This essay examines the productive role of media and visual culture in contemporary Gabon by bringing together three high- and low-tech spectacles: one aired on television, one enacted in the dimmer landscape of rural towns, and the other in the urban scenery of Libreville. Once a year, from the comfort of their homes, Gabonese spectators can watch the finale of the Miss Gabon Beauty Pageant on television, a program that attracts a considerable audience.Footnote 1 By contrast, the “Donations to the Population” (donations aux populations) appear almost daily during the local TV news, often provoking blasé comments from viewers. In a repetitive scenario, political representatives organize a donation ceremony in a remote or disadvantaged area where they ostentatiously hand out food items, medical drugs, and trivial commodities to a waiting line of local citizens. The third spectacle moves away from the safety of domestic space and the familiarity of TV news; it steps into the streets and nightclubs of the Gabonese capital, where female sex-workers slowly parade or dance in front of wall-mirrors, and, to the consternation of the public, merchandize their beautifully clad bodies.
Such visual parades are rooted in colonial performance and borrow from global repertoires of individual success and consumerism. They also mobilize key norms in the reproduction of power and gender relations. Miss Gabon celebrates the splendor of the citizenry and the many moral virtues of the Gabonese State. The Donations to the Populations routinize the parading of state solicitude in a country remarkable for its wealth in petroleum and the staggering poverty of its citizenry.Footnote 2 Finally, the Gabonese public often interprets the spectacle of sex-workers in Libreville as exhibiting the social fall of the female body and the crumbling of moral conventions. Similar liturgies of empowerment and disempowerment have provided scholars of Africa with fertile case studies of modern subjectivities, consumer culture, and visual advertisement.Footnote 3 I am less concerned with such strategies, however, than with mapping spectacles and visual parades as processes of production, exchange, transaction, and conversion.
I define “spectacle” here as an exhibition specially prepared or arranged for the visual senses. The etymology of the term derives from the Latin noun spectaculum, “a show,” and the verb spectare “to view, to watch.” By contrast with the flatter-word “display,” spectacle helps to bring attention to the active, relational, and dramatized nature of modern visual shows in Gabon. Part of my argument follows Guy Debord's insight that, instead of a collection of images, a spectacle “is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”Footnote 4 But unlike Debord, I do not think that the role of modern media has replaced reality by mere representation, or that “being” has declined into “having,” and “having” into merely appearing. Instead, I argue that “appearing” is essential to the possibility of being and having.Footnote 5
To reconceptualize aesthetics as modes of production and circulation, I suggest that we need to become alert to the ways in which social agents play with assumed identities in order to acquire status and to negotiate a number of assets among themselves. From this perspective, visual tactics work as organized technologies for mediating transactions.Footnote 6 To capture the contested nature of these processes, along with their transformative power, I propose a new notion, aesthetics of acquisition, provisionally defined as the ways in which some persons produce, bargain, and capture various assets during an aesthetic event.Footnote 7
In contemporary Gabon, aesthetics of acquisition have become essential to facilitating the circulation and revaluation of mobile resources. Although they can be described as technologies of the self, as defined by Michel Foucault, their agentive energy extends beyond self-transfiguration and identification.Footnote 8 Aesthetics of acquisition help a wide range of persons to acquire material goods and social status. The assets that they put into motion take many forms, including strategic positions, political rank, commodities, money, physical services, sexual pleasure, and social gratification. Some circulate as straightforward commodity rewards, others more surreptitiously as devolutions of social status, reputation, and legitimacy. Another part of these assets consists of information and knowledge, which are inextricably interwoven with masquerading and deception. During the “Donations to the Populations,” for instance, the commodity gifts distributed by Gabonese politicians participate in concealing the criminal revenues that fuel the private patrimony of the elite. One of the remarkable features of aesthetics of acquisition is their ability to put physical and symbolic “things” into motion together and redistribute them between various agents. They thus create and are a part of a veritable visual economy, defined as fields of interaction and exchange between persons (performers and onlookers), involving ideas, commodities, symbolic assets, spectacles, and the media.Footnote 9 In this visual economy, the worth of agents and things is constantly reassessed, in part through what Walter Benjamin called the “exhibition-value” of commodities.Footnote 10
In contemporary Gabon, aesthetics of acquisition rely on modern media such as television sets, Internet cafés and social sites, mobile phones, commercial games, and videos, which have permeated the main towns and have become accessible to a growing proportion of the general population since the mid-1990s.Footnote 11 The role these modern media play is not entirely new, however. In precolonial Gabon, the arts of parading and masquerading manifested and produced reality, a fact theorized for the contemporary period by Michael Taussig's Defacement, and Sasha Newell's recent work on bluff among young men in Côte d'Ivoire.Footnote 12 Although I cannot explore this early history in depth here, it is important to mention that, in the nineteenth century and earlier, visual performances allowed Gabonese to manufacture reality by harnessing the intervention of spirits and ancestors. Although invisible, these entities were a part of local communities. They enforced collective protection, and helped craftsmen to produce tools and people to secure commodities and prestige goods.Footnote 13 Mobilizing their power took two main forms, both strongly embedded in visual practices. Firstly, adorned with cosmetic markings and at times wearing masks, initiates could assume a different persona and call forth the reality of magical forces and spiritual entities. Secondly, ritual specialists could materialize the force of spirits and ancestors by charging it in material charms. Far from working as an artifice, these representative arts allowed the productive existence of the world of the living to take on a fuller, active existence.Footnote 14
In this context, the idea of visual artifice as illusion, so central to Western philosophies, was marginal, although precolonial tactics relied on powerful forms of secrecy and revelation. For instance, only initiates and persons with special skills could “see” the other world, unless it was enacted in public masquerades. Male elders enforced social hierarchies by protecting the realm of the sacred from profane view. As we shall see, events of the colonial period and the late twentieth century considerably altered these regimes of visual power, thus challenging the strategies of social domination they supported.
