Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon

By Rachel Jean-Baptiste

Conjugal Rights is a history of the role of marriage and other arrangements between men and women in Libreville, Gabon, during the French colonial era, from the mid–nineteenth century through 1960. Conventional historiography has depicted women as few in number and of limited influence in African colonial towns, but this book demonstrates that a sexual economy of emotional, social, legal, and physical relationships between men and women indelibly shaped urban life.

Bridewealth became a motor of African economic activity, as men and women promised, earned, borrowed, transferred, and absconded with money to facilitate interpersonal relationships. Colonial rule increased the fluidity of customary marriage law, as chiefs and colonial civil servants presided over multiple courts, and city residents strategically chose the legal arena in which to arbitrate a conjugal-sexual conflict. Sexual and domestic relationships with European men allowed some African women to achieve a greater degree of economic and social mobility. An eventual decline of marriage rates resulted in new sexual mores, as women and men sought to rebalance the roles of pleasure, respectability, and legality in having sex outside of kin-sanctioned marriage.

Rachel Jean-Baptiste expands the discourse on sexuality in Africa and challenges conventional understandings of urban history beyond the study of the built environment. Marriage and sexual relations determined how people defined themselves as urbanites and shaped the shifting physical landscape of Libreville. Conjugal Rights takes a fresh look at questions of the historical construction of race and ethnicity. Despite the efforts of the French colonial government and society to enforce boundaries between black and white, interracial sexual and domestic relationships persisted. Black and métisse women gained economic and social capital from these relationships, allowing some measure of freedom in the colonial capital city.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780821445037

Rachel Jean-Baptiste

Rachel Jean–Baptiste is an associate professor of African history at the University of California, Davis. Her articles have appeared in Journal of the History of Sexuality, Journal of Women's History, and the Journal of African History.

Book preview

Conjugal Rights

NEW AFRICAN HISTORIES SERIES

SERIES EDITORS: JEAN ALLMAN AND ALLEN ISAACMAN AND DEREK R. PETERSON

Books in this series are published with support from the Ohio University National Resource Center for African Studies.

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Jacob A. Tropp, Natures of Colonial Change: Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei

Jan Bender Shetler, Imagining Serengeti: A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present

Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya in Senegal, 1853–1913

Marc Epprecht, Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS

Marissa J. Moorman, Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times

Karen E. Flint, Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948

Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola, editors, Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa

Moses Ochonu, Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression

Emily Burrill, Richard Roberts, and Elizabeth Thornberry, editors, Domestic Violence and the Law in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa

Daniel R. Magaziner, The Law and the Prophets: Black Consciousness in South Africa, 1968–1977

Emily Lynn Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule

Robert Trent Vinson, The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa

James R. Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania

Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts, editors, Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children

David M. Gordon, Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History

Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara S. Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–2007

Stephanie Newell, The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa

Gibril R. Cole, The Krio of West Africa: Islam, Culture, Creolization, and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century

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Abosede A. George, Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development in Colonial Lagos

Alicia C. Decker, In Idi Amin’s Shadow: Women, Gender, and Militarism in Uganda

Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon

Shobana Shankar, Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c. 1890–1975

Conjugal Rights

Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon

Rachel Jean-Baptiste

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

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To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at [phone] or [phone] (fax).

‘A Black Girl Should Not Be with a White Man’: Sex, Race, and African Women’s Social and Legal Status in Colonial Gabon, c. 1900–1946.’ Copyright © 2010 Journal of Women’s History. This article was first published in Journal of Women’s History 22, no. 2 (2010): 56–82. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press.

‘The Option of the Judicial Path’: Disputes over Marriage, Divorce, and Extra-Marital Sex in Colonial Courts in Libreville, Gabon (1939–1959).

This article was first published in Cahiers d’études africaines 187–88 (2007): 643–70.

Reprinted with permission.

‘These Laws Should be Made by Us’: Customary Marriage Law, Codification and Political Authority in Twentieth-Century Colonial Gabon. This article was first published in the Journal of African History 49, no. 2 (July 2008): 217–40.

Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with permission.

Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jean-Baptiste, Rachel, author.

Conjugal rights : marriage, sexuality, and urban life in colonial

Libreville, Gabon / Rachel Jean-Baptiste.

pages cm. — (New African histories)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8214-2119-2 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8214-2120-8

(pb : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8214-4503-7 (pdf)

1. Marriage—Gabon—Libreville—History. 2. Divorce—Gabon—Libreville—History. 3. Sex—Gabon—Libreville—History. 4. Customary law—Gabon—Libreville—History. 5. Gabon—History—1839–1960. I. Title. II. Series: New African histories series.

