"In the City, It Is a Mess!": Home, the Street, and Sex in Colonial West and Central French Africa

Francie N’Toutoume, an elderly woman of the Fang ethno-language group whom I interviewed in Gabon in 2001, had an encounter in 1960, the year that her country gained independence from France, that marked her life.  She was walking through the capital city of Libreville, wearing cloth around her waist, her baby on her back, and carrying a basket of manioc from her day’s labor in fields on the outskirts of town, when she happened upon the Prime Minister Léon Mba.  He tapped her on her forehead and told her that she was an example of how the Fang were less civilized than Gabon’s other ethnic groups and how Gabon would be behind other nations around the globe.   Wrapped in cloth, carrying agricultural produce from the rural suburbs to the town for her family’s subsistence, and her husband not employed in wage labor, was not the model of home and in the post-colonial capital that would allow the nation to flourish.  M’Ba’s rule and that of the subsequent dictator unleashed a host of laws and policy initiatives shaped gender roles, marriage, and family life that were to be the foundation  for the new nation.

This paper explores the establishment of post-colonial govermentality through quotidian debates over conjugality and domesticity in the burgeoning capital city in the first two decades of political independence.  Libreville experienced explosive growth in this time period and urbanites viewed the city as the shining beacon of African modernity.  The paper traces the formation of evolving concepts of citizenship through debates over policies and practices of marriage, domesticity, and male and female roles.  In the expanding post-colonial metropolis, a new lexicon of sexual, conjugal, and familial prototypes emerged alongside debates over the place of “traditional” gender roles.