¹ Harries, Patrick, “Anthropology” in Etherington, Norman, ed., Missions and Empire (Oxford, 2005), 248Google Scholar; Stocking, George W. Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; idem., After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888-1951 (Madison, 1995).

² For an overview of missionaries, language, and literacy in the British Empire, see Landau, Paul, “Language” in Etherington, , Missions and Empire, 194–215Google Scholar. See also Fabian, Johannes, Language and Colonial Power: the Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880-1938 (Berkeley, 1986)Google Scholar and Mazrui, Ali A. and Zirimu, Pio, “The Secularization of an Afro-Islamic Language: Church, State, and Marketplace in the Spread of Kiswahili” in Mazrui, Ali A. and Mazrui, Alamin M., The Power of Babel: Language and Governance in the African Experience (Chicago, 1998), 169–91Google Scholar.

³ In the preface to Fetichism in West Africa: Forty Years' Observation of Native Customs and Superstitions (New York, 1904), xiiGoogle Scholar, Nassau thanked Libbey for his “sympathetic encouragement” and “judicious suggestions.” Libbey (1855-1927) was a physical geographer rather than an anthropologist. He taught “Earth and Man,” a course focused on the “physical environment of man,” helped to found the Princeton Department of Geology in 1904, and also served as a director of the Princeton E. M. Museum of Geology and Archaeology. Libbey himself undertook extensive geographical fieldwork, including in the Rocky Mountains (1877), Alaska (1888), and Greenland (1894 and 1899). The goals of these expeditions were geographical, archeological, and ethnographic (McCurdy, George G., “The Academic Teaching of Anthropology in Connection with Other Departments,” American Anthropologist 21[1919], 53Google Scholar; Geosciences@Princeton, History of Geosciences. http://geoweb.princeton.edu/aboutgeo/history.html, consulted 24 September 2005; Princeton Scientific Expeditions Collection AC#012. Princeton University Archives. Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections. 2002. http://infosharel.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/finding_aids/prisciex.html, consulted 24 September 2005). According to Professor James Boon (personal communication), the Princeton Department of Anthropology was not created until 1971.

⁴ Nassau, “Autobiography” (unpublished manuscript, n.d.), 1256, 1248, 1281, 1324, 1335, 1344, 1373-74, 1470.

⁵ Briault, “Notes sur le Père Trilles. Cas du Père Trilles et de son ouvrage sur les pygmées,” (Archives CSSP, Chevilly-Larue, France, 631 A. 2D12. 1 à 3).

⁶ As opposed to evolutionists, such as Tylor, Nassau posited that West Africans, originally children of Adam, had become more and more distant from God until all that lingered was a vague memory of the Creator. He traced a gradual fall from monotheism to animism, ancestor worship, fetishism, and superstition. As the Africans' moral and spiritual state declined, many “unconscious degradations occurred: animals became “objects of worship,” and ultimately Africans worshipped “objects that were frivolous, ridiculous or disgusting,” Nassau, Feticbism, 44-48.

⁷ Georges, Balandier, Sociologie actuelle de l'Afrique noire: dynamique sociale en Afrique centrale (4th ed.: Paris, 1982 [1955])Google Scholar; Laburthe-Tolra, Philippe, Les seigneurs de la forêt (Paris, 1981)Google Scholar; idem., Initiations et sociétés secrètes au Cameroun: Essai sur la réligion Bëti (Paris, 1985); idem., Vers la lumière? ou, Le désir d'Ariel: à propos des Beti du Cameroun: sociologie de la conversion (Paris, 1999); James Fernandez, Bwiti: an Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa (Princeton, 1982).

⁸ Nassau, Fetichism, v.

⁹ Trilles, Henri “Proverbes, légendes et contes Fang,” Bulletin de la Société neufchâtelloise de géographie 16(1905), 49Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Trilles, , Le Totémisme chez les Fân (Münster, 1912), 41Google Scholar.

¹¹ In Bwiti, 78n, Fernandez suggests that Trilles's use of Biblical genealogies may well have been appropriated by Fang-speakers themselves: “[t]he custom of tracing genealogies back to God may owe something to Trilles (and other missionaries) who invented his own genealogy and following biblical model, traced it triumphantly back to God.”

¹² Trilles, , Totémisme, 5–6Google Scholar.

