé women’s labor or how Mpongwé women would participate in the colonial economy.
On a January morning in 1922, a group of sixty mainly Mpongwé women, some holding children in their arms, mounted a cacophonous demonstration at the town hall before the mayor, his deputy, and the police commissioner.120 The group of women arrived at the mayor’s office in response to a rumor. Officials had allegedly announced the day before that all farmers, mainly Fang inhabitants of Libreville’s hinterlands, were to bring produce to city hall, where colonial officials would purchase their products at preset prices, instead of to the public market, where Fang farmers could control the prices. Colonial officials would then ration and distribute food to the city’s African and European inhabitants. The investigative report following the women’s protest summarized the assembled women as “Mpongwé, without a profession or living in concubinage with Europeans; three or four among them claimed to be seamstresses or washerwomen who have found themselves to be without work or money, although they were luxuriously dressed and well shod.”121 The report characterized the women as “lazy,” refusing to work in agricultural labor that would have yielded produce to relieve the shortage of food. Rather, the women would arrive at the market early and purchase large quantities of food, leaving nothing for wage laborers, who could not reach the market until the end of their workday.
Libreville’s colonial officials reacted angrily to the women’s demonstrations, noting that they had asked the women to present themselves individually, not in a group, and that a committee of male Mpongwé notables had already convened earlier in the week to address native concerns over food rationing. It was the male chiefs, not this ad hoc gathering of women, whom officials viewed as the authorized intermediaries with the colonial state. Though the women were asked to leave the premises, some refused, and four were arrested in an attempt to compel those who remained to disband.
This gathering of an all-female Mpongwé delegation asserted that women could claim a political voice and directly address the colonial state without African men as intermediaries.122 The Mpongwé women gathered at city hall challenged Mpongwé gender and colonial stratifications—thereby proving to be “dangerous” women, as seen by colonial officials and elder Mpongwé men. Women’s provision of sexual and domestic services to European men simultaneously circulated colonial capital into African communities, yet threatened colonial plans for socioeconomic and political management. As alluded to in the summary of the encounter, many of these women were currently or had been previously engaged in relationships with European men. They invoked their visible positions as taxed property owners and conspicuous consumers with money to protest state attempts to restrict their purchasing power and redirect their labor into agricultural production. Carrying children in their arms, some perhaps the métis children of colonial officials, the women cited their roles as mothers and caretakers of children as justification for their privileged access to food. Unlike the Igbo women’s protests in 1929 Nigeria, Mpongwé women did not protest in order to reclaim roles of the precolonial past.123 Mpongwé women were protesting in order to maintain the privileged existence that they had gained within the transition to colonial rule. The investigation concluded that other African inhabitants of Libreville applauded the women’s arrests. The approbation of townspeople at the women’s imprisonment indicates how less-affluent African urbanites might have resented the privileged status that the women sought to retain as others went hungry and felt the impact of colonial efforts to increase their labor and constrain the money that they could make.
REGULATING AFRICAN MARRIAGE PRACTICES: CODIFYING CUSTOMARY MARRIAGE LAW
Amid the political, social, and economic upheavals, colonial and health personnel assessing demographic data in the first two decades of the twentieth century determined that African populations throughout the colony were decreasing.124 By the 1920s, French medical officials and missionaries reported the disappearances of entire villages that they had visited in the early years of the twentieth century.125 In a 1920 article, a French doctor who headed the colony’s health service described Gabon as “a sick country” with a diminishing population, insufficient food supply, elevated rates of morbidity, and reduced fertility.126 By 1929, a colonial medical report estimated that the population of the entire colony was 334,000 inhabitants, reduced from estimates of 403,000 people in 1924.127 Furthermore, the document conveyed, 10 percent of women in some villages were sterile, and the infant mortality rate was about 50 percent. Colonial states and societies in the Belgian Congo, Kenya, and Malawi reported similar anxieties regarding population stagnation or decrease.128 Among the factors of communicable disease epidemics, forced labor, and food shortages that contributed to demographic decline and mortality in Gabon, colonial state and society settled upon African marital and sexual practices, transformed by colonial rule, as the principal culprit.
A chorus of colonial health personnel, colonial officials, and Christian missionaries settled upon the reduced fertility and morbidity as primarily caused by the prevalence of African women’s extramarital sexuality, particularly in the coastal regions of southern Gabon such as the Estuary region. A 1930 publication on marriage and sexual practices, commissioned by an antislavery society and based on written surveys completed by colonial administrators in the 1910s and 1920s throughout French-controlled Africa, encapsulates these views. Written by West African colonial administrator Maurice Delafosse, the monseigneur for French Africa Le Roy, and a medical professional identified as Dr. Poutrin, the introduction argued that colonial rule thwarted the establishment of stable marriages and fecund families by making women into commodities. First, African women’s sexual promiscuity with African and European men spread sexually transmitted diseases that compromised male and female fertility and were often passed on to children.129 Second, the expansion of the timber economy and the circulation of money had resulted in increased bridewealth prices. Delafosse, Poutrin, and Le Roy reported that the 1910 bridewealth list for the marriage of a Fang woman and a man of unspecified ages in the Estuary region was 3,000 francs’ worth of goods: 15 stone guns, 80 small barrels of gunpowder, 20 pieces of cloth, 10 machetes, 8 crates, 5 bags of salt, 1 vest, and 1 mutton or dog.130 By the 1920s, bridewealth in coastal regions ranged from 1,000 to 3,000 francs, the same worth of goods as in the 1910s, but it was now composed of 70 percent cash, a large sum that made marriage difficult for young men.131
Customary practices already allowed for divorce, but women and their families increasingly sought out divorce in order to earn the higher bride-wealth amounts paid by new suitors. To save the colony and ensure the biological reproduction of African societies would require the regulation of African women’s and men’s bodies, French colonial state and society and Catholic representatives would argue. As noted by Lynn Thomas, European states exhibited great interest in questions of “regulating sexual behavior and promoting the growth of national populations” in the early twentieth century, and “colonial rule in Asia and Africa fueled these reproductive concerns by situating the definition of and maintenance of racial, cultural, and sexual boundaries as important state projects.”132
With the view toward forming African families that would buttress the colony’s demographic growth, the French argued for the need to codify and regulate marital and conjugal relationships in Gabon. Between 1918 and 1925, state and Catholic personnel launched the first efforts toward codifying customary laws. Such efforts came later than elsewhere in colonial-era Africa. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in French West Africa, colonial administrators, armchair ethnologists, and missionaries had compiled customary practices of many African societies.133 By the 1920s, codified versions of customary law existed in many British colonies.134 The 1921 eleven-member
