Mpongwé women were consummate purchasers of imported cloth and European adornment.57 Vassal opined that “the native women with their gay-coloured cloths wound tightly round their supple bodies from breasts to knees had here a nonchalant, satisfied appearance which contrasted with the dreary impassive expressions we had seen in other ports.”58 British colonial civil servant Frederick Migeod, who traveled to Libreville in the early 1920s, described Mpongwé as “civilized,” speaking multiple European languages, well-educated, and “clean,” with the women often bathing themselves with soap several times a day.59
Libreville’s African populations were avid consumers of imported goods. Articles off-loaded from ships and sold in stores operated by European trading companies (factories) included tobacco, sewing machines, knives, pots, beads, belts, cloth, and manufactured clothes—shirts, hats, men’s boots, espadrilles, and women’s shoes.60 Townspeople readily incorporated European foodstuffs into their diets. Sugar, butter, rice, spirits and wine, preserves, and canned milk were part of daily intake.61 A 1928 annual report recorded that there were at least a half dozen bakeries in the town, and Africans were the main customers.62 Libreville residents viewed themselves as sophisticated and cosmopolitan, with men and women sporting European-style clothing and parading their fashions in Sunday strolls along the Ocean Boulevard or at public Bastille Day celebrations.
PHOTO 2.2. Maritime Boulevard, ca. 1927. (Reproduced from a postcard in the personal collection of Patrick Ceillier.)63
The Estuary region’s thin population density worried French colonial officials and businessmen, who were eager to increase Libreville’s African population and harness the labor of Fang communities. Colonial personnel, who viewed Mpongwé as “lazy” people who refused to perform manual labor, looked toward African societies other than Mpongwé to populate the town. In a 1916 report, the governor outlined efforts to draw people from the interior regions to Libreville and receive primary education at the state school so that they could increase the number of African auxiliaries from Gabon’s varied ethnic groups. He urged the subdivision heads from interior regions to send their most serious students to Libreville for schooling, where they would receive a scholarship.64
Officials worried about how to exact greater control over “elusive” Fang populations living in the forested suburbs of Libreville.65 Fang populations circulated in and out of Libreville to sell agricultural products and fish, sell forest products for export, purchase imported goods, and to seek out medical services from the French, but often eluded French efforts to extract forced labor and taxes. Frederick Migeod traveled through some Fang Estuary villages and described the houses as composed of raffia palm and flattened bark; he also noted that everything was laid out in “perfectly straight lines,” of houses, trees, and streets.67 In comparing Fang to Mpongwé, Migeod viewed Fang as “a dirty race” whose women “make no pretention to ornamental dress,” with some tattooing and red dye on their bodies and men sporting a cloth around their waists.68 The few Fang men who worked as clerks or interpreters differentiated themselves from other Fang by wearing a European trouser and shirt.
PHOTO 2.3. Bastille Day celebration, 1929. (Reproduced from a postcard in the personal collection of Patrick Ceillier.)66
Though they lived on the outskirts, Fang were essential to Libreville as they cultivated the agricultural produce that fed the city’s African and European inhabitants. Fang women, the principal farmers, worked daily on individual cropland plots. In contrast to Mpongwé women, whom European observers described as independent and exhibiting a certain liberty, Fang women were portrayed as “beasts of burden” and “veritable slaves,” who toiled in farming and then walked to town carrying thirty to forty kilograms of produce in baskets on their backs with a band around the forehead that helped stabilize the loads.69 Fang women sold the produce in markets to African and European purchasers and reportedly gave their husbands the money. While Migeod and other European observers rarely recorded Mpongwé women carrying children, the Fang woman always had her child with her, with “the babies carried on the right hip. One woman I noticed with a big basket on her back, had a child too big to carry on her hip, so she had it astride her shoulders above the basket.”70 As hunters and fishermen, Fang men procured the little meat present in the diets of Estuary residents.71 While most Estuary Fang communities lived outside of what colonial officials recognized as Libreville’s boundaries, some clans did move within Libreville in the 1910s and 1920s, further fueling the concerns of French personnel about how to maintain social control over townspeople and manage Libreville’s built environment.
French efforts to consolidate political power in Libreville involved attempts to expand European living, business, and administrative quarters. Executing this urban planning entailed displacing African communities who occupied land desired by the French. Mpongwé and Fang societies refuted French conceptions of urban planning on the grounds of gender, clan and ethnic differentiation, and rights to land and to construct their own housing. Early administrators sought to diminish Libreville’s nineteenth-century landscape of Africans and Europeans living in close proximity. Between 1912 and 1913, military officers expelled Fang who had been living near the military fort in order to create the area named the “plateau” that was to serve as the segregated European administrative and residential neighborhood.72 The French envisioned that they would segregate Africans into distinct neighborhoods by ethnicity and designated plots of land. Yet, in June 1912, a group of Fang men refused to move from the designated plateau area into a single area of the city that was to serve as the Fang neighborhood. In a letter to the mayor, these men refused on the grounds that Fang clans were not part of a single collectivity and were distinct from one another. Such close proximity to other Fang groups, the men argued, would encourage their wives’ infidelity.73 The mayor accused government-employed Fang of being at the head of the revolt and punished some of the protesters for their refusal.74 Mpongwé communities also protested French urban-planning efforts to displace them from land on which they lived, as well as against new colonial restrictions on economic and educational privileges that they previously held. Parallel to protests by Fang men, a group of Mpongwé writers and clerks in the colonial service wrote letters to French officials against the 1912 urban plan, claiming that their descent from Mpongwé kings gave them ancestral rights to the land.75
Libreville’s Mpongwé residents viewed themselves as equal to whites and chafed against French colonial efforts to categorize them as “natives” (indigènes), colonial subjects who had few economic and educational privileges. After the creation of FEA, administrators expelled the Saint Gabriel Fathers who had been providing secondary education to Mpongwé students. In 1918, some Mpongwé men founded a branch of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme in Libreville. League members wrote letters to colonial officials asking for the return of the Saint Gabriel Fathers to provide secondary school education and for Gabon to be autonomous from the new FEA, which members viewed as a turning point in which new racialist attitudes of the French emerged.76 That same year, a group called the Professional Association of African Native Employees, composed of West Africans and Myènès, lobbied against the lower salaries that African civil servants received in comparison to French employees.77 While in exile in Senegal and France in the 1920s, discontented Mpongwé elite men published the newspaper L’Echo Gabonais, later called La Voie Coloniale, to decry increased colonial taxes and limitations on education.78 The letter and newspaper campaigns against tax increases, reductions in educational opportunities, and low salaries, what the authors interpreted as racial discrimination, did little to stop such colonial directives. Nevertheless, these campaigns do demonstrate moments in which varied constituencies of Libreville’s