liasons” that could develop if men and women among the former slaves remained unmarried, Catholic missionaries were also referring to the commonplace nature of interracial sexual relationships between African women and European men along the Gabon Estuary. In facilitating these marriages, the French acknowledged the rebels’ claims of marriage as a right. However, the French sought to consecrate marriage in rites intelligible to French norms, civil and Christian. Written records and memory are silent as to the actions and subjectivities of the women who were historical actors in these events at the town’s emergence. However, throughout the history of colonial Libreville, populations of women exceeded or nearly equaled those of men, and women’s claims to make the city “home” through varied articulations of sex and marriage also deeply shaped urban life.
More than anything else, the marriage mutiny of 1849 illuminates the importance of questions and contestations of how, not if, men and women would constitute self and sociality in Libreville through relationships with each other. This episode was the first and but one of a multitude of struggles to articulate the contours of domestic life and being in Libreville that would unfold in the century to follow. Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon, tells the story of the longue durée of such questions, narrating a social history of heterosexual relationships as lived and a cultural history of the meanings of such relationships. This book thereby links three important processes of historical change in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa: (1) transformations in conjugal and sexual relationships; (2) meanings of gender; and (3) urbanism.
I periodize such dynamics as early as the nineteenth-century years of the Estuary region’s standing as a way station in transatlantic trade routes, but the greater part of this story centers on 1930 through 1960. These were years of tremendous social, political, and economic change in Libreville and its rural suburbs as the town grew through immigration and the export of timber came to be the colony’s primary economic activity. Disembarking via oceans, rivers, and overland, a population of about fifty Central African ethnolanguage groups, West Africans, and Europeans converged to transform the equatorial forest located along the Atlantic coast into a town in which they could establish homes and achieve fortune. I focus principally on the conjugal and sexual careers of the Mpongwé, inhabitants at the time of Libreville’s founding, and the Fang, whose migration toward the Estuary transformed the region and who would come to represent a large proportion of the city’s population over the course of the twentieth century. During this same period, conjugality and sexuality in the Estuary region also involved the persistence of interracial relationships between Mpongwé women and white men of varied nationalities even as the colonial state sought to demarcate rigid racial boundaries. Engaging the call of scholars who have argued that the study of households and gender needs to take center stage in African history, I argue that Libreville’s residents lived and contested meanings of urban life according to shifting mores of sexual economy.7 In defining the term “sexual,” I conceive of two meanings: practices and conceptions of what it meant to be male and female, as well as practices and meanings of sexuality. In conceptualizing the term “economy,” I am inspired by Alfred Marshall’s definition of economics as the study of humans “in the ordinary business of life.”8 Thus, “sexual economy” in this book means the transactions and relationships of everyday life around the meanings and lived experiences of gender identities and sexual relationships. Historical actors engaged in, had aspirations toward, and debated sexual economy based on changing emotional, social, political, and economic vectors. Ideas and lived experiences of sexual economy changed over time and shaped the very material and conceptual fabric of urban life.
Changing articulations and negotiations of sexual economy were motors of historical change that shaped the unfolding of key aspects of urban life: money and its use, distribution, and social value in the form of bridewealth (chap. 4); the law, legal systems, and jurisprudence (chap. 5); moral and social order and human and spatial geography (chap. 6); and racial and ethnic differentiation (chap. 7). Town life engendered an unprecedented circulation of people, material, and ideas in this Equatorial African locale. Taking advantage of the unparalleled opportunities and mitigating the risks required new forms of male-female partnerships. Heterosexual relationships changed as the city itself changed, presenting new kinds of social, cultural, and economic possibilities. The varied African and varied French communities understood sexual relationships to be the key to social, cultural, and economic goals, but in a variety of configurations that often resulted in contestation as well as convergence.
Colonial rule sparked the creation of Libreville, and the French sought to mold the lives of its African inhabitants into their own models. However, in examining the interstices of everyday affective life and institutional governance, I contend that African women and men were not accidental visitors to the colonial town. The loves, passion, breakups, makeups, courting, and jealousies of historical actors laid bare political and legal claim-making to belonging in the town. These processes shaped the very meaning of urbanism. African women and men in Libreville made urban life according to their own changing logics and sentience in ways that were touched by and sometimes circumscribed but never fully controlled by the colonial state, African political leaders, or church representatives. On the contrary, Libreville’s inhabitants made choices about if and how to marry, if and how to divorce, whom to love, and with whom to have sex that changed government policies and caused the colonial state to perpetually scramble to maintain social control. Such contestations did not stop with the end of formal colonial rule. As Libreville became the capital of independent Gabon in 1960, marriage and sex occupied the forefront of ideas about modern urban life, governance, and nation.
In addition to material concerns, historical actors in Libreville married, divorced, and had sexual relationships based on emotional aspirations of love, fear, pleasure, pain, and belonging, sentient factors. As argued by historian of medieval Europe Barbara Rosenwein, the study of emotion should also guide historical inquiry and analysis. People across time and space, Rosenwein argues, have lived in “emotional communities,” forms of grouping that are the same as social communities such as families and neighborhoods.9 However, what makes emotional communities distinct from social communities are systems of feeling: “what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them; the evaluations that they make about others’ emotions; the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize; and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate, and deplore.”10 Analyzing how “systems of feeling” in heterosexual relationships also shaped historical actors’ negotiations of urban life opens a new window into the complex articulations of historical change and continuity in colonial-era West-Central Africa. Following the conjugal and sexual lives of Libreville’s inhabitants and institutions offers a fresh perspective into the anxieties, hopes, disappointments, and unintended contingencies of city life. The varied articulations of sexual and conjugal comportment over time and space by varied African and French actors in Libreville reflected significant social, political, and economic change over the course of the twentieth century. Conjugal Rights engages three important historiographical themes of African studies: (1) urban history; (2) the history of women and gender; and (3) the history of sexuality. In foregrounding the history of sexuality, Conjugal Rights expands our understanding of this little-studied theme in research on Africa and reveals the linkages between shifting articulations of eros and social, political, and economic change.
URBAN AFRICA
This sexual-conjugal biography of Libreville in the precolonial and early colonial nineteenth century contributes to research that decenters colonial imperatives at the origins of urbanism in Africa.11 As argued by John Parker of locations such as Accra that were urban prior to colonial conquest,“The transition from precolonial city-state to colonial city was not about the creation of new urban identities and institutions but the reconfiguration of old ones.”12 By identifying how marriage and sex were important currents in the Estuary in the nineteenth century, before the consolidation of French colonial rule, I demonstrate the continuities in how Africans conceptualized town life into the twentieth century.
In