HQ694.9.J43 2014

306.8096721—dc23

2014014964

In memory of Lumen and Emanuel Georges and Melanie and Pierre Jean-Baptiste

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction Narrating a History of Domestic Life, Sexuality, Being, and Feeling in Urban Africa

Part IFROM ATLANTIC OCEAN TRADING POST TO COLONIAL CAPITAL CITY, 1849–1929

Chapter 1Sexual Economy in the Era of Trade and Politics: The Founding of Libreville, 1849–1910

Chapter 2Planning, Protest, and Prostitution: Libreville in the Era of Timber, 1910–1929

Part IILIBREVILLE’S GROWTH, 1930–1960

Chapter 3 Migration and Governance: The Expansion of Libreville

Chapter 4The Bridewealth Economy: Money and Relationships of Affinity

Chapter 5 Jurisprudence: Marriage and Divorce Law

Chapter 6 Faire Bon Ami (To Be Good Friends): Sex, Pleasure, and Punishment

Chapter 7 A Black Girl Should Not Be with a White Man: Interracial Sex, African Women, and Respectability

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

MAPS

I.1 Gabon

1.1 Mpongwé Settlement in the Gabon Estuary, Mid-Nineteenth Century

2.1 Administrative Division of Gabon, 1916

3.1 Libreville’s African Neighborhoods, ca. 1957

FIGURES

2.1 Population of the City of Libreville, 1912–1929

3.1 Population of the City of Libreville, 1931–1938

3.2 Population of the Subdivision of Libreville, 1931–1938

3.3 Population of the City of Libreville, 1939–1960

3.4 Population of the Subdivision of Libreville, 1939–1955

3.5 Marital Status by Ethnicity and Gender of Inhabitants of the Subdivision of Libreville, 1944

4.1 Fang Bridewealth in Years of Timber Laborer Salary

4.2 Median Fang Bridewealth in Years of Timber Laborer Salary

4.3 Marriage Loans from the De Gaulle Marriage Loan Fund

5.1 Colonial Native Court System, 1927–1939

5.2 Categories of Legal Complaints in Divorce Disputes

6.1 Polygamous and Monogamous Marriage Rates, Subdivision of Libreville, 1944

PHOTOGRAPHS

2.1 Village of Louis, ca. 1900

2.2 Maritime Boulevard, ca. 1927

2.3 Bastille Day celebration, 1929

3.1 House on stilts, ca. 1950s

6.1 Simone Agnoret Iwenga St. Denis, husband, and child, ca. 1950s

6.2 A man and his copine, ca. 1950s

7.1 Mpongwé women and French military personnel, ca. 1950s

7.2 A métis woman and child, ca. 1950s

Acknowledgments

I received tremendous financial, intellectual, and emotional support from varied institutions and people in completing this book. Fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Program, and the Fulbright Program supported fieldwork and writing of the dissertation from which this book sprang. The Mellon Mays Fellowship Program has funded varied stages of research, writing, and a sabbatical year. An Individual Development Award Grant from the United University Professions at the State University of New York at Albany funded follow-up research in Gabon and Senegal. The University of Chicago’s Social Science Division provided a year of leave and funding for further research trips to France and to Italy. The office of the Dean of Social Sciences provided funding for the stage of final production.

While a graduate student at Stanford, I was fortunate to be part of a dynamic community of faculty and peers. The indefatigable Richard Roberts has been a generous adviser and mentor for more than a decade. The late Kennel Jackson conveyed his love of African cultural and art history. Mary Louise Roberts taught me to not be afraid of theory, and Estelle Freedman taught me to think critically about how gender matters. Fellow graduate students Shelley Lee, Carol Pal, Lise Sedrez, and Matthew Booker read nearly every word of every chapter and continue to provide a sustained friendship. I have also benefited from commentary by Kim Warren, Cecilia Tsu, Shana Bernstein, Shira Robinson, and Amy Robinson, as well as Emily Burrill, Benjamin Lawrence, and Rachel Petrocelli. Abosede George has provided invaluable feedback along the entire road from dissertation to book.

