In this book, Florence Bernault offers an original and refreshing history of European-African colonial encounters in Gabon, Equatorial Africa. She does so by using a wealth of sources, including Gabonese narratives, vivid imageries derived from oral histories and interviews, extensive multisite fieldwork observations, contemporary Gabonese television and radio programs, European missionary sources, and French colonial archives. In six chapters, Bernault argues that colonialism was experienced as transactions (between people and spirits, and in objects, money, kinship, carnal fetishism, and cannibalism) which ‘enhanced historical and cultural discrepancies between rulers and ruled, and ranked them in racial hierarchies’ (7). Although many colonized peoples experienced these transactions ‘as moments of loss and disempowerment’ (10), transactions created ‘possibilities for people to accumulate status, rework identities, and extract different forms of value and power’ (195).

Chapter One traces how colonial technology replaced a water spirit in providing riches and power to communities in southern Gabon. Chapter Two examines how both the French colonizers and Gabonese peoples invested in the power of fetishes. Chapter Three investigates how human flesh became a key ingredient of power within the field of French-Gabonese colonial transactions. Chapter Four asks how the power of the body became valued in money and how French colonial and missionary perceptions of the cash value of persons (otangani) articulated with Gabonese imaginaries of wealth in people. By fetishizing the franc, the colonizers made it difficult for the Gabonese to retain control of accumulation and reproduction. Chapter Five evaluates French cannibalism discourses as expressions of anxieties about the nature of domination and the doom of the colonial project. Although ‘Gabonese communities did not eat the flesh of human beings’ and did not ‘perform cannibalism as religious practice or revenge’, the French constructed cannibalism as central to Gabonese ‘customs’ even as they enacted cannibal-like transgressions, like stealing Gabonese human remains as specimens (163). Thus, the zoologist and anthropologist Paul Du Chaillu alone collected, ‘seized’, and ‘carried away’ more than 93 African skulls in Gabon (166–7). Because of such practices, Africans viewed white people as consuming African ancestral puissance (power and agency). Chapter Six argues that whereas in precolonial Gabon ‘eating’ was a central imaginary of social disasters as well as of their cures, under colonialism ‘eating’ increasingly expressed destruction and the literal ingestion of flesh. This shift in meaning took place because of the French manufacture of African cannibalism and colonial cannibalism trials, which generated enduring motifs of witchcraft, vampirism, trafficking in body parts, and ritual murders.

Bernault is attentive to Gabon's complex historical trajectories. In the late eighteenth century, southern Gabon prospered from ‘vernacular systems of production and exchange’ reliant upon constant transactions between people and nature spirits (32). Hence, rituals and offerings enabled spirits to produce iron tools through smiths. The ‘transactional tactics’ that underpinned Gabonese prosperity manifested in the ‘constant circulation of persons and riches’ (33). The sale of slaves to Atlantic traders secured Gabonese access to commodities and wealth, and the incorporation of captives enabled clan expansion (38–40). Transactions effectively enabled people in Gabon to accumulate kinfolk, clients, and dependents; formulate traditions validating multiethnic intergroup relations; develop a new idiom of genealogical territorial authority anchored on spirit protection; and employ spirits, ancestors, and ritual experts to regulate the political economy. Between 1850 and 1960, however, the region experienced ‘the end of prosperity’ as it ‘fell under devastating foreign influence’ (14, 40–3). Euro-American ‘factories’ and imported commodities displaced local institutions, intermediaries, and middlemen, while missionary outposts reconfigured indigenous healing practices and beliefs as ‘witchcraft’. French military troops occupied the land, imposed forced labor and taxation, and destroyed local leaders, and a new Black political elite schooled in French culture compromised on political alliances with plantation owners and colonial bureaucrats (27–45).

