it was barely discussed.”38 However, as demonstrated by Lisa Lindsay in her research on towns in southwest Nigeria, the ideal of “the male breadwinner” was not normative, but expanded in the 1950s and 1960s amid the debates of Nigerian men, women, colonial government officials, and employers about the intersections of wage labor and family life in an era of rapid change.39 Additionally, Pascale Barthélémy’s book on the twelve hundred–odd women from throughout West Africa who received formal education and diplomas in Dakar as nurses and midwives between 1918 and 1956 demonstrates how African women entered professional and salaried labor.40 Thus, the gender of the African worker, of the quintessential town dweller, and of the African city was not always normatively male. The work of Barbara Cooper on Maradi, Niger, and that of Phyllis Martin on Brazzaville, Congo, demonstrated how indelibly women, family life, and men’s and women’s marital aspirations were woven into processes of urban becoming well before the 1930s.41 Several factors contributed to the greater presence of women in towns in Francophone Africa versus Anglophone Africa. First, urbanism predated the implantation of colonial rule in some regions that became part of French West and Equatorial Africa. Second, the French weren’t as concerned as their British counterparts with impeding women from migrating to towns.42 In focusing on the intersections of the sexual economy and wage labor in Libreville, Conjugal Rights demonstrates that how to be male and how to be female were very much in question and shaped the true fabric of urban African life and modes of “urban becoming” in the years of colonial rule.
Conjugal Rights contributes to women’s history, but also seeks to engender central historiographical questions in African studies. In doing so, I follow Allman, Geiger, and Musisi’s call for “foregrounding women as historical actors,” with attention to “women as historical subjects in gendered colonial worlds.”43 Yet I also heed Joan Scott’s critique that “gender” has become synonymous with “women” and her call for scholars to conceptualize gender as changing constructions of what it meant to be male and female.44 The historiography of urban colonial Africa has detailed that colonial officials, African chiefs and elite men, and church personnel gendered colonial cities male. Yet this appears to be more ambiguous in Libreville. I trace the processes through which historical actors contested how men and women could occupy and interact with one another in the emerging cityscapes of streets, markets, homes, and rural suburbs. What constituted “feminine” and “masculine,” “public” and “private” space, and who could legitimately occupy such spaces in Libreville was not fixed, but fluid.
Examining the gendered processes of urban becoming in Libreville contributes to an emerging body of research that challenges the idea of patriarchal power and masculinity as monolithic in twentieth-century Africa. Twenty years after Luise White’s call for African history to “gender men,” a small but important number of monographs and articles on men and configurations of masculinity in twentieth-century Africa has demonstrated the contradictory and changing ways in which societies conceived of and performed male gender. Researchers examining gender as something that men have done in changing forms in twentieth-century Africa have focused on the themes of wage labor, generation, and ideas of land ownership, classic themes of African social history.45 As argued by Lisa Lindsay in her study of men and wage labor in late colonial southwestern Nigeria, gender is not necessarily something that people have, but something that people do in various ways. Male rail workers in cities such as Lagos and Ibadan navigated practices and ideas of adult masculinity in a context in which men, their family members, employers, and government officials fashioned multiple ideas about how to be “men.”46 Stephan Miescher’s work on colonial and postcolonial Ghana has analyzed the interplay of changing notions of masculinity with men’s self-representations and subjective experiences over the course of their life cycles, demonstrating that no single dominant notion of masculinity emerged over a generation that witnessed profound historical change.47
In conversation with the emerging literature that genders men, I call into question the category of “men” as a normative social collectivity to outline how differentiation in ethnicity, religious affiliation, wealth, and age resulted in competing practices and ideas of how to be a man. In focusing on both men and women in relation to marriage and sexuality, I show the intersectionalities of intimate matters, political economy, and politics. In Libreville, defining ideas and practices about marriage and sex involved struggles to define masculinity as well as femininity. Conflicts erupted not only between husbands and wives, but also between men competing for rights and access to the same woman, thereby demonstrating the cracks in the patriarchal edifice. Status and generational tension between senior and junior men, men with ready access to cash and those without, and men who had received formal educations in French schools and those who were illiterate reveal the contested and slippery nature of male power.
The gendered history of Libreville reorders our understanding of how urban spaces and selves unfolded in colonial-era Africa. Exploration of these questions in Libreville causes us to rethink some central concepts and time lines of African historiography, both of African urban history and of African gender history. First, let us reconsider the understanding of labor agitation and unions as a watershed in constituting the possibility of permanent urban settlement. As argued by Frederick Cooper, before the wave of strikes by male African workers in the 1930s and 1940s, British and French alike thought of a sociology of Africa that divided its populations into peasants and educated elites and treated everyone else as residual “detribalized Africans” or a “floating population.” Only in the aftermath of this labor agitation did French colonial officials think about “more complex realities in African cities.”48 However, the marriage revolt at the mid-nineteenth-century founding of Libreville points to an earlier time in which African men drew attention to the questions of conjugal households, of social and biological reproduction, and of relationships with women as constitutive of lives in town. Libreville’s newest inhabitants claimed that domestic life was part and parcel of urban life, compelling French representatives to perpetually renegotiate the very contours of colonial policy. Furthermore, many Gabonese men of varied ethnicities disavowed agricultural labor in favor of trade as early as the mid-to late nineteenth century. By the 1920s, men from throughout Gabon migrated to work in timber camps or other forms of wage labor, configuring Libreville and the Estuary region as a place of permanent settlement. Entire lineages of men, women, and children moved into the region, and men who settled without wives struggled to marry and build households. Farming became a low-status occupation, one in which women and some men of ethnic groups from Gabon’s interior labored in plots kilometers away from Libreville. Mirroring what Tsuneo Yoshikuni found in 1920s Harare, urban life in Libreville included “dual participation in wage employment and agricultural production,” with some women growing the food that fed the critical mass of wage laborers.49 By the mid-1920s, the reality of an Estuary region in which many men were wage laborers, and in which women reached near parity or superseded the number of men, compelled colonial officials, missionaries, and African political leaders to grapple with the question of permanent African settlement in urban areas.
As was the case elsewhere in Africa, the 1930s in Gabon did usher in the attempts of colonial officials and some chiefs to work in concert to limit the autonomy of African women in marriage choices and sexuality. However, the patriarchy-state alliance was not unilateral. The category of “elder African men” in Libreville was differentiated by ethnicity, social and economic status, and individual interests. No single codified version of customary law emerged, but rather multiple articulations. Mirroring the “shifting customary terrain” in post-1930s Ghana, in the Estuary region litigants articulated varied definitions of customary marriage in colonial courts. After World War II, when Libreville experienced increased immigration and expansion, public debates over the male and the female spaces and sexual respectability erupted in the streets and legislative halls.
Some scholars have criticized the emphasis on urban women in African women’s history and the dearth of research on women in rural areas.50 However, we have barely begun to scratch the surface of uncovering the complexities of women’s and gender history and urban history in Africa. In recent publications on music, dress and fashion, and sexual politics
