Hunger and Consumer Protest in Colonial Africa during the First World War

Abstract

Libreville, the capital of the French African colony of Gabon, experienced food shortages as a result of the First World War, much like those that plagued Africans in other colonies. The disruption of international trade brought by the war, French military efforts to attack the neighboring German colony of Cameroon, climatic fluctuations, and government plans to extract taxes and manpower from rural Gabonese communities all interfered with local food supply networks. Mpongwe townspeople in Libreville had long purchased rather than produced most of their food. Unable to compete with government efforts to favor soldiers stationed in town for food, consumers struggled to obtain food from 1916 to 1920. Eventually, their resentment led to a series of protests that joined supernatural threats and petitions to metropolitan French human rights organizations. While townspeople inaugurated a consumer protest movement on food supply that would last until the Great Depression, rural producers devastated by famine and war came squarely under the heel of French administrators for the rest of the 1920s. Food shortages thus paved the way for rural disenfranchisement that still exists in Gabon today.