At the University of Chicago, I found myself amid a remarkable intellectual community of scholars. I thank Adrienne Brown, Tianna Paschel, Micere Keels, and Gina Samuels for reading several chapters in a critical moment of transition and for their friendship that knew no bounds. Leora Auslander’s keen discernment propelled me in new directions, as did the insights on the changing meanings of race provided by Julie Saville, Kathy Cohen, and Daniel Desormaux. Linda Zerilli and affiliated faculty and students of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality commented on several chapters. Ralph Austen, Jennifer Cole, Jean Comaroff, John Comaroff, Keisha Fikes, Cécile Fromont, Emily Osborn, Francois Richard, and graduate students who participated in the African Studies Workshop formed a tremendous gathering of Africanists. Research assistants Deirdre Lyons, Brittany McGee, and Jennifer Amos tracked down numerous leads. I learned much from undergraduate and graduate students in the classroom.

Many individuals beyond these institutions generously gave of their time and intellectual capital. I thank Jean Allman for meticulous criticism and probing questions. Gillian Berchowitz supported this project with patience and encouragement. Two anonymous reviewers provided valuable critiques. Carina Ray and Kahleen Sheldon read several chapters in varied stages. The book benefited tremendously from Michelle Beckett’s close reading and editorial suggestions and Nora Titone’s sharp eye for detail. Hilary Jones and Lorelle Semeley have conversed with me innumerable times about our mutual interest in historical change in Francophone Africa. The small community of scholars who work on Equatorial Africa—including Florence Bernault, Phyllis Martin, Jeremy Rich, John Cinnamon, Marissa Moorman, Meredith Terretta, and Kairn Klieman—has provided me with immeasurable assistance in obtaining access to archives, people, and institutions. In France, Pascale Barthélémy, Anne Hugon, Odile Goerg, and Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch have been generous colleagues. At the State University of New York at Albany, conversations with Patricia Pinho, Glyne Griffith, and Lisa Thompson pushed me to think more critically about the analysis of race, and I have benefited greatly from Iris Berger’s insights and mentorship.

I am grateful to and profoundly thank the men and women in Gabon who generously shared the most intimate details of their lives and hosted me in their worksites, homes, and sacred spaces. Jean-Emile Mbot and the Laboratoire Universitaire des Traditions Orales at the University of Gabon Omar Bongo provided me with institutional affiliation. Soeur Marie Sidonie and Soeur Maria Cruz of the Congrégation de l’Imaculée de Castres assisted me with transportation and introductions to social networks. Guy Rossatanga-Rignault and the Fondation Raponda-Walker pour la Science et la Culture also facilitated access to key documents and people. Patrick Cellier shared his treasure trove of historical postcards. The staff of the National Archives unearthed uncataloged documents and photographs. The company of Brigitte Meyo, Achille de Jean, Judy Knight, and many Haitian expatriates helped to make Libreville a home away from home.

I thank my family and friends for their love, patience, and encouragement during this long journey. Marsha Figaro and Erica Olmsted have been tremendous friends. My parents, Christie and the late Aramus Jean-Baptiste, and Ari, Sara, Pria, and Noah Jean-Baptiste provided me with sustenance beyond life in the academy. Cassandra Jean-Baptiste, whose life has unfolded within the shadow of writing this book, and Glenn Hoffmann formed the emotional community that nurtured the completion of this project.

MAP I

.

1

. Gabon

Introduction

Narrating a History of Domestic Life, Sexuality, Being, and Feeling in Urban Africa

LOCATED ON THE GABON ESTUARY along the Atlantic coast, Libreville (Free Town) was founded in 1849 by the French on land that political leaders of Mpongwé ethno-language communities, who had lived there for centuries, ceded via a series of treaties. The French populated the new settlement with a contingent of slaves they had intercepted from a vessel traveling from Angola toward the Americas.¹ Fifty-two former captives—twenty-seven men, twenty-three women, and two children of unidentified Central African origins—disembarked at the Gabon Estuary in February 1849.² The skeletal staff of the French administration, comprising a handful of naval personnel, alongside Catholic missionaries, pledged to each of the former slave men a hut and a parcel of land to begin their new lives. Yet, within months, a number of these men expressed their discontent with the freed lives that the French envisioned for them. In September, French naval reports relay, ten to sixteen men ran away into the forest and carried out attacks on Estuary communities.³ They stole arms, kidnapped women, and threatened to launch further attacks. The rebels issued a singular demand: they wanted wives. The mutineers had begun kidnapping women with the goal of making them their wives, and they threatened to inflict further terror upon Estuary residents unless they were given access to more women.⁴

