which this book sprang. The Mellon Mays Fellowship Program has funded varied stages of research, writing, and a sabbatical year. An Individual Development Award Grant from the United University Professions at the State University of New York at Albany funded follow-up research in Gabon and Senegal. The University of Chicago’s Social Science Division provided a year of leave and funding for further research trips to France and to Italy. The office of the Dean of Social Sciences provided funding for the stage of final production.
While a graduate student at Stanford, I was fortunate to be part of a dynamic community of faculty and peers. The indefatigable Richard Roberts has been a generous adviser and mentor for more than a decade. The late Kennel Jackson conveyed his love of African cultural and art history. Mary Louise Roberts taught me to not be afraid of theory, and Estelle Freedman taught me to think critically about how gender matters. Fellow graduate students Shelley Lee, Carol Pal, Lise Sedrez, and Matthew Booker read nearly every word of every chapter and continue to provide a sustained friendship. I have also benefited from commentary by Kim Warren, Cecilia Tsu, Shana Bernstein, Shira Robinson, and Amy Robinson, as well as Emily Burrill, Benjamin Lawrence, and Rachel Petrocelli. Abosede George has provided invaluable feedback along the entire road from dissertation to book.
At the University of Chicago, I found myself amid a remarkable intellectual community of scholars. I thank Adrienne Brown, Tianna Paschel, Micere Keels, and Gina Samuels for reading several chapters in a critical moment of transition and for their friendship that knew no bounds. Leora Auslander’s keen discernment propelled me in new directions, as did the insights on the changing meanings of race provided by Julie Saville, Kathy Cohen, and Daniel Desormaux. Linda Zerilli and affiliated faculty and students of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality commented on several chapters. Ralph Austen, Jennifer Cole, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Keisha Fikes, Cécile Fromont, Emily Osborn, Francois Richard, and graduate students who participated in the African Studies Workshop formed a tremendous gathering of Africanists. Research assistants Deirdre Lyons, Brittany McGee, and Jennifer Amos tracked down numerous leads. I learned much from undergraduate and graduate students in the classroom.
Many individuals beyond these institutions generously gave of their time and intellectual capital. I thank Jean Allman for meticulous criticism and probing questions. Gillian Berchowitz supported this project with patience and encouragement. Two anonymous reviewers provided valuable critiques. Carina Ray and Kahleen Sheldon read several chapters in varied stages. The book benefited tremendously from Michelle Beckett’s close reading and editorial suggestions and Nora Titone’s sharp eye for detail. Hilary Jones and Lorelle Semeley have conversed with me innumerable times about our mutual interest in historical change in Francophone Africa. The small community of scholars who work on Equatorial Africa—including Florence Bernault, Phyllis Martin, Jeremy Rich, John Cinnamon, Marissa Moorman, Meredith Terretta, and Kairn Klieman—has provided me with immeasurable assistance in obtaining access to archives, people, and institutions. In France, Pascale Barthélémy, Anne Hugon, Odile Goerg, and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch have been generous colleagues. At the State University of New York at Albany, conversations with Patricia Pinho, Glyne Griffith, and Lisa Thompson pushed me to think more critically about the analysis of race, and I have benefited greatly from Iris Berger’s insights and mentorship.
I am grateful to and profoundly thank the men and women in Gabon who generously shared the most intimate details of their lives and hosted me in their worksites, homes, and sacred spaces. Jean-Emile Mbot and the Laboratoire Universitaire des Traditions Orales at the University of Gabon Omar Bongo provided me with institutional affiliation. Soeur Marie Sidonie and Soeur Maria Cruz of the Congrégation de l’Imaculée de Castres assisted me with transportation and introductions to social networks. Guy Rossatanga-Rignault and the Fondation Raponda-Walker pour la Science et la Culture also facilitated access to key documents and people. Patrick Cellier shared his treasure trove of historical postcards. The staff of the National Archives unearthed uncataloged documents and photographs. The company of Brigitte Meyo, Achille de Jean, Judy Knight, and many Haitian expatriates helped to make Libreville a home away from home.
I thank my family and friends for their love, patience, and encouragement during this long journey. Marsha Figaro and Erica Olmsted have been tremendous friends. My parents, Christie and the late Aramus Jean-Baptiste, and Ari, Sara, Pria, and Noah Jean-Baptiste provided me with sustenance beyond life in the academy. Cassandra Jean-Baptiste, whose life has unfolded within the shadow of writing this book, and Glenn Hoffmann formed the emotional community that nurtured the completion of this project.
MAP I.1. Gabon
Introduction
Narrating a History of Domestic Life, Sexuality, Being, and Feeling in Urban Africa
LOCATED ON THE GABON ESTUARY along the Atlantic coast, Libreville (Free Town) was founded in 1849 by the French on land that political leaders of Mpongwé ethno-language communities, who had lived there for centuries, ceded via a series of treaties. The French populated the new settlement with a contingent of slaves they had intercepted from a vessel traveling from Angola toward the Americas.1 Fifty-two former captives—twenty-seven men, twenty-three women, and two children of unidentified Central African origins—disembarked at the Gabon Estuary in February 1849.2 The skeletal staff of the French administration, comprising a handful of naval personnel, alongside Catholic missionaries, pledged to each of the former slave men a hut and a parcel of land to begin their new lives. Yet, within months, a number of these men expressed their discontent with the “freed” lives that the French envisioned for them. In September, French naval reports relay, ten to sixteen men ran away into the forest and carried out attacks on Estuary communities.3 They stole arms, kidnapped women, and threatened to launch further attacks. The rebels issued a singular demand: they wanted wives. The mutineers had begun kidnapping women with the goal of making them their wives, and they threatened to inflict further terror upon Estuary residents unless they were given access to more women.4
The aspirations of these newly settled men to build a new present and future necessitated not just land and roofs over their heads, but also wives with whom to form households and ensure social and biological reproduction. Perhaps the rebels also conceived of wives as providing companionship and emotional attachment, factors that could provide them with a sense of belonging in their new home. These were poor men from distant places who had limited means to accumulate the imported goods that could constitute bridewealth payments to facilitate marriage. Bridewealth, a bundle of goods that a groom gave to a bride’s family, was a primary legal and social marker across Africa that made a relationship a marriage. These men also lacked the social capital that could have facilitated interpersonal relationships, and therefore marriage, in the Mpongwé communities of the Estuary region.
Marriage conferred dignity and the capacity to articulate social, legal, and economic rights to shape one’s personhood and status in society. If the men remained unmarried, they would be perpetual minors and socially dead, failing to establish adulthood and manhood.5 Not only had being uprooted from their natal homes separated them from their ancestors, to whom they owed offerings in order to prosper in their present life, but their unmarried status would not produce the children who would honor them when they died and perpetuate their lineages. In making the claim to marriage as a universal right for men to establish selfhood in the emerging settlement of Libreville, these men asserted a conception of the basic necessities of town life in terms unimagined by the French.
By October, the rebels had been killed, captured, or rejoined the settlement and pardoned. Fearing further mischief, a meeting involving the chief of the former slaves, the French doctor, and the naval commander convened to consider “the urgency of marriage” for Libreville’s new residents. Navy officers precipitously sought the approval of Catholic missionaries to bless en masse marriages of fifteen couples, fearing “very dangerous liaisons