In nineteenth-century Equatorial Africa, visual orders began to be transformed with the proliferation of cinema and photography, which local customers appropriated as soon as they became commercialized on a large scale.Footnote 15 Western scholars, anxious to trace ways in which Africans have been put on the Western stage, captured on sensitive paper, exhibited in fairs and collections, and visually enticed into capitalist consumerism, have often couched the relationship between Africans and images in terms of domination, alienation, and distancing.Footnote 16 Another reason we have been slow to catch up with the visual turn is the fascination that words and voices have held for historians of Africa. Our eagerness to break away from colonial perspectives and Eurocentric sources to recover indigenous narratives and articulate forms of knowledge production has often left other forms of language and representation unexplored.Footnote 17
As a result, sensorial and representational experiences at the heart of modern African life have remained the turf of anthropologists and media theorists.Footnote 18 In a particularly innovative article, Birgit Meyer recently proposed the powerful paradigm of “aesthetics of persuasion.”Footnote 19 Trying to undermine conventional understandings of Protestantism as a rational and disenchanting religion (à la Max Weber), Meyer uses the device of aesthetics of persuasion to recapture the sensitive dimension of African religious life, and argues that the emergence of new “aesthetic formations”—communities built around shared sensual experiences—demands new scholarly interpretations.
The idea of aesthetics of acquisition that I am proposing builds on Meyer's theory but departs from it in several ways. Limiting myself to visual rather than broader sensual or sensory experiences, I analyze aesthetic strategies primarily as transformative modes of valuation.Footnote 20 To display, to parade, and to perform the self as spectacle, I argue, helps people convert and alter their legibility, reputation, social value, and economic opportunities.Footnote 21 In so doing, aesthetics of acquisition facilitate transactions in assets and commodities.
Yet, I am not trying to reduce the alchemy of the visual to a simple process of commodification.Footnote 22 A powerful paradigm in African studies often blames the crumbling of older moral norms on the rise of predatory consumerism, and focuses on how visual capitalism introduces massive possibilities for transforming images and people into commodities. The theoretical device of aesthetics of acquisition nuances this view and illuminates how Gabonese utilize visual tactics to initiate complex transformations and transfers with uneven consequences. Rather than mere objectification, I argue, spectacle aesthetics help to dream the self into an inalienable possession, impervious to the flow of market pressures.
To approach how social actors use aesthetics of acquisition, I propose the additional notion of transactional life—a moment and a tactic when people adopt the lure of commodity value to alter their selves.Footnote 23 Transactional life draws attention to how people can espouse the aesthetic appeal of commodities to acquire relations, power, and value. Yet it recognizes that such moments can be fleeting, and the tactics unsuccessful. Against the temptation to reduce visual advertisement to a linear process of commodification, the concept of transactional life illuminates the complexity of self-fashioning visuals that can be both subversive and submissive, empowering and disabling.Footnote 24
While this essay contributes to the social and visual history of Gabon, I also seek to make a broader intervention in the field of representational technologies. Long recognized as a means to perform the self, aesthetic experiences have seldom been understood as devices that facilitate the concrete (trans)mutation of bodies, people, and goods.Footnote 25 By foregrounding the idea that visual strategies can alter the social, material, or symbolic life of things and persons, we can reverse the older convention that aesthetics are only an illusory, adjunct, or ghostly aspect of reality.Footnote 26 The concept of aesthetics of acquisition, by recovering the transformative agency of visual spectacles, helps us to see that they are inextricable from “being-in-the-world.”Footnote 27
CONVULSIVE BEAUTY AND EXALTED OBJECTS
Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be.