¹³ Cited in Herbert, Christoper, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1991), 152Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Malinowski, Bronislaw, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Prospect Heights, 1984 [1922]), 5–6Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa I (Chicago, 1991), 115–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ MacGaffey, Wyatt “African Ideology and Belief: a Survey,” African Studies Review 24:2/3(1981), 265CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cited in Mudimbe, V. Y., The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington, 1988), 65Google Scholar.

¹⁷ See MacGaffey, , Religion and Society in Central Africa: the BaKongo of Lower Zaire (Chicago, 1986)Google Scholar; idem., “The Eyes of Understanding: Kongo Minkisi” in Astonishment and Power (Washington, 1993), 20-103, and idem., Kongo Political Culture: the Conceptual Challenge of the Particular (Bloomington, 2000).

¹⁸ Perrois, Louis, “Les Fang du Gabon vus par les missionaires dans le premier quart du XXe siècle” in Le Gabon de Fernand Grébert, 1913-1932 (Genève, 2003), 20Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Mbot, Jean-Emile, preface to Tourneux, Henry, ed., Henri Trilles, Contes et Légendes Fang du Gabon (1905) (Paris, 2002), 7Google Scholar.

²⁰ Mudimbe, , Invention of Africa 45Google Scholar.

²¹ Ibid., 66.

²² Ibid., 44.

²³ Ibid., 65-66.

²⁴ Ibid., 65.

²⁵ Ibid., 66.

²⁶ Ibid., 67.

²⁷ Nassau, , Fetichism, xiiGoogle Scholar; idem., “Fetishism, a Government,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society 33(1901), 305-17; and idem., “The Philosophy of Fetishism.” Journal of the Royal African Society 3(1904), 257-70.

²⁸ Id., “Batanga Tales,” Journal of American Folklore 28(1915), 24-51; idem., “Bantu Tales,” Journal of American Folklore 30(1917), 262-68.

²⁹ Trilles, , “Le totémisme chez les Fãn.” Anthropos 9(1914), 630–40Google Scholar.

³⁰ Kingsley, Mary H., Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corsico, and Cameroons (London 1982 [1897]), 108, 395Google Scholar.

³¹ Ibid., 395, cited in Nassau, Fetichism (1904), x.

³² A.W.G. “Review of Fetichism in West Africa,” National Geographic (March 1905), 135Google Scholar.

³³ R.H. “Review of Fetichism in West Africa.” Année Sociologique 9(1904/1905), 191–94Google Scholar. The reviewer was probably Robert Hertz, one of Durkheim's disciples.

³⁴ Bruel, Georges, L'Afrique Équatoriale Française. Le pays-les habitants-la colonisation–les pouvoirs publics (Paris, 1918), 315–16Google Scholar.

³⁵ Tessmann, Günter, Die Pangwe: Völkerkundliche Monographie eines westafrikanischen Negerstammes (Berlin, 1913)Google Scholar, cited in Laburthe-Tolra, Philippe and Falgayrettes-Leveau, Charles, Fang (Paris, 1991), 171–72Google Scholar.

³⁶ Briault, Maurice, Sous le zéro équatorial: études et scènes Africaines (Paris, 1927)Google Scholar; idem., Dans la forêt du Gabon; études et scènes africaines (Paris, 1930); idem., Les sauvages d'Afrique (Paris, 1943).

³⁷ Briault, “Notes.”

³⁸ Ibid.

³⁹ Fonds Pouchet (Archives CSSP 1.020 2D72.1.1 Père Trilles [1867-1949]).

⁴⁰ Briault, “ Notes.”

⁴¹ Piskaty, Kurt, “Ist das Pygmäenwerk von Henri Trilles ein zuverlässsige Quelle?” Anthropos 52(1957), 48Google Scholar.

⁴² Berger, Augustin, Trilles, Henri (1866–1949). In Hommes et Oestins (Paris, 1977), 2: 731Google Scholar.

