Civilized Attire: Refashioning Tastes and Social Status in the Gabon Estuary, c. 1870–1914

Abstract

Dress in Libreville, the capital of the French African colony of Gabon, reveals the complexities of cross-cultural interaction and cultural influences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Mpongwe coastal ethnic community in the town, long linked to Atlantic commerce, adapted elements of European dress as part of a lifestyle of assimilation to French culture. Free people with access to missionary education and economic employment with Europeans adapted foreign dress. This cultural hybridity provoked dismay from some European and American observers who presented Mpongwe interest in western clothes as signs of their degeneration. Some Mpongwe rejected these criticisms by upholding assimilation as proof of their equality with Europeans. Mpongwe people also combined older fashion trends and ways of displaying foreign objects in ways that show the survival of older forms of status and wealth.