Gabon Estuary Research Articles

Unsteady Is the Cross: Catholic Missionaries, Marriage, and Fang Communities in the Gabon Estuary, ca. 1914–1945

Between 1914 and 1945, French Catholic missionaries and Gabonese priests tried to impose their faith and ideals of family life on Fang communities in the rural Estuary region of the French colony of Gabon. Catholic evangelists offered benefits such as education as well as threats of spiritual punishment to convert Fang people. However, Fang men and women often rejected these demands. While Fang men tried to maintain polygamy as a sign of successful manhood, women often rejected their spouses. At the same time, missionaries relied on Catholic lay Fang catechists in their work. Male catechists often violated the marital ideals of the missionaries, but they also successfully promoted Catholic conversions. Ultimately, rural Estuary communities selectively appropriated aspects of Catholicism, even if relatively few followed Catholic teachings on marriage.

American Presbyterian Missionaries, Enslavement, and Anti-Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Gabon

When American Presbyterian and Congregationalist missionaries arrived in the Gabon Estuary in the 1840s, they entered a world marked by vibrant commerce; violence and inequality; widespread slavery and slave-trading; British, French, and U.S. Anti-Slavery Patrols; and incipient French colonialism. This article draws on the published accounts by two U.S. missionaries, John Leighton Wilson, who served in Gabon from 1842 to 1851, and Robert Hamill Nassau, who worked on Corisco Island, the Gabon Estuary and Ogowe River, and the southern Cameroon coast from 1861 to 1906. Together, their writings provide insights into early colonialism and especially the long decline of enslavement and slave trading. While Wilson witnessed the establishment of Libreville in the 1840s, Nassau encountered slave trading first on Corisco and later on the Ogowe during the period of French colonial exploration. Both men, shaped by their African experiences as well as their respective social locations in the United States, held strong views on African domestic slavery and the slave trade. Wilson, from the South, was an ambivalent abolitionist who railed against the Atlantic Slave trade while hesitating to denounce slavery and racial inequality in his native South Carolina. Nassau, from New Jersey and educated at conservative Princeton University, was prompted above all by the missionary impulse. He sought to convert and “uplift” formerly enslaved Africans while nevertheless underlining their “servile” characters and benefitting from their labor as docile, socially vulnerable mission workers.

FOOD AND THE IMPACT OF COLONIALISM ON EVERYDAY LIFE IN GABON - A Workman is Worthy of his Meat: Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary. By Jeremy Rich. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Pp. xx+220. £25, hardback (isbn978-0-8032-1091-2).

FOOD AND THE IMPACT OF COLONIALISM ON EVERYDAY LIFE IN GABON - A Workman is Worthy of his Meat: Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary. By Jeremy Rich. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. Pp. xx+220. £25, hardback (isbn978-0-8032-1091-2). - Volume 50 Issue 2

Review: A Workman Is Worthy of His Meat: Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary, by Jeremy Rich

Review: <i>A Workman Is Worthy of His Meat: Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary</i>, by Jeremy Rich

Jeremy Rich. A Workman Is Worthy of His Meat: Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization series, xx + 220 pp. Map. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00. Cloth.

Jeremy Rich. A Workman Is Worthy of His Meat: Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization series, xx + 220 pp. Map. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00. Cloth.

Manhood, State Power and Scandals in the Gabon Estuary, 1940-1946

Manhood, State Power and Scandals in the Gabon Estuary, 1940-1946

Jeremy Rich, A Workman is Worthy of His Meat: Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary. London and Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization, xxii + 222 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8032-1091-2 (hbk.). $56.25; £34.50.

Jeremy Rich, A Workman is Worthy of His Meat: Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary. London and Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization, xxii + 222 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8032-1091-2 (hbk.). $56.25; £34.50.

My Matrimonial Bureau: Masculine Concerns and Presbyterian Mission Evangelization in the Gabon Estuary, c. 1900-1915

AbstractThis essay examines the reasons why some young Fang men supported Presbyterian missionary Robert Milligan's crusade to establish a Protestant community of converts at the turn of the twentieth century. Milligan presented his work as an example of heroic and muscular Christianity that transformed young Gabonese men. However, his methods of attracting followers appear very similar to those used by local big men: creating kinship networks, providing military support, sharing imported goods and providing access to women for marriage. Fang men and Milligan shared a flexible vocabulary of fatherhood that placed obligations on converts and missionaries alike. Eventually, Milligan's efforts came undone because of problems with other missionaries, but young Fang men continued to turn to missionary patronage, in part to cope with gender tensions and struggles over status.

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

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.

Le Gabon précolonial : étude sociale et économique.

E. M'Bokolo—A Social and Economie Study of Pre-Colonial Gabon. Oral sources on the pre-colonial situation in the Gabon estuary before 1850 are scarce and unreliable but an interpretation of contemporary written sources gives a rather precise and detailed picture of the social organisation of the local people. The coastal Mpongwe were more deeply involved with the European traders, their sole economie activity—and a very rewarding one—being to act as middlemen between them and the inland peoples. They had lost the centralised political organisation which prevailed in the 18th century and were hard-struck by the economic changes which followed the French settlement in 1843 and the suppression of the slave trade. The Orungu and Nkomi, less directly involved in the coastal trade, and less dependent upon it, had kept a more centralised organisation and sufiered less of the change.

The Settlement of the Mpongwe clans in the Gabon estuary : an historical synthesis

Pendant la période qui va de 1740 à 1810, des clans mpongwé rivaux se faisaient face de part et d'autre de l'estuaire du Gabon (embouchure du Como et du Remboué). Des clans secondaires étaient groupés autour des Agulamba de la rive gauche et des Agekaza de la rive droite, les deux clans dominants. Vers 1810, et peut-être avant, les Agekaza acquirent la suprématie sur la rive droite en amont d'Owendo, tandis que les Asiga éclipsaient les Agulamba sur la rive gauche en se rapprochant de la bouche de l'estuaire, aspirés par le tourbillon du commerce occidental. A l'aide des traditions orales et des archives missionnaires et administratives principalement, on peut identifier et localiser environ 25 clans mpongwé, à telle ou telle époque ; mais on n'en peut suivre pendant un certain temps que 9 sur la rive gauche et 5 sur la rive droite. Les débuts des missions protestantes (américaines) et de la mission catholique (française) ainsi que la construction du Fort d'Aumale (tous ces évènements se placent entre juin 1842 et septembre 1844) ne firent qu'accélérer la décadence des clans situés les plus loin de la source du commerce à longue distance. A partir de 1845, la plupart des clans se groupèrent autour des Agekaza de Glass et de Quaben, où les missions, le fort et la plupart des maisons de commerce étaient installés. Après 1842, on passe d'une histoire clanique à une histoire interclanique, assaisonnée d'une certaine mesure d'assimilation à la présence occidentale qui se fait de plus en plus sensible. Au milieu du siècle la société mpongwé représente un élément de cohésion dans la vie sociale et politique de l'estuaire, sous l'hégémonie des Agekaza de Glass.

The Village of Glass and Western Intrusion: An Mpongwe Response to the American and French Presence in the Gabon Estuary: 1842-1845

The Village of Glass and Western Intrusion: An Mpongwe Response to the American and French Presence in the Gabon Estuary: 1842-1845