———André Breton, Nadja, 1928The final line in Breton's novel summarized the Surrealists' radical rejection of Western rationalism and consumer culture. The artists were seeking another kind of aesthetics, one that could re-enchant the world and disseminate a few sensual terrors into the bourgeois confines of interwar Europe. Today, mass consumption and the commodification of visual culture have long cannibalized the disturbing power of images that appall or project “a challenging kind of beauty.”Footnote 28 In contemporary Gabon, the aesthetics of acquisition belong to this history of upsetting visual power. Sex-workers and youth use fashion as convulsive theatrics of attraction that seek to transgress the norms of conventional adornment. Many in the Gabonese public see such provocative tactics as betraying an increasing commodification of the person.Footnote 29 Here I will discuss them instead as ploys that maneuver the self between fluid fields of exchange, recognition, and rejection.
A spectacular iteration of the moral tremors triggered by street fashion in contemporary Gabon can be found in the popular nicknames for young female prostitutes and urban fashionistas. The Gabonese call them “DVD” and “Tuées-Tuées,” expressions I heard on the streets of Libreville for the first time in 2006. DVD stands in French for Dos et Ventre Dénudés (Naked back and belly), at the same time that it conjures the technological lexicon of digital video disks. The metaphor thus equates the dazzling spectacle offered by young women and sex-workers with a media commodity, an encrypted video, perhaps pornographic, that one can purchase and play at will.
Tuées-Tuées, meanwhile, builds on the repetition of “-tuée” the last syllable of the word prostituée (Fr., prostitute) while playing on the sinister connotation of the adjective “tuée” (Fr., killed, or dead). The prostitutes respond to the naming by a sarcastic insult of their own, calling out to ordinary citizens, “les Vivants-Vivants” (the Alive-Alive).Footnote 30 The Tuées-Tuées epithet, more than the obvious risks associated with the selling of sexual services (HIV-AIDS, STDs, and physical abuse), resonates with a broader issue analyzed by sociologist Joseph Tonda as the “deparenting” (Fr., déparentalisation) of Gabonese society.Footnote 31 Tonda argues that a prostitute breaks away from earlier politics of reproduction by turning her procreative labor, the traditional property of the family, into a means to amass money for herself. From the viewpoint of older Gabonese, prostitution, and more generally female autonomy, point to a broader crisis in the mechanisms of social hierarchies and reproduction. Many lament the growing “egotism” of young women and the fact that they do not give their earnings to their parents, choosing instead to live in single, female-led households.Footnote 32
Deparenting is a process profoundly tied to aesthetic history. During the colonial era, the public persona of white people came to symbolize social, cultural, and political excellence, encouraging racial and cultural alienation among the Gabonese. Prompted by a new fascination for Western “looks,” French colonialists devaluated the native body. Older Gabonese norms, by contrast, encouraged decency and “shame” (Fr., honte), a visual regime in which the body reflected a person's social value for the lineage and their parents. According to this ideology, colonialism lured young people toward a sterile quest for external beauty and desirability. What Tonda calls the “body-sex” (Fr., corps-sexe) of the prostitute is the extreme embodiment of this new order.Footnote 33 For Tonda, the French popular expression, commonly used in today's Gabon, underlines the new overlap between the body and sexual organs (in Lingala, nzoto), one that appeared as physical attributes grew, discursively, into a derogatory metonym for the whole person. Reduced to his or her flesh, torn away from lineage order, and violently individualized and commodified, the person increasingly became devoid of social and communal value.