⁴³ Vansina, Jan, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of the Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, 1990), 17Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Bahuchet, Serge, “L'invention des Pygmées,” Cahiers d'études africaines 33(1993), 171CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ See, for example, Bucher, Henry Hale Jr., “The Mpongwe of the Gabon Estuary: a History to 1860,” (Ph.D.. University of Wisconsin—Madison, 1977)Google Scholar; Gardinier, David “The American Board (1842-1870) and Presbyterian Board (1870-1892) Missions in Northern Gabon and African Responses,” Africana Journal 17(1998), 215–34Google Scholar; Gray, Christopher and Ngolet, François, “Lambaréné, Okoumé and the Transformation of Labor along the Middle Ogooué (Gabon), 1870-1945,” JAH 40(1999), 87–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gray, Christopher J., Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon, ca. 1850-1940 (Rochester, 2002)Google Scholar; Rich, Jeremy, “‘Leopard Men’, Slaves, and Social Conflict in Libreville (Gabon), c. 1860-1879,” IJAHS 34(2001), 619–38Google Scholar; idem., “‘Une Babylone noire:’ Interracial Unions in Colonial Libreville, c. 1860-1914,” French Colonial History 4(2003), 145-70. The late François Ngolet, a Gabonese historian who taught in the U.S., had hoped to write on Nassau's interactions with the Kele on the Ogooué, where Nassau worked and struggled from 1874 to 1876. He had collected oral traditions that referred back to Nassau's misadventures there. Jeremy Rich (personal communication) has drawn on Nassau's voluminous writings for their detail and chronology of colonial life in Libreville and the Ogooué. When I visited the Gabonese National Archives in July 2005, Mary Cloutier, a missionary with the Christian and Missionary Alliance and professor at the Bethel Bible Institute in Libreville, was consulting the Nassau collection, undertaking preliminary research on the history of Protestant churches in Gabon.

⁴⁶ Bucher, , “Mpongwe,” 8–9Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Interviews, Michel Bagné, Libreville, 5 January and 8 January 2005.

⁴⁸ Nassau “Autobiography;” Teeuwissen, Raymond Woodrow, “Robert Hamid Nassau: Presbyterian Pioneer Missionary to Equatorial West Africa.” (M.A., Louisville Theological Seminary, 1973), 156–60Google Scholar. Drawing on mission records and Nassau's writings, Teeuwissen's well-researched, sympathetic thesis on Nassau contains an extended discussion of his relationship with Anyentyuwe, ibid., 142-185. Teeuwissen commended Nassau's treatment of her (ibid., 184-85) “as a person of equal human value as himself, in spite of her past mistakes. … Determined to stand by a person who had suffered injustice, and considering himself in debt to Anyentyuwe for what she had done for his daughter, Dr. Nassau was ready to face, at first criticism; then slander, and even persecution form missionary colleagues.” More recently, Jeremy Rich, “Babylone,” 160, 16263, has outlined the case of Anyentyuwe to illustrate the complexity of interracial liaisons during the early colonial period. While admitting that “[t]he motivations and actions of [African] women involved with European men are not easy to discern,” Rich concludes that Ayentyuwe's relationship with Nassau and other European men illustrate multiple dimensions of such unions: both her dependence and agency (she accepted some solicitations while rejecting others), the allure of her mission education and domestic skills, as well as colonial racism, debates over appropriate relations with Africans, and missionary views on “the sinfulness of Mpongwe women.”

⁴⁹ Kinship and genealogical discourses played—and continue to play—a crucial role in mediating a wide variety of social relations in Gabon. For a discussion of how genealogies facilitated nineteenth-century overland trade networks see Cinnamon, John M., “Mobility, Genealogical Memory, and Constructions of Social Space in 19th-century Northern Gabon” in Howard, Allen and Shain, Richard, eds., The Spatial Factor in African History: the Relationship of the Social, Material, and Perceptual (Leiden, 2005), 177–219Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Nassau, , “Two Women, the Lives of Two Native African Christians,” unpublished typescript with handwritten corrections (Vail Memorial Library, Lincoln University, 1911)Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Ibid., 30.

⁵² Nassau, who left the United States in 1861 at the onset of the American civil war, was an ardent abolitionist. In his autobiography, he referred repeatedly to the “race-antipathy” of his missionary colleagues; “Autobiography,” 1212, 1424, 1494-95, 1558. In My Ogowe, Being a Narrative of Daily Incidents during Sixteen Years in Equatorial West Africa (New York, 1914)Google Scholar, Nassau provided abundant, sometimes tedious or excruciating, details of daily life at the various mission stations where he served on the Ogooué river from 1874 to 1891.

