If analyzed according to a set of rules of evidence, history as what really happened could be parsed out from any embellishments or untruths that later generations may have added to the original messages.85 Subsequent scholars unearthed the limitations of oral traditions in that they reflected the viewpoint of the powerful in African societies and represented normative accounts of social order.86 Historians of colonial Africa turned to oral history, interviews of informants that yielded narratives about events in living memory or a person’s lifetime, to elucidate the histories of the less powerful. Life histories, a particular form of oral history, encompassed an interviewee’s entire life span. Many historians, particularly feminist scholars, publishing research in the 1980s and 1990s, used the words of women, peasants, and other marginalized actors to narrate everyday experiences of colonialism and emphasize African agency.87 Oral histories, scholars argued, were “more authentic, and thus more objective than any colonial text could be,” conveying the “truth” of historical experiences.88
Yet some scholars urged a more critical methodological and epistemological use of oral histories.89 Belinda Bozzoli and Mmantho Nkotsoe, in their analysis of twentieth-century life histories of South Africans, forwarded a multifaceted reading of life histories as “documents, stories, histories, incoherent rumblings, interlinked fragments of consciousness, and conversations and/ or recital of facts,” as well as a “product of the unique formal and informal exchanges between interviewer and interviewee.”90 Bozzoli and other scholars have called attention to the asymmetrical relationships of power between informants and interviewers and the need for self-reflexivity in how both parties shaped the content, form, and interpretation of oral history.91 Perhaps the most trenchant reassessment of oral history came from Luise White, who in a 2004 article described her uncritical use of oral sources in The Comforts of Home as “perhaps the most arrogant defense of oral history ever written” in her assertion of their greater authority and truth compared to other sources.92 White’s words of caution call attention to how informants also play an active role in interpreting lives in the context of historical change and the figurative meanings of the accounts people give.
Oral histories are central to this book’s analysis of how sojourners to Libreville lived in and framed their marital and sexual relationships. Between 1999 and 2005, I conducted and recorded about one hundred oral interviews with Gabonese men and women of varied ages and ethnic groups. Informants included individuals born from the late 1920s through the 1960s who lived in Libreville and peri-urban villages located along the Kango-Libreville road, people who made the Estuary region a place of permanent settlement. I conducted some interviews in Mpongwé and Fang languages with the aid of research assistants and translators Thanguy Obame and the late Edidie Nkolo. I conducted other interviews in French without interpreters. I recorded the interviews using directed questions, asking participants specific questions about their marital and conjugal careers, as well as allowing informants to discuss topics of importance to them. I and the men and women I interviewed were aware of my woeful ignorance about Gabon, and my interviewees sought to “school me” in the history of their lifetimes, often pushing back against the questions I asked and the assumptions embedded in them. As a woman, I sometimes faced reticence from male interviewees to talk with me, and, indeed, some men told me they would reveal only so much to me, since “women must not know men’s secrets.” I have changed the names of some of my interviewees per their requests, while others wished to be identified.
In critically utilizing these oral histories, I reject the binary of using oral sources either as history as lived or as representations of the past. Instead, I follow Stephan Miescher in “taking the middle road” by using oral histories to glean both data about the past as well as evidence of interviewees’ conceptions of “how it should or could have been” and “a reflection of the past’s meanings for the present and this reflection of a speaker’s subjectivity.”93 The middle road allows for the uncovering of how the researcher and the interviewee produce history in the questions and conversations that unfold over the course of the interview, as well as the researcher’s contextualization of oral sources with other sources and within broader historical processes. The middle road also heeds calls for critical distance from interviewees’ words to explore how people give meaning to their lives and their places in their worlds. In endeavoring to critically analyze subjectivities in oral histories, I follow Corinne Kratz’s suggestion that historians pay attention to how “narrators combine episodes in sequences based on particular notions of time, social relations, and self.”94 Building on Miescher and Katz, I have excavated the sexual and marital careers that narrators present in their interviews, their expectations, joys, and dismay, to analyze how historical actors have attempted to shape normative conceptions of order in their own lives and in relationship to strangers, neighbors, intimate partners, and kin in changing historical contexts.
PART I
From Atlantic Ocean Trading Post to Colonial Capital City, 1849–1929
PART 1 ANALYZES TRANSFORMATIONS in marriage and sex in Libreville prior to 1930. Chapter 1 explores Libreville’s transformation from a small but strategic hub of Atlantic trade in slaves and forest and imported goods in the mid- to late nineteenth century to a nascent colonial capital city in 1910. I track the gendered dynamics of moving to and setting up homes in the emerging town and how the sexual economy shaped the political economy, legal infrastructures, and geographic layout. Chapter 2 picks up this thread from 1910 to 1929, years in which efforts by the French to consolidate colonial rule and direct the labor of Africans toward the colonial economy and timber production fundamentally altered daily life. I trace the unintended processes of women’s sexual labor in generating cash and other forms of wealth and how worries about the sexual economy compelled transformations in French conceptualizations of customary law and governance. These two chapters set the stage for how the dynamics of conjugal and sexual relations demonstrate cracks in the edifice of colonial rule and spaces for Gabonese to shape the lived realities of urban life in the decades to come.
1
The Founding of Libreville, 1849–1910
WRITING IN 1975, historian K. David Patterson observed, “The early history of Gabon has received almost no attention from scholars. . . . The whole region of Western Equatorial Africa remains something of a historio-graphical void.”1 Since Patterson wrote this, less than a handful of publications have filled the historiographical void. A few publications have focused on the period before European contact.2 The few publications focusing on the nineteenth century can be characterized as the “trade and politics school,” focusing on the end of the transatlantic slave trade, the exchange of Western and equatorial forest goods, and increasing French ambitions toward colonial rule and African resistance to French attempts at domination as motors of historical change.3 Scholars have argued of marriage and family life as serving normative functions—to allow elder men to maintain political power and social control over women, slaves, and junior men that permitted them to control nodes of transatlantic trade in slaves and goods. Marriage was an important institution through which individuals achieved social adulthood and kin groups formed alliances. What is common in research on the nineteenth century is an absence of an analytical focus on women and gender, an empirical absence that has led to conceptual gaps in our understanding of historical change.
In chronicling how Libreville inhabitants negotiated dynamics of sexual economy over the course of the mid-nineteenth century to 1910, this chapter demonstrates that questions of how marriage was to be consecrated and the forms of socially acceptable sexual relations