The aspirations of these newly settled men to build a new present and future necessitated not just land and roofs over their heads, but also wives with whom to form households and ensure social and biological reproduction. Perhaps the rebels also conceived of wives as providing companionship and emotional attachment, factors that could provide them with a sense of belonging in their new home. These were poor men from distant places who had limited means to accumulate the imported goods that could constitute bridewealth payments to facilitate marriage. Bridewealth, a bundle of goods that a groom gave to a bride’s family, was a primary legal and social marker across Africa that made a relationship a marriage. These men also lacked the social capital that could have facilitated interpersonal relationships, and therefore marriage, in the Mpongwé communities of the Estuary region.

Marriage conferred dignity and the capacity to articulate social, legal, and economic rights to shape one’s personhood and status in society. If the men remained unmarried, they would be perpetual minors and socially dead, failing to establish adulthood and manhood.⁵ Not only had being uprooted from their natal homes separated them from their ancestors, to whom they owed offerings in order to prosper in their present life, but their unmarried status would not produce the children who would honor them when they died and perpetuate their lineages. In making the claim to marriage as a universal right for men to establish selfhood in the emerging settlement of Libreville, these men asserted a conception of the basic necessities of town life in terms unimagined by the French.

By October, the rebels had been killed, captured, or rejoined the settlement and pardoned. Fearing further mischief, a meeting involving the chief of the former slaves, the French doctor, and the naval commander convened to consider the urgency of marriage for Libreville’s new residents. Navy officers precipitously sought the approval of Catholic missionaries to bless en masse marriages of fifteen couples, fearing very dangerous liaisons if they were left unmarried.⁶ In alluding to the dangerous 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 an important current in African urban studies, researchers have challenged the very concept of urbanization as a linear process that automatically results in a standard set of structural changes. James Ferguson has critiqued the manner in which modernization theorists have interchangeably used the term urbanization and the terms modernization, monetization, proletarianization, and detribalization, a slippage in language that he calls teleologies of social change.¹³ Similar to Ferguson, historians of Africa emphasized African agency in determining what urban life looks like. Town dwellers forwarded their own conceptions of modernity and directed their leisure time and sartorial makeup.¹⁴ Wage laborers countered European bosses’ conception of work time and offered alternative visions of wage labor.¹⁵ After World War II, urban men were at the forefront of nationalist and anticolonial politics.¹⁶

However, in keeping the term urbanization as an analytical category, we have narrowed the possible terrains on which Africans conceptualized town life and have posited the source of transformations in city life to the very teleologies we seek to disrupt. In his research on four cities across sub-Saharan Africa, AbdouMaliq Simone contests the very term urbanization as the cognitive framework through which researchers analyze urban African history. Simone exhorts scholars to examine how specific actors reach and extend themselves across a larger world and enact these possibilities of urban becoming.¹⁷ Moreover, Simone contends, particular modalities of organization, long rooted in different African histories, are resuscitated for new objectives and with new resiliency.¹⁸

Conjugal Rights traces urban becoming rather than urbanization in Libreville in order to encompass the multiplicities of processes through which individuals created and gave meaning to urban life. In correlating the themes of sexuality, marriage, and transformations in how to be male and female through the interpretive lens of urban becoming, this book offers a fresh perspective to understandings of African urban history.

There is a rich collection of histories of women in urban Africa, but this scholarship has not often resulted in the gendering of urban African studies. When discussing African urbanites, general overviews of African urban history often talk about only African men— the African city has been gendered male. The normative urban African character, the person with agency to shape meaning and experience of life on the Copperbelt, in Johannesburg, Mombasa, the Witwatersrand, and Dakar, the mine, the factory, and the street, is male.¹⁹ In tracing the uneven and changing gendering of Libreville as male and female, this book centers the historiographical and epistemological paradigms of women’s and gender history on urban African history.

