Conjugal Rights. Rachel Jean-Baptiste

Gabon such as the Estuary region. A 1930 publication on marriage and sexual practices, commissioned by an antislavery society and based on written surveys completed by colonial administrators in the 1910s and 1920s throughout French-controlled Africa, encapsulates these views. Written by West African colonial administrator Maurice Delafosse, the monseigneur for French Africa Le Roy, and a medical professional identified as Dr. Poutrin, the introduction argued that colonial rule thwarted the establishment of stable marriages and fecund families by making women into commodities. First, African women’s sexual promiscuity with African and European men spread sexually transmitted diseases that compromised male and female fertility and were often passed on to children.¹²⁹ Second, the expansion of the timber economy and the circulation of money had resulted in increased bridewealth prices. Delafosse, Poutrin, and Le Roy reported that the 1910 bridewealth list for the marriage of a Fang woman and a man of unspecified ages in the Estuary region was 3,000 francs’ worth of goods: 15 stone guns, 80 small barrels of gunpowder, 20 pieces of cloth, 10 machetes, 8 crates, 5 bags of salt, 1 vest, and 1 mutton or dog.¹³⁰ By the 1920s, bridewealth in coastal regions ranged from 1,000 to 3,000 francs, the same worth of goods as in the 1910s, but it was now composed of 70 percent cash, a large sum that made marriage difficult for young men.¹³¹

      Customary practices already allowed for divorce, but women and their families increasingly sought out divorce in order to earn the higher bride-wealth amounts paid by new suitors. To save the colony and ensure the biological reproduction of African societies would require the regulation of African women’s and men’s bodies, French colonial state and society and Catholic representatives would argue. As noted by Lynn Thomas, European states exhibited great interest in questions of “regulating sexual behavior and promoting the growth of national populations” in the early twentieth century, and “colonial rule in Asia and Africa fueled these reproductive concerns by situating the definition of and maintenance of racial, cultural, and sexual boundaries as important state projects.”¹³²

      With the view toward forming African families that would buttress the colony’s demographic growth, the French argued for the need to codify and regulate marital and conjugal relationships in Gabon. Between 1918 and 1925, state and Catholic personnel launched the first efforts toward codifying customary laws. Such efforts came later than elsewhere in colonial-era Africa. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in French West Africa, colonial administrators, armchair ethnologists, and missionaries had compiled customary practices of many African societies.¹³³ By the 1920s, codified versions of customary law existed in many British colonies.¹³⁴ The 1921 eleven-member customary law commission in Gabon included mostly Frenchmen: medical and administrative civil servants, representatives from Protestant and Catholic missions, and the president of the Planter, Businessmen, and Settler Association. The two African members, one a Fang and the other an Mpongwé, were civil servants of the colonial state. The governor’s annual report summarized the committee’s mandate to “reorganize the native family” through facilitating marriage for young people by decreasing bridewealth amounts, limiting adultery and the prostitution of wives by husbands, making divorce more difficult, and prohibiting the marriage of prepubescent girls.¹³⁵ The commission was charged with producing a set of laws that would serve as a blueprint for local administrators and African auxiliaries in enforcing social order. Documents do not detail the opinions of the African members of the committee. However, a report by member Monsignor Matrou encapsulated the common goal of state and church members of the commission, which was to establish immutable written laws to ensure that all African men could find a wife and to make marriages last. Stable marriages, in turn, would increase birth rates.¹³⁶

      The various drafts of customary marriage law that emerged from 1922 to 1925 reveal the conflict between church and state regarding which institutions had the authority to determine what types of marriages would be allowable. Catholic officials viewed marriage as a spiritual contract, of monogamous men and women, consecrated by priests who were intermediaries between humans and God. Colonial bureaucrats viewed marriage as a civil contract, to be consecrated and recorded before those appointed by the colonial state. Church officials argued that polygamy should be discouraged and eventually made illegal. The church sought to add “liberty of consciousness” as grounds for divorce—women could leave a polygamous marriage in order to enter a monogamous one.¹³⁷ Colonial administrators viewed polygamy as ingrained in African practice and feared that efforts to abolish polygamy could result in revolt against the colonial state. Church officials also argued that bridewealth was equivalent to the sale of women and argued for strict limits on bridewealth.¹³⁸ Yet some colonial administrators viewed the monetization of bridewealth payments as a transformation that benefited the colonial economy, given that the need for bridewealth cash provided incentive for African men to participate in wage labor. Bridewealth amounts should, the governor argued, fluctuate according to wages. Colonial officials did worry that elder men with female dependents would ask for high cash payments in order to tap into the cash earnings of young men.¹³⁹ However, the governor concluded that the need to alleviate the acute labor shortage for French enterprises was a greater imperative.