Lacam Clélia, Le Bleu et le Noir. Jeux de pouvoirs dans une mission catholique féminine (Gabon, 1911-1955)
Lacam Clélia. — Le Bleu et le Noir. Jeux de pouvoirs dans une mission catholique féminine (Gabon, 1911-1955). Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2023, 430 p., bibl., ill.
Texte intégral
1Do African women have history? And more precisely, do African nuns have history? In the 1970s, the tendency of feminist history was to analyse women as victims of oppression. By the 2000s, a trend has emerged to endow them with agency. Through a critical re-reading of colonial texts, new postcolonial books in subaltern studies like Lacam’s Le Bleu et le Noir show how black nuns did in fact have agency and, despite their oppression, history, too.
- 1 S. Curtis, Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire, Oxford, Oxford U (...)
2This study fills a gap left by both devout religious historians and radical gender theorists. Specialists of women’s history and gender studies have long refused to take any interest in traditional organized religious institutions because in their eyes they have only perpetuated the inferiority of women. Religious historians and church hagiographers have for their part marginalized the study of nuns to more important spiritual subjects, and see gender studies as a sin, indoctrination in lesbianism, androgyny, a denial of the God-given difference between men and women. To fill this gap, Clélia Lacam has given us a book both historical and critical. Inspired by gender theorists of new women’s history,1 Lacam consulted nuns’ letters preserved in the Spiritan archives in Castres (a few rare examples written by Gabonese sisters themselves), missionary archives of Lyon, Paris, the Vatican in Rome, and Spiritan archives of Chevilly-Larue. She has done the ant-work of a historian, consulting biographies and obituaries, journals and correspondences between nuns in Gabon and their superiors in France. In Rome she found 150 letters written by Gabonese nuns, a “new feminine corpus” (p. 29) that permits these lost, forgotten, marginal, black African women’s voices to finally be heard.
- 2 M. Briault, La Sœur Saint-Charles de l’Immaculée conception de Castres, Paris, Paul Téqui, 1914; La (...)
- 3 A. Raponda-Walker, Souvenirs d’un nonagénaire, Versailles, Les classiques africains, 1994.
3Spiritan fathers had long imposed their own version of the history of the evangelization of Gabon. Maurice Briault, priest-historian, wrote on the nuns of francophone Africa, almost monopolizing the subject in the first decades of the 20th century.2 André Raponda-Walker, priest-historian, told his version in a first-person autobiography.3 Until now, male priests have written this history. Clélia Lacam offers us a new feminist and subaltern minority report of the Blue Sisters of Gabon.
4The Blue Sisters (so-called for their dark blue habits) originated from the 1836 founding of the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, in Castres, southwestern France. It was Spiritan fathers who invited them to Gabon, where they participated in the founding of the colonial capital city Libreville in 1849 as a haven for freed slaves. But in order to free themselves from the male-domination of Spiritan tutelage, their mother superior sought out and acquired a direct affiliation with the Vatican in 1852… an example of the oppressed having agency, being capable of resisting domination (in this case male domination) and acquiring a space of freedom and autonomy. But still, Clélia Lacam admits, the list of male ecclesiastics who dominated the Blue Sisters in the church hierarchy was vertiginous: Popes, bishops of Albi and Cahors, Spiritan superiors, vicars apostolic of Gabon, superiors of mission stations, confessors, chaplains, simple priests (p. 85). The Blue Sisters were “inscribed in a strict hierarchy of multiple masculine authorities,” (p. 49) “considered as subordinate assistants of priests,” (p. 85) “obedient to a sexual division of religious labor,” (p. 81) “called upon to accomplish the totality of traditional female tasks:” (p. 82) teaching children, doing laundry, sewing, cooking, nursing. Nuns were women in a man’s world.
- 4 M.-G. Godar, Missionnaire des Noirs: Mère Saint-Martin Hortala des Sœurs bleues de Castres, 1870-19 (...)
5But there was another form of oppression, racial. The first indigenous black Blue Sister was integrated in 1913, Sister Hyacinthe. Entire chapters have been dedicated to her in the official histories of works on the religious life of Gabon.4 I must “confess” that when I first got this book I presumed that it would be another such hagiography. But unlike those flattering portraits of brave, humble, and chaste nuns teaching poor “uncivilized” African children the Gospel and healing the sick in sweltering tropical rainforests of equatorial Africa, Clélia Lacam seeks to tell another story, one less holy, less religious, less hagiographical.
6Her story begins with some photographs of the Blue Sisters, showing how the white-European nuns wore blue habits with white veils while the black-African nuns wore blue habits with black veils (note the title of her book Le Bleu et le Noir). From this starting point she explores what her subtitle calls “power games” in female Catholic missions. One might pick up this book expecting to find social history. But what one will find is political analysis, a story of power and resistance at the microlevel of the organization.
