Conjugal Rights. Rachel Jean-Baptiste

hope, and possibility that litigants conveyed have provided insight into the interior recesses of households. Courts presided over by chiefs in Estuary villages and Libreville neighborhoods were scattered across the region, and residents petitioned them—often bypassing the authority of elder kin—to attempt to obtain a desired outcome. Furthermore, over the course of the twentieth century, Libreville residents also increasingly brought problems of marital disagreement before French colonial officials, electing “to go before the white man,” often overwhelming the capacity of colonial personnel to hear cases.

      I have contextualized court records, framing the interpersonal conflicts presented in testimony with questions of social, cultural, economic, and political changes occurring in the time period. As argued by Sally Falk Moore in her study of customary courts in 1960s and 1970s Tanzania, small-scale “legal events . . . bear the imprints of the complex, large-scale transformations.”⁷⁷ Tracing the dialectical relationships between small-scale legal events in colonial court records and large-scale transformations entails contextualizing court records within broader currents of historical change. Furthermore, I followed the methodology articulated by Richard Roberts in his analysis of court cases in early twentieth-century Mali. Roberts urges researchers to identify the “trouble spots” of conflict that emerge in individual court cases, to illustrate “the detail of these general patterns,” and to track trends in aggregate data.⁷⁸ I mined extant criminal and civil court registries to identify the nature of the conflict that brought people to court. I categorized cases according to the various “trouble spots” of disagreement as articulated by litigants—divorce, adultery, wife-kidnapping, bridewealth, levirate marriage, child custody, and abandonment of the conjugal home. I have analyzed the terms of disagreements, outcomes desired by litigants, and, when available, the decisions of judges to chart transformations in praxes of marriage and sexual relationships.

      The analysis of texts written by Gabonese opens a window into the discursive arenas in which elite African men, chiefs, and, on occasion, poor African men employed the French language and writing to claim rights in marriage and sex. Scholars such as Nancy Rose Hunt have critiqued methodologies of Africanist scholarship that emphasize “to Africa for voices, to Europe for texts.”⁷⁹ In this paradigm, historians research European perspectives in archives and create “authentic” African historical records in gathering oral interviews in indigenous languages during fieldwork. In Libreville, French was the lingua franca of Africans, and access to basic education in mission schools meant that literacy in French was a symbol of status that many sought. As such, documents authored by Africans—correspondence to colonial officials, letters to newspapers in other colonies in French Equatorial Africa (FEA) and in France, ethnographies, and proposals of laws and policies—are another important body of source materials for this book.

      Other types of documents I had hoped to find in my archival research in Gabon, France, Italy, and the United States proved to be nonexistent. Scholars of African history often navigate significant lacunae in source materials, yet Gabon and all of FEA are particularly challenging. Few oral or written sources exist to document the history of Gabon before the mid-nineteenth century.⁸⁰ The gaps continue into the colonial period. The political, economic, and social dislocation in the period of concessionary rule from 1899 to 1909 has made this period little-documented.⁸¹ Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch summed up the period of 1900 to 1920 as marked by the “poverty of the bibliography,” with little documentary and oral evidence available.⁸² The entire federation of FEA perpetually lacked funding and staffing that would promote systematic record keeping, and scholars refer to Gabon as the “Cinderella” of French Africa.⁸³ Moreover, the entire body of documentary archives of the municipality of Libreville, which may have included police reports, detailed censuses, and the mayor’s reports, has disappeared from the archives in Gabon.⁸⁴ Another potentially rich source of documents, the local records of the two Catholic parishes of Sainte Marie and Sainte Pierre in Libreville, are unavailable to researchers. Documentary records of the Soeurs Bleues in their archives in Rome and Libreville are threadbare. No newspapers were produced in Gabon over the course of about one hundred years of French colonial rule. The postcolonial state of Gabon has been particularly autocratic, with one-man party rule over several decades, resulting in the virtual absence of documentation since 1960 in the national archives. Thus, my research on Gabon focused on creating historical records, in the form of oral histories, as much as mining existing historical sources.

      The field of African history was founded on the commitment to use African sources, oral sources, given that few sub-Saharan African societies had written languages, as a means to pursue the accompanying commitment to demonstrate African agency. Yet as researchers began to set the methodological and epistemological parameters of using oral sources, debates about which types of oral sources were empirically sound abounded. Jan Vansina’s publications stood as foundational texts that argued for the validity and accuracy of oral traditions as evidence for the reconstruction of the African past. Vansina specified that oral traditions were spoken, sung, or instrumental renditions of verbal messages originating at least one generation removed from the informant who relayed them. If analyzed according to a set of rules of evidence, history as what really happened could be parsed out from any embellishments or untruths that later generations may have added to the original messages.⁸⁵ Subsequent scholars unearthed the limitations of oral traditions in that they reflected the viewpoint of the powerful in African societies and represented normative accounts of social order.⁸⁶ Historians of colonial Africa turned to oral history, interviews of informants that yielded narratives about events in living memory or a person’s lifetime, to elucidate the histories of the less powerful. Life histories, a particular form of oral history, encompassed an interviewee’s entire life span. Many historians, particularly feminist scholars, publishing research in the 1980s and 1990s, used the words of women, peasants, and other marginalized actors to narrate everyday experiences of colonialism and emphasize African agency.⁸⁷ Oral histories, scholars argued, were “more authentic, and thus more objective than any colonial text could be,” conveying the “truth” of historical experiences.⁸⁸

      Yet some scholars urged a more critical methodological and epistemological use of oral histories.⁸⁹ Belinda Bozzoli and Mmantho Nkotsoe, in their analysis of twentieth-century life histories of South Africans, forwarded a multifaceted reading of life histories as “documents, stories, histories, incoherent rumblings, interlinked fragments of consciousness, and conversations and/ or recital of facts,” as well as a “product of the unique formal and informal exchanges between interviewer and interviewee.”⁹⁰ Bozzoli and other scholars have called attention to the asymmetrical relationships of power between informants and interviewers and the need for self-reflexivity in how both parties shaped the content, form, and interpretation of oral history.⁹¹ Perhaps the most trenchant reassessment of oral history came from Luise White, who in a 2004 article described her uncritical use of oral sources in The Comforts of Home as “perhaps the most arrogant defense of oral history ever written” in her assertion of their greater authority and truth compared to other sources.⁹² White’s words of caution call attention to how informants also play an active role in interpreting lives in the context of historical change and the figurative meanings of the accounts people give.

      Oral histories are central to this book’s analysis of how sojourners to Libreville lived in and framed their marital and sexual relationships. Between 1999 and 2005, I conducted and recorded about one hundred oral interviews with Gabonese men and women of varied ages and ethnic groups. Informants included individuals born from the late 1920s through the 1960s who lived in Libreville and peri-urban villages located along the Kango-Libreville road, people who made the Estuary region a place of permanent settlement. I conducted some interviews in Mpongwé and Fang languages with the aid of research assistants and translators Thanguy Obame and the late Edidie Nkolo. I conducted other interviews in French without interpreters. I recorded the interviews using directed questions, asking participants specific questions about their marital and conjugal careers, as well as allowing informants to discuss topics of importance to them. I and the men and women I interviewed were aware of my woeful ignorance about Gabon, and my interviewees sought to “school me” in the history of their lifetimes, often pushing back against the questions I asked and the assumptions embedded in them. As a woman, I sometimes faced reticence