Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon

Posted in Africa, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs on 2015-04-21 01:05Z by Steven

Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality, and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon

Ohio University Press
2014
336 pages
6 × 9 in., 7 b&w photos, 4 maps
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8214-2120-8
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8214-2119-2
Electronic ISBN: 978-0-8214-4503-7

Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Assistant Professor of African History
University of California, Davis

Conjugal Rights is a history of the role of marriage and other arrangements between men and women in Libreville, Gabon, during the French colonial era, from the mid–nineteenth century through 1960. Conventional historiography has depicted women as few in number and of limited influence in African colonial towns, but this book demonstrates that a sexual economy of emotional, social, legal, and physical relationships between men and women indelibly shaped urban life.

Bridewealth became a motor of African economic activity, as men and women promised, earned, borrowed, transferred, and absconded with money to facilitate interpersonal relationships. Colonial rule increased the fluidity of customary marriage law, as chiefs and colonial civil servants presided over multiple courts, and city residents strategically chose the legal arena in which to arbitrate a conjugal-sexual conflict. Sexual and domestic relationships with European men allowed some African women to achieve a greater degree of economic and social mobility. An eventual decline of marriage rates resulted in new sexual mores, as women and men sought to rebalance the roles of pleasure, respectability, and legality in having sex outside of kin-sanctioned marriage.

Rachel Jean-Baptiste expands the discourse on sexuality in Africa and challenges conventional understandings of urban history beyond the study of the built environment. Marriage and sexual relations determined how people defined themselves as urbanites and shaped the shifting physical landscape of Libreville. Conjugal Rights takes a fresh look at questions of the historical construction of race and ethnicity. Despite the efforts of the French colonial government and society to enforce boundaries between black and white, interracial sexual and domestic relationships persisted. Black and métisse women gained economic and social capital from these relationships, allowing some measure of freedom in the colonial capital city.

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“Miss Eurafrica”: Men, Women’s Sexuality, and Métis Identity in Late Colonial French Africa, 1945-1960

Posted in Africa, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Women on 2011-12-22 04:27Z by Steven

“Miss Eurafrica”: Men, Women’s Sexuality, and Métis Identity in Late Colonial French Africa, 1945-1960

Journal of the History of Sexuality
Volume 20, Number 3, September 2011
pages 568-593

Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Assistant Professor of African History
University of Chicago

The 1960 issue of the magazine L’Eurafricain (The Eurafrican) featured a cover photo of a woman announced as “Miss L’Eurafrique” (figure 1). Edited from Dakar under the auspices of the Union internationale des métis (International Union of Mixed-Race Persons), the magazine was written in French and printed in Paris. The membership of the union consisted of métis primarily from French-ruled sub-Saharan Africa. The primary mandate of the union was to advocate for financial, moral, and educational assistance to métis children. Published once or twice a year between 1945 and 1960, L’Eurafricain was the public face of the organization. The publication was a medium through which contributors sought to cultivate a sense of common identity among métis persons across geographical boundaries, facilitate communication among members, report on various métis social and cultural events, and promote the organization’s lobbying efforts. Contributors to L’Eurafricain included métis across French-speaking Africa as well as some black and white benefactors. It is not clear from extant records whether an actual pageant was held, what the criteria for judging were, who witnessed the pageant, how many contestants competed, and from where in French Africa these contestants hailed. The photo is a headshot of a café au lait-toned woman identified as Miss Marie Céline, a “young métisse (mixed-race woman) of Niger.”

A rather modest photo in comparison to those of post-World War II pageants in the United States, Miss L’Eurafrique looks at the camera in an unprovocative and grave manner. Her long hair is plaited into a single, neat braid without a stray hair in sight. Though her age is not indicated, she appears to be youthful, likely in her mid- to late teens. Her face is devoid of…

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“A Black Girl Should Not be With a White Man”: Sex, Race, and African Women’s Social and Legal Status in Colonial Gabon, c. 1900–1946

Posted in Africa, Articles, History, Law, Media Archive, Social Science, Women on 2010-06-16 05:06Z by Steven

“A Black Girl Should Not be With a White Man”: Sex, Race, and African Women’s Social and Legal Status in Colonial Gabon, c. 1900–1946

Journal of Women’s History
Volume 22, Number 2, Summer 2010
E-ISSN: 1527-2036
Print ISSN: 1042-7961
DOI: 10.1353/jowh.0.0140

Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Associate Professor of African History
University of California, Davis

This article reviews representations and lived experiences of interracial sex and métissage in twentieth-century colonial Gabon to argue that African communities and colonial societies debated over “the métis problem” as question of how to demarcate African women’s sexuality, and socioeconomic and political power in the urban locale. These discourses and social realities reflected ambiguous and contradictory colonial discourses and polyvalent struggles among Gabonese populations to recast gender and respectability in the colonial capital city. Mpongwé women’s participation in interracial relationships, frequently brokered by male kin, had unintended consequences that threatened colonial order and reordered gender hierarchies within Mpongwé communities. Following World War I through the 1950s, shifting coalitions of elite African men, colonial officials, and private French citizens—anxious of the social mobility black and mixed race women achieved and sought to maintain—frowned upon and sought to restrict interracial liasons. Mpongwé women, both black and métis, involved in interracial relationships struggled to maintain control over their property, their labor, and insist upon their respectability in the precarious urban milieu. Using oral and written sources, this article addresses a gap in the scholarship on gender, sexuality, and colonialism by foregrounding how African women and men engaged in and reflected on miscegenation at the center of analysis. Furthermore, this article emphasizes the colonial encounter as a dialectic in which the actions of African women shaped colonial perceptions and policies.

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