7During the period under study (1911-1955) the total number of black Gabonese women to put on the blue habit and take their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, was only 49.
8Spiritans had called the sisters to join them because it was hard to recruit African women.
9In the traditional African societies of Gabon women were a valuable commodity of exchange. Losing a daughter to the church meant losing a dowry. At first the novices came from the most assimilated coastal ethnic groups—Mpongwe, Galoa, Benga—from elite families (one of them descended from King Denis, who had signed the first treaty with the French in 1839). But lacking enough recruits, they started accepting lower-status ethnic groups, like the Fang. Strictly separated and strictly subordinated to their white superiors in the religious hierarchy, visibly differentiated by their black veils, these indigenous nuns suffered from what Clélia Lacam denominates “double subalternity” (p. 79), that is, being subject to male domination by priests as well as racial discrimination by white sisters. All nuns in the 19th century understood that obedience to authority was not merely a form of subjection. Even Clélia Lacam admits that it was a spiritual liberation, an honor, a sovereign Christian virtue (p. 114). But the Blue Sisters were subject to a rigid indoctrination in submission to ecclesiastical domination that under African colonialism was not only male, but also white.
10If her book stopped there in its analysis, it would be a simple matter of telling anecdotes of unjust oppression. But Clélia Lacam does more than that. In the second part, entitled “shaking off the masculine colonial yoke,” she examines how the Blue Sisters, granted with their own hierarchy and invested with reserved spheres of action, reappropriated their status as women missionaries. “Finding the lost voices of sisters, French or Gabonese, is not merely analyzing their submission to religious domination,” she explains, “but it is above all investigating the strategies and initiatives they employed to acquire a space of freedom, and even sometimes to enlarge the limits of what is religiously permissible” (p. 147).
11Travelling overseas to equatorial Africa offered something of an adventure for French nuns who were usually restricted to convents. Blue Sisters had exotic missions transcending traditional gender norms. They had to be robust, young (an average age of 23) educated, and adventurous to live in colonial Gabon. They professionalized their work, acquired experience in nursing, tropical medicine, gained expertise in tropical illnesses unknown in the metropole. Writing journals of their voyages, “the nuns emancipated themselves from gender norms which reserved to men long-distance travel,” (p. 162) visiting places that were seldom visited in deepest, darkest Africa, going upriver into the tropical rainforests of Gabon without men, “sometimes escaping the control even of priests,” (p. 169) learning local languages at hinterland missions where no French women and few French men had gone before, learning to grow their own food, make their own clothes, deal with indigenous peoples, live autonomously. “These voyages represented an emancipatory experience” (p. 173).
12During the war years they had to become food sufficient, consuming only local products like manioc and bananas (p. 179) growing what they needed during wartime scarcities (which lasted in Gabon for a decade after the war), even growing commodities like coffee, cacao and palm oil (pp. 182–183). The sisters also managed to successfully integrate into the colonial world, the “small European circle” (p. 184) that ruled in Libreville, weaving white women networks with wives who had accompanied their husbands on the colonial enterprise. Blue Sisters went on visits in groups of three or four to attend formal ceremonies and official receptions, and received visits by local dignitaries (including famous celebrities like Dr. Albert Schweitzer). European women living in the colony spent time with other white women in the missions and convents, building colonial society, making contacts that mattered. “Their convents, in theory veritable places of sociability, became through these Sunday meetings, one of the places where women of ‘good society’ could be found” (p. 190). This gave the Blue Sisters influence in the larger power games of white colonial society.
- 5 M.-G. Godar, Le Christ au Gabon, Louvain, Museum Lessianum, 1931.
- 6 M. Briault, La Sœur Saint-Charles de l’Immaculée conception de Castres, Paris, Paul Téqui, 1914; La (...)
13Soon their reputation spread to France, through brochures and books and “propaganda” (a word whose meaning in this Catholic context meant the spreading of the Christian faith, but which here takes on a more political connotation). In 1931, Sister Marie-Germaine Godar published Le Christ au Gabon, which enjoyed a large readership among Catholics in France.5 Throughout the 1930s the Spiritan Father Maurice Briault multiplied descriptions of the Blue Sisters of Gabon6 as brave heroines of the French “civilizing mission” teaching, nursing, and saving black souls (p. 197).
14As for the indigenous black African sisters, they found themselves doubly oppressed, and in many cases, forgotten (nameless even in some photographs reprinted in Clélia Lacam’s book). Forced to do laundry, grow food, cook and clean, these black nuns found themselves at the bottom of the order. What’s more, they were expected to like it! Obedience was drilled into them by their white fathers and sisters. Ridicule, punishment, and even suspension from their order were all tools of domination employed by European superiors.