There is little doubt that the aesthetics of acquisition mobilized by Gabonese sex-workers seek to transform them, or their body, into transient commodities. The art that hyper-individualizes a prostitute's dress and enhances the attractiveness of her figure does reveal and mask her as a highly replaceable product.Footnote 34 She, or he, can be desired, possessed, and put aside by a customer able to shun any kind of social bonding. An example of such willful commodification can often be glimpsed from the dance floors of a few Libreville nightclubs, where crowds of young women dance alone in front of a large wall-mirror and exhibit their attractive bodies to a circle of male patrons, expatriates, and rich Gabonese.Footnote 35 Tonda analyzes this sort of solitary dance as a narcissistic performance that reflects the violence of unproductive sex and the self-love of a body reduced to merchandise. He shows, moreover, how the dancer's reflection is pregnant with deadly meaning, since mirror images in Gabon are often read as the presence of a soul eaten up by a witch or sold to the Devil. The sinister spectacle works hand in hand with what ordinary Gabonese interpret as the social death of Tuées-Tuées and their attacks on parental reproduction.Footnote 36
But histories of commodification are rarely simple. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, female sexual labor allowed families to capture the new economic assets offered by the wage economy and global trading.Footnote 37 When Euro-American explorers and travelers lamented the promiscuity of local women, part of their indignation stemmed from the awareness that families were complicit in the act and hoped to benefit financially from stray wives and daughters.Footnote 38 The tight and paradoxical enmeshing of prostitution and the conservation/reconfiguration of social bonds survives in today's Gabon, as the following testimony indicates: “Parents are responsible for the fact that a woman is sterile, and this is because of the goods (les biens). I say because of the goods, since her parents compose a fetish, and when a woman has a fetish, people cannot refuse anything to her. I mean that, when a woman has these kinds of fetishes, she sleeps with men and she earns a lot of money. Therefore, one can say that this woman has become a man, because she takes care and feeds her family. So, when a woman has become a man, she cannot give birth.”Footnote 39
I will come back to the issue of the fetish and its intervention in family reproduction. For now, I want to elaborate on the historical forms of social reproduction enabled by prostitution. In today's Gabon, sex-workers often single-handedly support their children, especially if they fail to secure help from the children's father(s) or from their own relatives. Hence, and although they might disappoint their parents' social and material expectations, the young women do become men in the sense described by the quote above. However, contrary to the sterile females cannibalized by family greed, as expressed in the statement quoted above, their labor provides for their own children.Footnote 40
The ongoing critique of the commodification of Gabonese sex-workers has a strong genealogy in racist and moralizing colonial genres. Black and white conservatives expressed cross-racial concern at how youth escaped lineage control, and sought new autonomy through modern music, dance clubs, bars, and fashion contests. The also criticized temporary unions between Gabonese women and white colonialists, a social plague they blamed on commodity consumerism: “Poor Joséphines! Unfortunate Sidonies! Pushed by a maddening lust towards fineries, they will, once they turn fifteen, get trapped in the Vice of the Civilized! Poor daughters of the Pongoués, Bengas, and Fiottes, who could only be protected by virtue and labor, and who give in to depravation through laziness and frivolity!”Footnote 41
Although the text was written by a white missionary, Gabonese male elites proved equally vocal in mortifying the young people's behaviors. In 1943, for instance, chief Rapontchombo alerted the French against “Soulevé” (“Pull-Up”), a dance performed at “diabolical” balls in the high schools of Libreville.Footnote 42 Female dancers, he explained, pulled up their clothes to reveal parts of their bodies to the audience. The choreography thus manipulated the boundaries between visual secrecy and exhibition, and between family property and individual agency. For the Gabonese chief, the scandal was that girls played with what older men saw as family treasure, breaking open the familial mystery of reproductive assets. Despite this anxiety, artfully exhibiting erotic parts of the body as a means of seduction did not necessarily destroy family traditions, and indeed the girls probably remained wedded to the ideal of acquiring a long-term partner.Footnote 43 The playful spectacles that teased existing moral codes did not stray entirely away from them.Footnote 44
Today, the visual strategies that facilitate daily transactions in bodies and statuses still face similar gerontocratic virulence, although the critiques have been partly transferred onto Gabonese “sugar daddies.” In a 2002 article, for example, the Libreville newspaper Misamu argued that the city streets had been transformed into permanent exhibits “of a flesh that auctions itself to the highest bidder and the ultimate purveyor of wealth (enrichisseur).”Footnote 45
From another perspective, the parading of fashionable men and women in Libreville, with sex-workers as their extreme street incarnation, can be read as liberation from colonial aesthetics and the tyranny of racial prototypes. Modern investments in looks celebrate the individual, his or her newly found narcissism and their skill at using visual tactics of combat. Young people create a public persona who plays with the signs of the market at the same time as they make possible a dream of individualization and self-control.Footnote 46 These visual tactics are full of rich paradoxes, including complex games played between materiality and representation. As the Indo-European root of viewing (weid) signals, watching is above all a mental activity.Footnote 47 In Africa as elsewhere, “clothing and style [reflect] on the ability of the modern subject to be playful, aware, and mobile.”Footnote 48
That a person borrows the lure of merchandise, in Africa as elsewhere, is generally condemned as a striking form of social transgression. Yet, aesthetics of acquisition also serve to enhance a particular sacralization of the self. Deployed by Gabonese youth, these tactics open a moment of transactional life, when one assumes the appeal of a commodity to acquire assets. Beauty as exposition and transgression also organizes the person as an exalted object. The convulsive looks enacted by street fashionistas, if they serve to acquire personal consideration or money, also manifest an attempt to promote fetish valuation for the self.
