"White Coronations and Magical Boycotts"

In 1873, German adventurer Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden entered a series of disputes that were a common part of everyday life for foreign residents of the French Central African colony of Gabon in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Upon arriving in Gabon, he decided to establish a trading house in the Glass neighborhood of Libreville. This small town of two thousand people had been the administrative and commercial center of French political and European economic interests since 1842. Hübbe-Schleiden had problems within a short time. A crowd of Mpongwe men assembled by his home and quarreled with one another. Since Hübbe-Schleiden had rented out a house from the son of an Agakaza …