My paper examines the slavery-marriage nexus as an imaginative but reductive analogy spread through strange realizations and alarm by colonial agents and by local intellectuals in the Fang societies of colonial Spanish Guinea, Gabon and Cameroon. The disquiet and charged character of casting marriages arranged through payments with monies and goods as quasi-equivalent to the commodified purchase of slaves came about in the 1920s, not only because of the rapid monetarization of Fang bridewealth, but because the transferred amounts constituting bridewealth were extraordinarily high—one of the highest of the whole African continent.
In the pre-colonial period, Fang were a people who, peculiarly for the region, had had no mercantile tradition whatsoever and who had largely avoided the slave trade altogether. I will outline the processes of monetarization of Fang bridewealth or nsoa from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s, by which time a combination of imported trade goods and marks, francs and silver peseta coins came to fully replace Fang customary prestations and the ceremonial iron moneys known as bikuele. I will also look at the accompanying rise of the interpretive and moralizing genre founded by host of missionaries and carried on by a generation of influential and critical French anthropologist of the time, and more recently too, such as Peter Geschiere (2007, 48) who summarizes the transformation of Fang nsoa during the first decades of the twentieth century as one where money “entered into the organization of kinship and turned it ‘inside out’ - turning it into a marketplace”. The price of the nsoa became subject to escalating speculation and “exorbitant prices” which led Georges Balandier (1970, 197) and Suret-Canal (1971,67) to observe how this process seemed to “turn woman into objects”, into “slave concubines”. I will reiterate Claude Meillassoux (1991,13,5) insistence against “the ‘vulgar’ materialist thesis that bridewealth is ‘an act of purchase”, and propose further differentiations with bridal acquisition through enslavement, the latter defined as occurring where not all of the components of a “full” bridewealth are paid, and where a bride’s own relatives are cut away irreversibly. These two features are interrelated, because the key to understanding bridewealth, apart from the question of proof of paternity, is that it is an ostentatious process of prolonged and escalating reciprocities with the bride’s kin over the entire course of a marriage, rather than a discrete act of exchange.
When following the flows of imported moneys and the commercialization of social payments and ceremonial obligations such as bridewealth a clear contrast emerges between the period of the slave trade and the colonial situation. Africanist scholars have highlighted the commodification of social obligations during the violence of the slave trade, as itself a supply mechanism of the Atlantic slave trade; but the picture becomes more unstable and reversible under imperial rule when many more African societies became fully exposed or fully appropriated the vagaries of commercial money.