officers, as well as the correspondence of private French citizens with colonial officials and newspaper articles and editorials. Furthermore, the records of French Catholic and American Protestant missionaries are an important body of source materials, particularly for the nineteenth century.
Literary discourse analysis is a useful tool for demystifying the aura of “fact” that surrounds colonial and missionary documents. Literary theorist David Spurr argues that documents of imperial administrations involve some level of representations. Rather than reading colonial documents as only conveying history as it occurred, “scholars should consider these texts as snapshots of how [a] Western writer constructed a coherent representation out of the strange and often incomprehensible (to the writer) realities confronted in the non-Western world.”69 This interpretive lens allows the excavation of the anxieties and contradictions of colonial societies.
Though few registers have survived (only for scattered years in the 1930s through the 1950s), civil and criminal colonial court records housed at Gabon’s national archives are a particularly precious body of sources that allow a view into interior recesses of Gabonese households. Customary law, aptly defined by Martin Chanock as the laws and practices recognized by European and African political leaders in the colonial period as “tradition,” has been a crucial theme of African social historical inquiry since the 1980s.70 Richard Roberts and Kristin Mann’s 1991 edited volume, Law in Colonial Africa, advocated for the critical use of neglected colonial court cases to illustrate transformations in African social history.71 Since then, scholars have utilized the records of colonial courts, under the adjudication of Europeans, chiefs, and imams, to trace the transformations in the meanings of marriage, land rights, inheritance, and the end of slavery across Africa.72 Court records, however, have their limitations. Court records tend to reify conflict as normative.73 Furthermore, colonial court records may overstate the role of state institutions in people’s daily lives.74 Another limitation of court records stems from the question of language and translation. Though deliberations may have taken place in an African language, an African interpreter, with his own interests in presenting particular renderings of the case to a French judge, translates and writes the transcript into French, flattening out the nuances of orality and body language.75
Court records, nevertheless, remain an invaluable source material that permits the periodization and analysis of fundamental transformations in marriage and sex in the Estuary region. Contrary to elsewhere in British and French Africa, customary law was not decisively codified in colonial Gabon, and, thus, colonial courts remained an important arena in which litigants reworked legal and social understandings of the law. Colonial court records surviving in the Gabon national archives range from long-form summaries of testimony and biographical information about litigants to one- or two-sentence summaries of the conflict without identification of the litigants. The “option of the judicial path,” as one female defendant phrased it in a 1950 Libreville court case, was an option that many Libreville and Estuary residents strategically sought out to adjucaticate domestic conflict.76 Furthermore, the varied expressions of reconciliation, betrayal, disappointment, hope, and possibility that litigants conveyed have provided insight into the interior recesses of households. Courts presided over by chiefs in Estuary villages and Libreville neighborhoods were scattered across the region, and residents petitioned them—often bypassing the authority of elder kin—to attempt to obtain a desired outcome. Furthermore, over the course of the twentieth century, Libreville residents also increasingly brought problems of marital disagreement before French colonial officials, electing “to go before the white man,” often overwhelming the capacity of colonial personnel to hear cases.
I have contextualized court records, framing the interpersonal conflicts presented in testimony with questions of social, cultural, economic, and political changes occurring in the time period. As argued by Sally Falk Moore in her study of customary courts in 1960s and 1970s Tanzania, small-scale “legal events . . . bear the imprints of the complex, large-scale transformations.”77 Tracing the dialectical relationships between small-scale legal events in colonial court records and large-scale transformations entails contextualizing court records within broader currents of historical change. Furthermore, I followed the methodology articulated by Richard Roberts in his analysis of court cases in early twentieth-century Mali. Roberts urges researchers to identify the “trouble spots” of conflict that emerge in individual court cases, to illustrate “the detail of these general patterns,” and to track trends in aggregate data.78 I mined extant criminal and civil court registries to identify the nature of the conflict that brought people to court. I categorized cases according to the various “trouble spots” of disagreement as articulated by litigants—divorce, adultery, wife-kidnapping, bridewealth, levirate marriage, child custody, and abandonment of the conjugal home. I have analyzed the terms of disagreements, outcomes desired by litigants, and, when available, the decisions of judges to chart transformations in praxes of marriage and sexual relationships.
The analysis of texts written by Gabonese opens a window into the discursive arenas in which elite African men, chiefs, and, on occasion, poor African men employed the French language and writing to claim rights in marriage and sex. Scholars such as Nancy Rose Hunt have critiqued methodologies of Africanist scholarship that emphasize “to Africa for voices, to Europe for texts.”79 In this paradigm, historians research European perspectives in archives and create “authentic” African historical records in gathering oral interviews in indigenous languages during fieldwork. In Libreville, French was the lingua franca of Africans, and access to basic education in mission schools meant that literacy in French was a symbol of status that many sought. As such, documents authored by Africans—correspondence to colonial officials, letters to newspapers in other colonies in French Equatorial Africa (FEA) and in France, ethnographies, and proposals of laws and policies—are another important body of source materials for this book.
Other types of documents I had hoped to find in my archival research in Gabon, France, Italy, and the United States proved to be nonexistent. Scholars of African history often navigate significant lacunae in source materials, yet Gabon and all of FEA are particularly challenging. Few oral or written sources exist to document the history of Gabon before the mid-nineteenth century.80 The gaps continue into the colonial period. The political, economic, and social dislocation in the period of concessionary rule from 1899 to 1909 has made this period little-documented.81 Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch summed up the period of 1900 to 1920 as marked by the “poverty of the bibliography,” with little documentary and oral evidence available.82 The entire federation of FEA perpetually lacked funding and staffing that would promote systematic record keeping, and scholars refer to Gabon as the “Cinderella” of French Africa.83 Moreover, the entire body of documentary archives of the municipality of Libreville, which may have included police reports, detailed censuses, and the mayor’s reports, has disappeared from the archives in Gabon.84 Another potentially rich source of documents, the local records of the two Catholic parishes of Sainte Marie and Sainte Pierre in Libreville, are unavailable to researchers. Documentary records of the Soeurs Bleues in their archives in Rome and Libreville are threadbare. No newspapers were produced in Gabon over the course of about one hundred years of French colonial rule. The postcolonial state of Gabon has been particularly autocratic, with one-man party rule over several decades, resulting in the virtual absence of documentation since 1960 in the national archives. Thus, my research on Gabon focused on creating historical records, in the form of oral histories, as much as mining existing historical sources.
The field of African history was founded on the commitment to use African sources, oral sources, given that few sub-Saharan African societies had written languages, as a means to pursue the accompanying commitment to demonstrate African agency. Yet as researchers began to set the methodological and epistemological parameters of using oral sources, debates about which types of oral sources were empirically sound abounded. Jan Vansina’s publications stood as foundational texts that argued for the validity and accuracy of oral traditions as evidence for the reconstruction of the African past. Vansina specified that oral traditions were spoken, sung, or instrumental renditions of verbal messages
