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, the marriage revolt at the mid-nineteenth-century founding of Libreville points to an earlier time in which African men drew attention to the questions of conjugal households, of social and biological reproduction, and of relationships with women as constitutive of lives in town. Libreville’s newest inhabitants claimed that domestic life was part and parcel of urban life, compelling French representatives to perpetually renegotiate the very contours of colonial policy. Furthermore, many Gabonese men of varied ethnicities disavowed agricultural labor in favor of trade as early as the mid-to late nineteenth century. By the 1920s, men from throughout Gabon migrated to work in timber camps or other forms of wage labor, configuring Libreville and the Estuary region as a place of permanent settlement. Entire lineages of men, women, and children moved into the region, and men who settled without wives struggled to marry and build households. Farming became a low-status occupation, one in which women and some men of ethnic groups from Gabon’s interior labored in plots kilometers away from Libreville. Mirroring what Tsuneo Yoshikuni found in 1920s Harare, urban life in Libreville included “dual participation in wage employment and agricultural production,” with some women growing the food that fed the critical mass of wage laborers.49 By the mid-1920s, the reality of an Estuary region in which many men were wage laborers, and in which women reached near parity or superseded the number of men, compelled colonial officials, missionaries, and African political leaders to grapple with the question of permanent African settlement in urban areas.
As was the case elsewhere in Africa, the 1930s in Gabon did usher in the attempts of colonial officials and some chiefs to work in concert to limit the autonomy of African women in marriage choices and sexuality. However, the patriarchy-state alliance was not unilateral. The category of “elder African men” in Libreville was differentiated by ethnicity, social and economic status, and individual interests. No single codified version of customary law emerged, but rather multiple articulations. Mirroring the “shifting customary terrain” in post-1930s Ghana, in the Estuary region litigants articulated varied definitions of customary marriage in colonial courts. After World War II, when Libreville experienced increased immigration and expansion, public debates over the male and the female spaces and sexual respectability erupted in the streets and legislative halls.
Some scholars have criticized the emphasis on urban women in African women’s history and the dearth of research on women in rural areas.50 However, we have barely begun to scratch the surface of uncovering the complexities of women’s and gender history and urban history in Africa. In recent publications on music, dress and fashion, and sexual politics in late colonial and postcolonial Luanda and Dar es Salaam, Marissa Moorman and Andrew Ivaska, respectively, demonstrate how male and female urbanites constructed their understandings of nation and culture.51 This body of work has highlighted the improvisational and fluid dynamics of demarcating gender, generation, wealth, and culture in African towns from the 1950s into recent times. We need to further complicate our understanding of gender in African cities in the years of colonialism as well, unpacking the complex processes of social change in African societies, and understanding the multifaceted strategies of men and women for migrating to and creating lives in towns.
SEXUALITY AND AFFECT
In tracing the history of sexuality as imagined and practiced by Gabonese, this book expands an emerging body of research that challenges the dominant paradigm of sexuality in Africa as “other” in comparison to Europe or within the context of research of AIDS.52 In challenging this paradigm, historians of sexuality in Africa have focused primarily on two themes: political economy and reproductive rights and circumcision. In her seminal book on prostitution in Nairobi, Luise White has shown that prostitutes and the domestic and sexual services they provided for African men in Nairobi were key to maintaining social reproduction of Kenyan societies under British colonial rule. Women’s cash earnings from their labor maintained rural households, supported migrant men in negotiating harsh and racist labor conditions, and permitted women to purchase property in the city.53 Lynn Thomas has shown how “the politics of the womb,” female excision, pregnancy, birth, and abortion, occupied the center of how Meru women, girls, elder men and young men, and British colonial officials, missionaries, and feminists sought to configure political power and moral order in twentieth-century colonial Kenya.54
In an edited volume urging scholars to “re-think” sexualities in Africa, Signe Arnfred argues that European imaginaries of African sexuality have oscillated from ideas of the exotic and the noble and depraved savage, yet have been continually “other” in comparison to the norm of European sexuality.55 Historians have analyzed European discourses of African sexualities as more fraught than Arnfred portrays.56 Megan Vaughan’s work on biomedical discourses in colonial British Central and East Africa and Diana Jeater’s book on colonial moralist conceptions of African sexuality in early colonial Southern Rhodesia demonstrate that no dominant, hegemonic colonial discourse emerged, but rather a range of discourses. Megan Vaughan underlines how colonial representatives expressed anxieties about African women’s sexuality in urban areas in particular and associated African women’s sexuality with disease and social breakdown. Vaughan traces how state-employed doctors and medical missionaries conceptualized and debated the mechanisms of syphilis vaccination campaigns to construct governable African subjects.57 In analyzing changing discourses of biomedicine, Vaughan’s analysis demonstrates the persistent import of controlling African women’s bodies by the apparatuses of colonial rule. Diana Jeater also demonstrates the multivalent nature of European ideas of African