Cultivating Citizenship Through Xenophobia in Gabon, 1960-1995

Abstract

Mahmood Mamdani's recent book, Citizen and Subject, examines the legacy of the bifurcated state in contemporary Africa. Under colonial rule, the full rights of citizenship were usually granted only to Europeans, while the vast majority of African inhabitants were recognized as subjects who therefore may have had modicum of civil rights, but not political rights.' In French-administered colonies such as Gabon, this bifurcation was accomplished through the indige'nat, the legal statutes that defined the civil status of the local African population in Gabon between 1910 and 1946. Even though a small number of elites were able to obtain French citizenship, most Gabonese were subject to this authoritarian and restrictive system. The rights of African sujets indigenes to freedom of speech, association, and movement were severely restricted. The subjects were obliged to provide unpaid and often forced labor to the colonial state for public projects; French colonial administrators also had considerable leeway in administering punishments for infractions, often imposing sanctions in arbitrary fashion. In 1946 the system came to an end when the Lamine Gueye Law granted French citizenship to African subjects.2 For the next fourteen years a kind of African colonial citizenship evolved in Gabon in the context of an ambiguous democracy.3 Growing numbers of Gabonese participated in an electoral culture that sent a Gabonese person to the French National Assembly and placed Gabonese representatives on various advisory, and ultimately governing, bodies.4 Gabonese political elites were obliged to create a political system that catered to both a local electorate and to powerful French economic and political interests. Following independence in 1960, French presence and influence in Gabon actually increased as the country experienced an extraordinary economic boom due to revenues from petroleum and mineral exports. Gabon's relationship with France has been rightly described as neocolonial, as evidenced in part by French nationals' full citizenship rights in Gabon until the mid-1970s.

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