demonstrate how male and female urbanites constructed their understandings of nation and culture.51 This body of work has highlighted the improvisational and fluid dynamics of demarcating gender, generation, wealth, and culture in African towns from the 1950s into recent times. We need to further complicate our understanding of gender in African cities in the years of colonialism as well, unpacking the complex processes of social change in African societies, and understanding the multifaceted strategies of men and women for migrating to and creating lives in towns.
SEXUALITY AND AFFECT
In tracing the history of sexuality as imagined and practiced by Gabonese, this book expands an emerging body of research that challenges the dominant paradigm of sexuality in Africa as “other” in comparison to Europe or within the context of research of AIDS.52 In challenging this paradigm, historians of sexuality in Africa have focused primarily on two themes: political economy and reproductive rights and circumcision. In her seminal book on prostitution in Nairobi, Luise White has shown that prostitutes and the domestic and sexual services they provided for African men in Nairobi were key to maintaining social reproduction of Kenyan societies under British colonial rule. Women’s cash earnings from their labor maintained rural households, supported migrant men in negotiating harsh and racist labor conditions, and permitted women to purchase property in the city.53 Lynn Thomas has shown how “the politics of the womb,” female excision, pregnancy, birth, and abortion, occupied the center of how Meru women, girls, elder men and young men, and British colonial officials, missionaries, and feminists sought to configure political power and moral order in twentieth-century colonial Kenya.54
In an edited volume urging scholars to “re-think” sexualities in Africa, Signe Arnfred argues that European imaginaries of African sexuality have oscillated from ideas of the exotic and the noble and depraved savage, yet have been continually “other” in comparison to the norm of European sexuality.55 Historians have analyzed European discourses of African sexualities as more fraught than Arnfred portrays.56 Megan Vaughan’s work on biomedical discourses in colonial British Central and East Africa and Diana Jeater’s book on colonial moralist conceptions of African sexuality in early colonial Southern Rhodesia demonstrate that no dominant, hegemonic colonial discourse emerged, but rather a range of discourses. Megan Vaughan underlines how colonial representatives expressed anxieties about African women’s sexuality in urban areas in particular and associated African women’s sexuality with disease and social breakdown. Vaughan traces how state-employed doctors and medical missionaries conceptualized and debated the mechanisms of syphilis vaccination campaigns to construct governable African subjects.57 In analyzing changing discourses of biomedicine, Vaughan’s analysis demonstrates the persistent import of controlling African women’s bodies by the apparatuses of colonial rule. Diana Jeater also demonstrates the multivalent nature of European ideas of African sexuality and how efforts to regulate sexuality were central to colonial rule. Jeater analyzes European discourses to argue that the colonial encounter profoundly altered ideas about and practices of sexuality. Between 1910 and 1930s colonial Rhodesia, Jeater argues, Christianity and migration to towns produced the idea of individual responsibility and “sin,” as well as the idea that sexuality could take place outside of the sanction of family groups.58 By focusing primarily on colonial discourses, we have not been fully able to understand the meanings of sexuality and the complexities with which African historical actors thought of and embodied their sexuality. Furthermore, how did ideas about sexuality intersect with praxes of sexuality?
I heed the arguments and engage the threads of previous works on the history of sexuality in Africa, that sex inherently shapes and is shaped by political economy, that contestations over sexuality were about the contours of generation, gender, and the state, that attention to shifting colonial discourses about African sexualities reveals the fissures of colonial rule, and that colonialism profoundly shaped the landscape of practices and ideas about sexuality. However, analyses of the history of sexuality in Africa have insufficiently considered that sexual expression is also about emotions—such as desire, pleasure, yearning, and pain. I argue for the need to step back from deterministic analyses of sexuality and also analyze the subjective and interpersonal realms in which historical actors engaged in and conceived of sex. Analyzing the varied sexual landscapes and relationships in Libreville and historical actors’ often simultaneous expressions and experiences of the physical, emotional, and pragmatic offers a new window into the changing meanings and praxes of sexualities in African history.
Marriage was a primary relationship through which African men and women in Libreville articulated and experienced sexuality. A critical mass of books has chronicled social and economic change in Africa through the lens of marriage.59 As this body of scholars, including Brett Shadle, has shown, “nowhere in colonial Africa was marital stability a foregone conclusion.”60 In the region that became Libreville, men and women engaged in varied forms of extramarital sexual relationships prior to the colonial encounter, and over the course of the decades of colonial rule new forms of extramarital sexual relationships developed. However, in spite of marital instability, there was a persistence with which Libreville’s residents used changing forms of conjugal relationships as a metaphor in conceptualizing sexuality. As argued by Stephanie Newell, scholarship on marriage in Africa has emphasized “economic and social power rather than . . . desire and pleasure or coercion.”61 Furthermore, Jennifer Cole and Lynn Thomas contend that love, “the sentiments of attachment and affiliation that bind people to one another—in sexual, predominantly heterosexual, relationships,” is a neglected lens of research in African studies.62 I take seriously notions of sexual desire and love as units of analysis. Yet, following historical actors’ conceptions of heterosexual relationships as also mediating economic mobility, I engage the recent literature on love and money in contemporary Africa that demonstrates how people viewed well-being in relationships according to both material and emotional fulfillment.63
By analyzing a multiplicity of ways in which historical actors experienced their heterosexual relationships—as material well-being, deprivation, honor, respectability, desire, violence, pleasure, biological or social reproduction, criminality, legality—I seek to demonstrate the multivalent meanings of sexuality in this urban, West-Central African context. Scholars have debated the definition of sexuality as a unit of analysis, drawing a line between sexuality as ideology (“what ought to be”) and sexuality in behavior (“what was”).64 Historical actors in Libreville debated sexuality both as actualized and in discourse. Thus, I combine two definitions to analyze the history of sexuality in Libreville: Michel Foucault’s conception of sexuality as “a field of mobile power relations,” and Robert A. Padgug’s definition of sexuality as “praxis, a group of social relations, of human interactions.”65
I did not assume heterosexuality as normative when embarking upon research on the history of sexuality in Gabon. I was attuned to the multidisciplinary literature of queer theory, as well as emerging work on same-sex relationships and desire in African history that has disrupted ideas of heteronormativity.66 I mined documentary sources for and asked interviewees about same-sex desire. Informants vehemently denied same-sex desire as manifesting in Gabon; nor could I find traces of homosocial sexualities in colonial reports. I questioned interviewees on the ideas of homosexuality as “un-African” that some expressed. However, I also began to realize that there has been relatively little scholarly attention to the history of heterosexuality in Africa. In tracing the changing practices and meanings of heterosexuality, this book does heed the call of queer theory to call into question the idea that sexual and gender identities are normative.67
SOURCES AND METHODS
This book draws on historical, ethnographic, and cultural studies methodologies and text-based and oral source materials. I followed AbdouMaliq Simone’s formulation of “systematic social research” as the path to “immerse myself in various settings under whatever conditions and rubrics were possible” and for “multiple engagements as methodology.”68 I have utilized archival sources such as political reports, correspondence, legislation,