⁵³ Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier 11 (Chicago, 1997), 32, 31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁴ Eckert, Andreas and Jones, Adam. “Historical Writing about Everyday Life” Journal of African Cultural Studies 15(2002), 10, 12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁵ Martin, Phyllis M., “Life and Death, Power and Vulnerability: Everyday Contradictions at the Loango Mission, 1883-1904” Journal of African Cultural Studies 15(2002), 65–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 68-70, 71, 73.

⁵⁷ Trilles, , Mille lieues dans l'inconnu en pleine forêt équatoriale chez les Fang anthropophages (Paris, 1931), 67Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 56.

⁵⁹ Perrois, , “Fang du Gabon,” 26Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Briault, “Notes.”

⁶¹ See Fernandez, , Bwiti, 56, 62, 69Google Scholar; and Ondo, Bonaventure Mve, Sagesse et initiation à travers les contes, mythes et légendes Fang (Libreville, 1991)Google Scholar.

⁶² Mbot, , “Préface,” 5–6Google Scholar.

⁶³ Ibid., 7.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 8-10.

⁶⁵ Berger, , “Henri Trilles,” 730Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Fernandez, Bwiti, 78n.

⁶⁷ Nassau knew John Leighton Wilson, who founded the Gabon mission in 1842 and who later served as Mission Board secretary in New York, In Fetichism, Nassau, cites Wilson's Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects (New York, 1856)Google Scholar at length. Nassau also served (and quarreled) with Robert H. Milligan at the turn of the twentieth century. See Milligan, , The Jungle Folk of Africa (New York, 1908)Google Scholar; and idem., The Fetish Folk of West Africa (New York, 1912). Grébert, Fernand, Au Gabon (Afrique Équatoriale Francaise) (Paris, 1948 [1922])Google Scholar; see also Le Gabon de Fernand Grébert, 1913-1932 (Genève, 2003)Google Scholar; Galley, Samuel, Dictionnaire Fang-Français et Français-Fang, suivi d'une grammaire Fang (Neuchâtel, 1964)Google Scholar; Schweitzer, Albert, On the Edge of the Primeval Forest (New York, 1948 [1922])Google Scholar; idem., More from the Primeval Forest (New York 1948 [1931]); idem., My African Notebook (New York, 1939 [1938]). Efraim Andersson worked primarily in Moyen-Congo/Congo-Brazzaville, but studied a number of populations that also lived in Gabon; see Andersson, , Contribution à l'ethnographie des Kuta I (Uppsala, 1953)Google Scholar; idem., Messianic Popular Movements in the Lower Congo (Uppsala, 1958); idem., Churches at the Grass-Roots: a Study in Congo-Brazzaville (New York, 1968); idem., Les Bongo-Rimba (Uppsala, 1983); Ethnologie réligieuse des Kuta: mythologie et folklore (Uppsala, 1987). Finally, see Walker, André Raponda, Notes d'histoire du Gabon (Brazzaville, 1960)Google Scholar; idem., Dictionnaire Français-Mpongwé, suive d'éléments de Grammaire (Brazzaville, 1961); Raponda-Walker, and Sillans, Roger, Les plantes utiles du Gabon (Paris, 1961)Google Scholar; idem., Rites et croyances des peuples du Gabon (Paris, 1962). In recent years a number of Raponda-Walker's numerous ethnographic, historical, and linguistic works have been re-edited by the Fondation Raponda-Walker in Libreville.

⁶⁸ See, for example, Harries, Patrick, “Field Sciences in Scientific Fields: Entomology, Botany, and the Early Ethnographic Monograph in the Work of H.-A. Junod” in Dubow, Saul, ed., Science and Society in Southern Africa (Manchester, 2000), 11–41Google Scholar; idem., “Anthropology,” 238-60; Pels, Peter, A Politics of Presence: Contacts between Missionaries and Waluguru in Late Colonial Tanganyika (Amsterdam, 1999)Google Scholar; Pels, and Salemink, Oscar, “Introduction: Five Theses on Ethnography as Colonial Practice,” History and Anthropology 8(1994), 1–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pels, , “Introduction” in Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology (Ann Arbor, 1999), 1–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Forster, Peter G., T. Cullen Young: Missionary and Anthropologist (Hull, 1989)Google Scholar, for Malawi.

⁶⁹ Mbembe, Achille, Afriques indociles: Christianisme, pouvoir et état en société postcoloniale (Paris, 1988)Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Bagné, interview, 8 January 2005; Nassau, “Autobiography.”