15One way they resisted was to play off the rivalry between the Spiritan Fathers and the Blue Sisters (p. 288). Another was for a novice to quit (p. 290). After several years of such desertions the vicarate started transferring such novices to new missions in the hinterland. Evangelization there of the “uncivilized” people of the tropical rainforests was seen as more suitable for these native Gabonese nuns, although, as Clélia Lacam notes, it also liberated them from all Western feminine tutelage (p. 292).
16Six “indigenous” female missions had been created by 1940, and in them “indigenous” Gabonese nuns found themselves treated as equals to their white European counterparts. They enjoyed a greater liberty of movement (p. 297) and were given better jobs with greater responsibilities over education, evangelization, and visits. In the 1920s, Gabonese nuns started being named as superiors of these missions (p. 298). “For these Gabonese sisters, leaving on a mission was discovering an unknown autonomy, acquiring a right of initiative and obtaining a veritable agency” (p. 298).
17The third part of Clélia Lacam’s book tells how, after the Second World War, the Blue Sisters liberated themselves. They did this by taking advantages of the overall progressive context of late colonialism, becoming active participants in the Libération movement of Charles de Gaulle, capitalizing on their celebrity through such publicity building propaganda as the short 1948 film “Cent ans de mission” which was broadcast in France and represented them as brave heroines of the French “civilizing mission,” and then, in 1951, successfully translating that myth into independence from male domination by the Spiritan Fathers (p. 320). Finally, with the advent of Gabonese nationalism, the black African sisters managed to liberate themselves from their white European superiors, starting in 1949 when powerful posts of mother superior were transferred to them, first in the hinterland missions and then eventually to more prestigious missions along the coast. “In 1955, they held 11 stations, while their European co-sisters possessed only 7” (p. 387). Those who were once below were now above. This is good subaltern historiography.
18For Clélia Lacam this story of emancipation of the indigenous Blue Sisters by 1955 illustrates a form of Catholic decolonization written in the larger context of Gabonese independence proclaimed five years later (p. 404). For traditional Catholics this book may not be to their liking. It has little good to say about the missionary enterprise, about the spread of the Christian Gospel, about the bravery and suffering of those devout Europeans who came to Gabon less to exploit and more to help, save, teach, and heal. Albert Schweitzer once won the Nobel Peace Prize for his missionary work at Lambaréné hospital. Those days are now over. No one wants to hear that story any more. These days the trend in current African history is postcolonial, critical, feminist, and subaltern. Nothing could find readers in these times better than a critical re-reading of the Blue Sisters’ habits.
Notes
1 S. Curtis, Civilizing Habits: Women Missionaries and the Revival of French Empire, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010; A. Hugon, Histoire des femmes en situation coloniale: Afrique et Asie, XXe siècle, Paris, Karthala, 2004; R. Jean-Baptiste, Conjugal Rights: Marriage, Sexuality and Urban Life in Colonial Libreville, Gabon, Athens, Ohio University Press, 2014; P. Martin, Catholic Women of Congo-Brazzaville: Mothers and Sisters in Troubled Times, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2009; K. Storning, Sisters Crossing Boundaries: Germany Missionary Nuns in Colonial Togo and New Guinea, 1897-1960, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013.
2 M. Briault, La Sœur Saint-Charles de l’Immaculée conception de Castres, Paris, Paul Téqui, 1914; La Légende dorée sous l’Équateur africain, Castres, Impression des Orphelins-Apprentis, 1933.
3 A. Raponda-Walker, Souvenirs d’un nonagénaire, Versailles, Les classiques africains, 1994.
4 M.-G. Godar, Missionnaire des Noirs: Mère Saint-Martin Hortala des Sœurs bleues de Castres, 1870-1940, Castres, 1940; G. Goyau, La Femme dans les missions, Paris, Flammarion, 1933; M. S. Oyembo Vandji, Les Sœurs de l’Immaculée Conception de Castres: 150 ans de présence missionnaire au Gabon, Libreville, CERGEP/Les éditions udégiennes, 1999, and Sur les pas de Hyacinthe, Libreville, 2009.
5 M.-G. Godar, Le Christ au Gabon, Louvain, Museum Lessianum, 1931.
6 M. Briault, La Sœur Saint-Charles de l’Immaculée conception de Castres, Paris, Paul Téqui, 1914; La Légende dorée sous l’Équateur africain, Castres, Impression des Orphelins-Apprentis, 1933.
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Douglas Yates, « Lacam Clélia, Le Bleu et le Noir. Jeux de pouvoirs dans une mission catholique féminine (Gabon, 1911-1955) », Cahiers d’études africaines, 258 | 2025, 585-590.
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Douglas Yates, « Lacam Clélia, Le Bleu et le Noir. Jeux de pouvoirs dans une mission catholique féminine (Gabon, 1911-1955) », Cahiers d’études africaines [En ligne], 258 | 2025, mis en ligne le 11 juin 2025, consulté le 06 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesafricaines/50729 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/145yt
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