The singular power of the fetish, an object made up of different ingredients, comes from a unique use-value that cannot be measured. It is also hardly exchangeable for an equivalent object. By contrast, commodities are produced for the market, and their value derives primarily from commercial exchange. For Freud, a fetish worked as a substitute and a fake as it assumed the erotic power of sexual organs. Wrenching desire away from its “natural” object, it enacted enormous temptation and enticement. If we apply the idea to aesthetics of acquisition, fetish valuation defines a social actor's strategy to endow her or his self with unique significance and irreplaceable worth. The paradox of transactional life comes from the fact that such surplus value can be achieved by a commodity tactic; temporarily assuming the visual appeal of common merchandise. Commodity spectacle, in short, accentuates fetish valuation.Footnote 49
A short detour to pornography, a spectacle of exhibition and transgression destined to intensify the value and power of a desirable object, can put this pattern into relief. The emergence of pornography as a legal and moral category coincided with print culture and freethinking (Marquis de Sade). Indeed, the invention of modern censorship and the “obscene” in Europe paralleled the democratization of culture, at a time “when it began to seem possible that everything could be shown to everybody.”Footnote 50 However, a few decades after Restif de la Bretonne coined the term (1769), pornography became an integral part of the ways in which industrialism, mass-consumption, and the nascent advertisement industry titillated consumers' desires for manufactured products.Footnote 51 Western visual theory shows that image as shock and image as cliché are two aspects of the same presence.Footnote 52 The transgression and violence that endow mechanically reproduced artifacts with the extraordinary aura of a fetish work as a source of value and a stimulus of consumption. In Gabon, the brutal and artful uncovering of things hidden by reproductive and moral norms paradoxically transforms the body into an exalted commodity and a quasi-fetish. Aesthetics of acquisition also work as volatile alchemies of desire and display that enable the self to seek social and economic liberation.
The ambivalent power of street fashion in contemporary Gabon is thus descended from an array of ambivalent genealogies. The scintillating bodies of fashionistas dancing in front of nightclub mirrors are a form of the visual magic that fixates people's wonderment and desire. On one hand, they remain pregnant with the threat of social death and commodification. For the righteous Gabonese public, they promote the idolatry of commodities and encourage socially unproductive, self-centered satisfaction. Public parading helps young people and sex-workers to breach and re-route the circulation of social resources away from the dominant male control of the lineage/family. Playing with the signs of the commodity and the market, they assume a paradoxical moment of transactional life that, ultimately, fosters the inalienable value of the self as fetish.
BEAUTY IS A PRODUCT: THE MISS GABON PAGEANT
Moving away from low-tech street fashion, where one needs only modest capital and visual savvy, I now turn to TV broadcasting as a case of high-tech, state-sponsored aesthetics of acquisition able to reshape social and economic hierarchies. The Gabonese government controls the country's TV channels, with the exception of two French satellite chaines. State censorship, along with the kind of technical expertise and financial capital demanded by televised spectacle, create a high “threshold of visibility” for what and who can access national exposure.Footnote 53 I will base my discussion on the annual Miss Gabon Beauty Pageant, whose final competition in 2007 I followed almost in its entirety during a summer trip to Gabon.Footnote 54
In its current form, the show started in 2000 under the leadership of the Ministry of Culture and a special committee staffed by government officials (Comité Miss Gabon, or COMIGA). In 2004, the government granted the competition an annual subvention in the national budget (Loi de finance). Like other pageants, Miss Gabon publicizes an image of womanhood that tries to bring together older moral values and newer, more contested ones. In 2007, the requirements for the candidates combined concerns for their “moral, physical, and intellectual maturity (épanouissement),” measured by a level of education corresponding to the eleventh grade, with sexual norms. The contestants were to be childless and not “in a state of pregnancy” (en état de grossesse). During the pageant itself, the girls, whose minimum height was 1.70 meters, paraded three times on stage, wearing first an “Olympic outfit” (a bathing suit), then a “traditional costume” (from the region they came from), and finally, a formal long dress.
Beauty contests in formerly colonized countries have been studied as expressing popular longings for trans-locality and cosmopolitanism, and people's eagerness to belong in the modern “family of nations.” In such analyses, these concerns go together with the project of naturalizing national identities on the bodies of young women, especially when the candidates compete in world pageants.Footnote 55 The ceremonies often celebrate nostalgic and reified ideas about traditional femininity and decency. Because these notions are heavily contested at home and abroad, the competitions unfold as sites for both transgressing and domesticating social changes and popular demands.Footnote 56
I take a different perspective here, and examine the Miss Gabon contest as an aesthetic performance that triggers transactions in material and symbolic assets. The pageant, I argue, generates important material exchanges and social re-ranking among female participants. It also functions as an aesthetic of acquisition among TV viewers. Through voyeuristic pleasures and moral outrage, Gabonese spectators can revisit and redefine their own identit(ies), and project personal desires and moral standards in conversation with the narrative onscreen.