WOMEN AND GENDER IN AFRICAN HISTORY

In a landmark 1996 edited volume on urban women in Africa, Kathleen Sheldon wrote, Women and gender have rarely held center stage in accounts of urban analytic issues.²⁰ Since then, a number of books have been published on African women in cities. Countering earlier publications that posited African women as passive rural widows, historians have demonstrated how women, like their male counterparts, migrated to cities in search of economic opportunities.²¹ Women usually worked on the margins of the colonial wage-labor economy, as beer brewers, sex workers, and hawkers. Focusing primarily on Southern and Eastern Africa and on colonies in which there were large numbers of European settlers, this research has argued that though small in numbers, women shaped the political economies of cities and rural regions from which they originated, as well maintained the social reproduction of African societies.²²

Several decades of research have yielded a commonly accepted chronology of African women’s twentieth-century colonial history as marked by both opportunities and limitations. Dorothy Hodgson and Sheryl McCurdy have argued that the onset of colonial conquest and rule in the early twentieth century intensified struggles over normative gender relations. Wicked women, women who acted in ways outside the normative ideas of proper female comportment in urban areas across the continent, were at the forefront of historical change.²³ The early colonial period, for the most part, ushered in openings for women of increased autonomy as officials created legal institutions and wrote legislation in attempts to make African societies legible.²⁴ An unintended consequence was that women near European enterprises and colonial administrative centers brought marital disputes before officials, bypassing chiefs, who had been the traditional arbiters, and more easily obtained divorces.²⁵

By the 1920s and 1930s, many scholars concur, colonial states and elder African men sought to enact control over women’s labor, marriage options, and mobility by applying new varied regimes of indirect rule. In settler colonies in East and Southern Africa, land alienation and the expansion of male migrant labor fixed women in rural areas under the adjudication of chiefs and newly articulated bodies of customary laws that rigidified the control of senior men over women.²⁶ However, some researchers have countered, women’s status in rural areas was not so bleak, with young men and women contesting the control of senior men.²⁷ Moreover, codification did not evenly occur, nor did it inevitably result in the crystallization of senior men’s power over women and junior men.²⁸ Furthermore, scholars have demonstrated that the closing off of town life to women after the 1920s was not so categorical, showing that some women from Nairobi to Harare created niches for economic opportunity and social reproduction.²⁹

During and in the aftermath of World War II, migration to cities increased across the continent, and British and French colonial officials turned their attention to creating a stable urban population composed of African men and women. From the Copperbelt to Harare to Lagos, elite Africans invoked politics of respectability to argue that African town life incorporate married couples and their children into permanent housing.³⁰ After World War II, Africans surged to cities across Africa, even in apartheid South Africa, with redefined pass controls. As colonial officials in settler colonies viewed the presence of African women in towns with less approbation, they sought to encourage monogamous households of wage-earning men and women trained in European domestic arts. In towns such as Harare and Nairobi, an increased number of women circulated through cities, including wives joining their wage-laborer husbands for part of the year in town through marital migrancy and individual women working as small-scale traders.³¹

Research on women in West Africa, which included African societies with precolonial urban traditions and fewer European settlements, has demonstrated that restrictions on women’s and girls’ movement in urban areas and socioeconomic mobility were not so unilateral.³² Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian have shown that in 1930s Asante, Ghana women had possibilities for economic autonomy through cash cropping on their own farms, instead of husbands’ farms, in rural frontiers that bordered towns.³³ That some women were able to maintain control over land and cash proceeds facilitated their control over their sexuality and choice in marital status. In spite of the consolidation of indirect rule and the codification of customary law in the 1930s, some customs remained fluid and others rigid, resulting in a shifting customary terrain in which men and women reconfigured the meanings of customary marriage law in colonial courts.³⁴ Nevertheless, the dominant paradigm in the literature across East, West, and Southern Africa is that women did decline in economic, social, and legal status in the 1930s as chiefs, elder men, and colonial officials strove to limit their economic autonomy and ability to determine their marital lives and sexuality.

Research in women’s history in Francophone Africa, published in English or French, remains embryonic. In 1997, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch wrote that the history of African women was almost unrecognized in French historiography.³⁵ Since then a few edited volumes and essays have indicated some momentum toward this research theme.³⁶ Yet, by 2010, Pascale Barthélémy lamented the as of yet little tread research path in France on the history of women and gender in Africa.³⁷

The small body of research on women in French-speaking West and Central Africa has called into question some generalizations in the historiography on colonial Africa. For example, as argued by Frederick Cooper, in the minds of British and French colonial personnel, the gendering of the African worker [as male] was so profound 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,