URBAN PLANNING AND THE HUMAN GEOGRAPHY OF LIBREVILLE, 1910–1929
Though the historiography of early twentieth-century Gabon has focused much attention on men and the expansion of the okoumé economy in the evolution of Libreville and the Estuary region, women were a key factor in the city’s demographic and socioeconomic evolution in the timber era. As male migrants populated the timber yards of the Estuary region, the population of the city of Libreville and villages of the region reflected gender parity and included a critical mass of children. Figure 2.1 outlines available census data for the city of Libreville from 1912 to 1929. Records do not detail how colonial officials determined who counted as a child, man, woman, or elderly person, yet these numbers are useful for outlining a generational and gender portrait of the town’s residents.
Census numbers suggest sharp increases and decreases in Libreville’s population in the first two decades of FEA’s existence. Through the fluctuations of Libreville’s population, these numbers suggest that Libreville was effectively a “city of women.” African women equaled or outnumbered African men, with the exception of the years 1916 and 1922, in which there appeared to be nominally more men than women. From 1912 to 1916, the beginning of expansion years for the okoumé industry and its decline during World War I, the population of the city gradually increased and peaked at 4,077 people. Fang clans, made up of men, women, and kin linked by affinity in polygamous households, contributed to the population growth. It appears that children were a significant portion of Libreville’s population, as high as about 30% in 1916.
FIGURE 2.1. Population of the City of Libreville, 1912–192941 -Statistics not available for this year
As World War I continued and the French fought battles with Germans in neighboring Cameroon, economic constraints, disease, and food shortages decimated Libreville’s population, which decreased by 31 percent from 1916 to 1918. The population whom the French counted as permanent residents remained at less than three thousand people for nearly a decade to come. Yet, between 1914 and 1916, two to four thousand conscripts from throughout the colony—porters, laborers, and soldiers—took up residence in camps immediately outside Libreville. 42 With the influx of people and the resulting demand for agricultural produce, food prices increased as farmers could not produce greater yields.43 A series of food shortages that began in 1917 culminated in full-scale famine in 1918 and again in 1922.44 Germany had been the main trading partner and recipient of Gabonese wood. The stoppage of trade with Germany and the reduction of ships in ports resulted in a near standstill in the export of timber and a shortage of goods available for purchase.45 Prices increased dramatically for imported items such as salt, soap, tobacco, and pots that had become essential for quotidian existence.46 In spite of this shortage of cash, the colonial state increased taxes from an individual rate of 3 francs in 1914 to 10 francs in 1918 or equivalent amounts of palm oil, rubber, or wood.47 Furthermore, epidemics of sleeping sickness and men dying or fleeing from conscription and portage contributed to the population decrease. The most drastic demographic loss in Libreville’s population seems to have been in terms of the numbers of children, the population of which was reduced by about 50 percent from 1916 to 1918.
After the war, the population only gradually increased, from 2,400 in 1920 to a little over 3,400 inhabitants in 1929. Drought and other ecological factors further diminished agricultural yields in the 1920s, and it was hard for residents to obtain food. From 1920 to 1921, the price for manioc nearly doubled, from 350 to 750 francs. Famine broke out again in 1922, further crippling population growth. With the exception of 1922, in which the numbers of men, women, and children were nearly equal, census figures suggest that women continued to dominate the town’s population figures. Children and men each constituted about 30 percent of Libreville’s population. Women represented about 40 percent of the town’s population in 1924 and 1929, outnumbering men. This was most likely due to several factors. Alcoholism may have contributed to the death of some men. The okoumé rush may have resulted in the out-migration of men to forestry concessions. Moreover, it is probable that many of the Fang communities in the city limits were polygamous households. The Estuary-Como region, the immediate rural suburbs of Libreville in which Fang communities lived in villages, also reflected a greater number of women. Its total population grew from 8,561 men and women in 1910 to a population of 25,822 men and women in 1916. The average number of women in these rural regions exceeded the number of men by about 2,000.48 The currents of historical change in early twentieth-century Libreville entailed the processes of women and men shaping the meaning of town life in the era of timber and the consolidation of colonial rule.
Implementing centralized political control, directing where Africans would live, and controlling labor and economic resources would prove challenging for colonial officials, in part because of the sheer diversity of African societies that belied French conceptions of a singular “African” colonial subject. Libreville’s African population was a heterogeneous population with distinct cleavages in ethnicity, wealth, social status, and the degree to which they had adapted European mores. West Africans from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Ghana worked as agents for various trading companies and as storekeepers, and hundreds of Senegalese tirailleurs circulated in and out of Libreville as they policed the colony. As at the founding of Libreville, the African population originating from Equatorial Africa within the city’s boundaries was predominantly Myènè, particularly Mpongwé. Mpongwé viewed themselves as superior to Fang societies who lived on the outskirts of Libreville. In addition to educational offerings afforded by American Protestant and French Catholic missionaries, Mpongwé boys could attend the secular state-operated school that sought to train students in French and basic math in preparation for jobs as writers and clerks for the colonial government and French trading companies.50
PHOTO 2.1. Village of Louis, ca. 1900. (Reproduced from a postcard in the personal collection of Patrick Ceillier, Saint-Malo, France.)49
Gabrielle Vassal, a French woman who was accompanying her civil servant husband to Brazzaville, stopped in Libreville for a few days in 1923. She was struck by the degree to which Libreville’s residents, meaning the Mpongwé, had adopted European cultural norms, remarking that “all the natives seemed to speak and understand French,” and that she found in “the natives of Libreville a veneer of civilization not to be found in the rest of Equatorial Africa nor in the hinterland of Gabon itself.”51 Libreville’s residents readily adopted the sartorial accouterments of Europeans, with African men wearing pith helmets. Vassal noted, “Natives passing by politely took off their hats (their chief reason for desiring a hat is to be able to imitate the white man).”52 Men wore shorts and shirts tailored from imported cloth. Mpongwé lived in neighborhoods such as Louis and Glass (named after nineteenth-century kings). Townspeople constructed houses on stilts to offer protection from flooding. Local raffia palms provided the materials for the roofs and planks for the walls of the houses, which featured wraparound verandas.53
An Mpongwé girl divided her time between domestic tasks at home and small-scale agricultural production that supplemented families’ diets. The daughters of elite families attended the school for girls that had been operated by the Soeurs Bleues since the late nineteenth century. Between 1916 and 1921, annual enrollment of boarding school pupils increased from 23 to 32 girls, and each year about 66 girls were day school students.54 The curriculum included instruction in basic reading and writing in French, morality, hygiene, the domestic arts, housekeeping, and sewing, skills that supported the nuns’ intention for the girls to be dutiful wives in monogamous marriages to Christian African men. Yet the Catholic efforts to mold a certain type of Mpongwé girl proved problematic. In a 1916 report, a nun characterized