The pageant is riddled with large transfers of commodity gifts and substantial forms of social alteration. The 2007 winner received a personal car, a monthly pension, a newly built house (maison de fonction), and three million Francs XFA. The latter two gifts were provided by the First Lady of Gabon Lucy Edith Bongo.Footnote 57 Moreover, the pageant facilitated multiple conversions in the reputations and visibility of the young women, whose prestige was in turn enhanced, depreciated, or converted depending on the jury's assessment of their merits. Gabon itself was summoned to undergo a revaluation of its assets. The parading of its most visually pleasing citizens explicitly aimed at promoting the country and its various products to tourists and economic investors. To borrow from Andrew Apter, this “high-tech mirage” re-birthed the nation as a paradise on screen, endowed with attractive women, beautiful landscapes, and exotic customs.Footnote 58 For instance, in 2010 a journalist explained that the Miss Gabon Pageant valorized the cultural patrimony of the country and repositioned women “as the guardian of our traditions and social values.”Footnote 59
In turn, the pageant also naturalized and converted corporations into public persons with political rights: the journalists kept hinting that the real worthy citizens of Gabon were the corporate enterprises that created wealth and profit. In 2007, two cell phone companies, TELECEL (marketed in Gabon under the brand name MOOV) and LIBERTIS-GABON, figured among the main private sponsors. The CEOs of both firms attended the final ceremony and spoke to the public. Asked to deliver a public speech, the CEO of LIBERTIS promoted his company as a “civic-minded business” (une entreprise citoyenne). Simultaneously, the Gabonese citizenry was pressed to behave like a corporate entity and a self-promoting commodity. Presenting the pageant as a competition between the various regions of the country, the governor of the Estuaire Province (Libreville) concluded on the following note: “Beauty is a product. Gabon is a product. It should actively market itself.”Footnote 60
It is thus hardly surprising that the parading of the beauty queens appears fraught with suspicions of commodification similar to those surrounding fashion and prostitution. The circulation of material rewards coexists here with the threat of social devaluation.Footnote 61 To diffuse the tension, the competitors must answer questions that insist on female autonomy and individual consumption. The answers validate the model of the “free woman,” a young urban professional engaged in the wage economy. But the shadow of the rich sugar daddy lurks backstage. In 2006 and 2007, the contestants were asked to explain why women should have a job, and whether “getting a rich man” remained a legitimate aspiration for them. After dutifully answering “no” to the last question, one candidate justified the ambition for an independent career as follows: “To secure a living, to avoid being dependent on a man, and to depend solely on oneself. Voilà, thank you!”Footnote 62
Such insistence underlines rather than masks the potential reduction of the candidates to a “body-sex,” a man or woman who needs to rely on their physical attractiveness to secure financial rewards and an egotistic way of life.Footnote 63 To counter the suspicion, presenters often borrow from the repertoire of the gift to erase the laws of the market, and depict the pageant as a social spectacle untainted by mercantile hunger. They particularly insist on this regarding the official rewards provided by the government. Here the state acts as a moral sanitizer of commodity culture. In this righteous spectacle, goods are handed over without being paid for, and gifts are obtained without labor. The dazzling appearance of the pageants and the respectable behavior of the notables attending the ceremony conjure up a cornucopia of free commodities, honorable fame, and decent glory.
While aesthetics of acquisition put various assets into motion, the pageant seeks to restore an older ethos of parenting swelled to the scale of the entire nation. During the finale, the young women parade in front of the TV cameras in costumes of raffia cloth and cowry shells supposed to represent the traditional dress of the fifteen provinces of Gabon and their major ethnic groups.Footnote 64 Combined with choreographed deference to the president of Gabon, participants and officials push the parody of national bonding to an extreme.Footnote 65 In 2007, a female member of COMIGA spoke through the microphone of her gratitude to the president, “who is a veritable father to me, and who passed the decree allowing the election of Miss Gabon in the nation.” Another praised him as “the great man who does not skimp (lésiner) when it comes to culture and to his children.” A panegyric from the prime minister's wife placed First Lady of Gabon Edith Lucy Bongo at the center of such affective exchanges. Toward Mrs. Bongo, she explained, “all our hearts and all our thoughts converge.” Olga Clarisse Odjele, the president of COMIGA, could barely control her shaking voice when she was asked to explain the First Lady's role in the show: “The First Lady of Gabon, pffeew … I don't know how to express myself…. She is not only our godmother…. To me, she is truly our mother.”Footnote 66
In addition to the pageant's transfers of reputation and material resources, therefore, the spectacle functions as an expansive narrative of social harmony and political domination associated with spectacles of domestic love and order. Visually organized around iconic beauty and social mobility, the aesthetics of acquisition deployed during the pageant work as a loose, transitory structure that helps the manifold drives and expectations of participants, sponsors, and spectators to be discharged, exchanged, and hoarded anew.