But Bernault also recognizes that the dominant language with which contemporary Gabonese express their ideology of this history and its legacies emphasizes ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ agencies, ‘the domain of the night’, and the ‘intervention of ancestors, spirits, magical experts, and witches’ (16). Hence, Bernault argues that modern witchcraft is a historical phenomenon, and its contemporary manifestations cannot be understood outside of the long and intricate battles between Africans and Europeans over physical and mystical agency. French colonialists and Gabonese held mutually intelligible ideas, praxes, and symbolic systems concerning ‘extraordinary’ forms of human agency and spiritual power (pouvoir), such that the colonial encounter was not one between rationalist Europeans and superstitious Africans (2). Considerable historical divergences and asymmetries of power separated Europeans and Africans, and so too did the dichotomies enforced by colonial racism, but Equatorial Africans and Europeans nonetheless transacted in conversant and compatible ‘imaginaries of power’ or ‘vocabularies of power’ (43, 3). Both Europeans and Africans pursued transactions between people and numinous entities (like spirits and technology) as a way to achieve accumulation, exert individual agency, and advance social reproduction and domination. Both perceived human flesh as a fetish, invested transformational power and agency in objects (such as bodies, currencies, charms, relics, and commodities), and shared a belief in cannibalism. Europeans’ desire to mask their similarity to Africans, like Africans’ desire to conceal their autonomy from Europeans, became the major battleground of colonialism. Colonialism became ‘enacted’ when Africans and Europeans ‘entered in relation with one another’ to reorder hierarchies, status, wealth, and knowledge (10, 195). These ‘interracial conversations about power and transgression’ generated ‘symbolic uncertainties’ and defined colonial hegemony (11, 53–68).

However, Europeans and Africans mobilized their cosmologies differently. The French conceived colonialism as a civilizing mission that required the personal sacrifice of French lives, the transformation of the ‘native’ through numinous science, and the propagation of free commerce in return for African taxation, forced labor, and acceptance of European moral superiority. In exchange for schools and teachers, for example, Catholic fathers required Gabonese villagers to build chapels and surrender their ‘fetishes’ (84–5). For their part, the Gabonese experienced colonialism as the relentless theft of local puissance, bodily capacity, and economic and social resources. They saw colonialism as enabling European control of economic exchanges, as well as disrupting social and domestic transactions within and between communities and spirits. African ‘loss and disempowerment’ took place through labor and taxation, the criminalization of polygamy and bridewealth payments, and the destruction of local charms, relics, and spiritual groves by development projects, photography, and Christian symbolic domination (75–95). The Gabonese articulated this ‘cost’ of French intrusion with representations akin to witchcraft, where individual greed undermined the flux of spiritual exchange and social reproduction.

Moreover, colonialism also generated new forms of puissance, as embodied by Western-educated Gabonese, biometric-identity-card-carrying migrant laborers, and new types of healers. The latter included zealous Gabonese prophets (moulimfou) bent on destroying witchcraft and fetishes, new purveyors of global magical objects (medicaments), Christian saints that emulated the symbolism of nature spirits, and white people who came to be seen as ritual specialists. At the same time, practices such as European fencing of graveyards for fear of African cannibalism and exhumation of African bodies for science, as well as Gabonese retaliations through the maiming of French people and processing white flesh as ‘magical capital’ (96), similarly contributed to new colonial imaginaries of extraordinary force (103, 96–117) and extraordinary agency (184). The objects, body parts, rumours, dramas, complaints, trials, and laws which mediated French-Gabonese colonial relations comprise the material for Colonial Transactions. Bernault's longue durée approach advances us beyond Luise White's rebellious anticolonial discourse of vampirism, as well as beyond the commoditization, bricolage, and ‘European revolution of African values’ frameworks of the Comaroffs.Footnote ¹ Bernault's book perspicaciously shows that French and Gabonese ideologies about power and agency originated from their respective pre-colonial-encounter histories and knowledge systems, but became convergent and mutually reconstituted in the course of racialized colonial subjugation, resistance, and adaptation. Following on Bernault's work, other scholars should pay closer attention to the gendering nature and gendered repercussions of these transformative colonial imaginaries of power and agency in Gabon. The book will appeal to scholars of colonialism in Africa and beyond, and to anyone interested in African spirituality and modernity. It will work well in graduate seminars, as well as upper-level undergraduate classes.