Mpongwe Erotic

The Mpongwe are the people of the Gabon Estuary, the wide brackish mouth where the Komo River meets the Atlantic, and their history is essentially the history of that doorway. They settled the estuary's banks well before European ships arrived, and when the Portuguese, then the Dutch, English and French began working the coast, the Mpongwe made themselves the hinge. Little moved inland or out, ivory, dyewood, ebony, wax, captives, without passing through Mpongwe hands on Mpongwe terms. They rarely went into the forest themselves. They did not have to. They held the water.

They speak Myene, a Bantu language of the northwest, shared in dialect form with the Orungu, Nkomi, Galwa, Adyumba and Enenga, their close kin along the coast and the lower Ogooue. Myene sits apart from the Fang speech that now surrounds and vastly outnumbers it in Libreville. Society was organized by clan and by trading house: chiefs known to Europeans under working names, King Denis, King Louis, King Glass, ran compounds that were part household, part warehouse, part diplomatic post. Those names stuck to the ground. Quartier Louis and Glass are still Libreville neighborhoods, and Pointe Denis is still the spit of sand across the bay.

The treaties Mpongwe chiefs signed with French naval officers in 1839 and 1842 gave France its first real hold in Gabon. In 1849 the French put a shipload of liberated captives ashore on the estuary and named the settlement Libreville. The capital of the country sits on Mpongwe land, and the Mpongwe are a small minority in it. American Protestant missionaries reached Baraka in 1842 and Catholic priests followed two years later, so the Mpongwe were reading and writing early, which produced a clerk and interpreter class that carried weight in the colonial administration and later in the professions far out of proportion to its numbers. Epidemics, low birth rates and Fang migration cut those numbers hard across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Christianity is near universal now, Catholic and Protestant both, and it runs alongside older practice rather than having erased it. Ndjembe, the women's society that nineteenth century missionaries wrote about with visible frustration because they could not get inside it, has not disappeared. Myene is the fragile thing: French is the working language of the city the Mpongwe built the ground under.