STATE SOLICITUDE
The transactional theatrics deployed on Gabonese television may reach their zenith in the daily ritual of the “Donations to the Populations.” In this routinized drama, aesthetics of acquisition employ a tedious lexicon of solicitude, debt, and gratitude that reverses the Euro-American taxonomy of state duties.Footnote 67 The TV news and newspapers often talk ceremoniously of “the contributions of His Excellency, Head of the State President Omar Bongo Ondimba, to the populations.” In metropolitan France, contributions is another word for income taxes; in Gabon, it is a contractual language that defines investments from the state and personal gifts from the president.Footnote 68 Here I will highlight the donations as a visual language of commodity and moral exchange, a spectacle of politicians providing citizens with material goods and citizens receiving the charity of the state.
During the donations ceremonies, state officials and elected representatives offer food items, medicinal drugs, and trivial commodities to local citizens while being dutifully filmed by a TV crew. Here are three examples collected from state TV channels in the summer of 2006:
On 4 August, Mme Francine Mebiang visited a village in the Ogooué Province to distribute gifts from the Head of the State, OBO, and his wife Lucy Edith Bongo, to the local people. She handed out medicine, condoms, and equipment for the local dispensary. The next day, the TV News reported on her arrival in Lambaréné to bring the “contributions of the Head of the State to the populations” in the form of boat engines, fishing nets, and mechanical mills to ground manioc and sugar cane. Mme Mebiang expressed her hope that the gifts would “help the populations to take charge of themselves.”Footnote 69
On 6 August, Mme the Minister of Solidarity and Women visited a maternity clinic where triplets and twins had been born the same week. She handed out gifts to the mothers, while the doctor confided to the journalists that he hoped “this gesture would become a perennial one (un geste qui se pérennise).”Footnote 70
On 10 August, the wife of the Delegated Minister to the Interior, a “kind-hearted woman (femme de coeur),” appeared on the TV News as “the benefactor of the day.” In an “effort to fight against poverty” she distributed goods to the villagers of the Woleu Ntem province.
As spectacle, such donations operate as a tantalizing shop window. While the life of most Gabonese citizens is marked by deprivation and inflated prices, the spectacle is meant to transmute reality into a magical satisfaction of people's material needs. In ways similar to Gabonese TV advertisements, they erase any hint of the products' cost, origin, or availability to ordinary people, drawing desire and fantasy from incompleteness. On 11 August 2006, for instance, a report aired about a humanitarian caravan led by Madam the Minister of Health in an isolated canton of Gabon, where she brought forty doctors and loads of medical equipment and drugs, and a sequence of commercials followed the bulletin. One urged parents to bring feverish children to the hospital so they could be seen by a doctor. Watching the ad, my Gabonese friend, a thirty-five-year-old, middle-class Librevilloise, interjected sarcastically: “And what if one does not have the dough? Ah, ça!”Footnote 71 Indeed, most services at the public hospitals in Gabon are available only to patients who can pay for medical care and prescribed drugs.
And yet, the spectacles of the donations continue, it seems, to buy Gabon another day of social peace, a word that in Latin (pax) shares a root with the verb “to pay” (pacare). Or does it? Most Gabonese citizens are well aware of the underside of such commodity spectacles. They know first hand that neither the taxes they pay nor the profits generated by the mineral resources extracted from their land are reinvested locally, but are instead siphoned off to private bank accounts abroad. As a local blog complained in 2011: “For the last two decades, the gifts made in the name of the head of the state have replaced public investments in Gabon. Ministers and deputies are busy traveling all across the hinterland to deliver bars of soap and cans of oil, jugs of petrol, electric generators, machetes, axes, powdered milk, boxes of turkey thighs, and roasts of beef to the populations, as if political and governmental action should be limited to such topical aid.”Footnote 72
Whether or not the government's aesthetics of acquisitions function as intended, they master the late pictorial art of French colonialists.Footnote 73 Amassing the natives in powerless aggregates waiting for the crumbs of economic profits, they reform the spectacle of racial distancing into a fantastical act of political embrace. Every day during the news, the litany of the donations aux populations works to make the Gabonese nation appear to come to life in a tight clinching of affects. Bringing together the dazzling generosity of the Grands (English: The Great Ones) and the wary gratitude of the Petits (English: The Small Ones), the visual magic of circulating commodities and gifts in cash wraps the nation in harmonious social exchanges.Footnote 74 This daily spectacle of political intercourse glorified by the cameras, the sentimental discourses on civic happiness (le bonheur des populations), and the moving procession of grateful citizens waiting for the goods, displays surprisingly explicit hierarchies of value. It separates the triumphant elite who deliver, or pretend to do so, from people waiting in line to accept their charity.
That said, part of the visual power of the donations also derives from its routine, familiar quality. In ways similar to the beauty pageant, the shows transfigure the nation as a domestic space protected by the father figure of the president. Animated on TV screens, the wonders of political intimacy and circulating goods penetrate the private sphere of thousands of families. This repetitive familiarity relies on corroboration, repetition, and confirmation.Footnote 75 As such, the aesthetics of acquisition utilized by the donations borrow from the main visual genre of late capitalism, which consists, as Appadurai once observed, in reruns and pastiches.Footnote 76
The Gabonese often complain that they live “before the shame” (avant la honte), an expression that refers to the breaking down of the older regime of taboos and prescriptions surrounding social exchanges, the value of the person, and the composition of power. During the donations, the state tries to transform the threatening pornography of the criminal theft of resources into decent displays of charity and gratitude. It transfigures the greed of the Grands into benevolent generosity.Footnote 77 It endeavors to convert viewers' material lusts into political submission. In the glowing glory of these commodity parades, the Gabonese elite attain a fairy-like quality: beauty remains in the family.
AESTHETICS OF ACQUISITION AND ENCHANTED DOMINATION
One cannot hold power if one does not see what allows this power to materialize.
———Daniel Baboussa, Mouila (Gabon) June 2002The dreamlike ways in which the Gabonese elite circulate symbolic and material goods, and in the process transfigure themselves, their cronies, and the lives of ordinary citizens, are anchored in contradictory forms of visual agency. In this section I show how Gabonese aesthetics of acquisition partake both in vernacular rituals and more recent forms of Western magic.
Prior to the colonial era, the production of material riches and the harnessing of spiritual protection required the intervention of ancestors and spirits. Ritual specialists yoked this magical agency through a variety of techniques. One consisted of charging physical objects (charms) with the efficacy of supra-natural entities, a ritual operation that remained shrouded in secrecy and invisible to the profane.Footnote 78 Another was to make these entities visible through public masquerade and performance.
In nineteenth-century Europe, meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution inaugurated a new relation between technology and magic. The wonders of large-scale production and rapid mechanical progresses likened manufacturing to a feat of magical generation. As Walter Benjamin pointed out, the fresh overlap of magic and technology was perhaps best illustrated by prestidigitation spectacles in which marvelous objects were effortlessly conjured up.Footnote 79 In a feat of ideal production, the magician metamorphosed people and objects in the blink of an eye, without apparent cost. Engendering something out of nothing short-circuited the laws of economics.Footnote 80
Colonialists put the relation between magic and technology in the service of domination.Footnote 81 Such tactics, theorized by Brian Larkin in Africa as the “colonial sublime,” relied on a libidinal economy meant to bedazzle the natives, induce them to submit to white superiority, and to increase their desire for imported commodities. In Gabon, Europeans performed sleights of hands and used chemical powders to produce smoke and explosions. They also played phonographs and electric devices, such as in this scene described by explorer Paul du Chaillu in 1871: “Many people of Mayolo's clan came to see, before I left the country, the many wonderful things I had brought with me. I got out a galvanic battery, and experimented on such of them as I could persuade to touch the handles. When they felt the shock they cried out, ‘Eninda!’ this being the name of a species of electric fish found in the neighboring streams. […] I exhibited my large magnet, which I knew would astonish them. […] They all shouted out: ‘He is surely an Oguizi (spirit) to do these things.’”Footnote 82
Clouding Western technology in mystery and imported commodities in magic, the colonial sublime reinserted “the possibility of invisibility” in the relations of power imposed by European rulers.Footnote 83 Colonialism also changed vernacular logics of visual spectacle. The blurring of boundaries between exhibition and secrecy, in particular, triggered significant changes in the ways in which specialists harnessed divine and spiritual agency. The finale of the Miss Gabon Pageant in 2007 provides a good example of these alterations.
During the final night of the 2007 show, a presenter brought on stage a shiny metal suitcase that, the spectators were told, held the crown under lock. Like a magician, he silently lifted the case and presented it to the public. Everybody held their breath, waiting for the crown to be taken out and fitted on one of the three finalists' heads. But the metal case evoked additional meanings for the Gabonese. I need here to make a short detour into the history of relics and the cult of ancestors performed by many societies in the region. Colonialism brought such worshipping practices to their knees, triggering an almost complete collapse of the making of genealogical relics. Starting in the 1890s, French administrators and Christian missionaries destroyed the family shrines that preserved ancestral bones (in Fang, byeri), and passed various decrees that criminalized the making of relics.Footnote 84 The law provided for harsh jail sentences in an attempt to discourage ritual specialists from pursuing their art. To counter such colonial assaults, elders started to preserve their family byeri in imported suitcases (Fr., valises) that they could conceal under a bed.Footnote 85 Around the 1920s, a French euphemism, “la valise de l'entente” (the suitcase of alliance) entered Gabonese parlance as a euphemism for ancestral relics.Footnote 86
The shiny metal case exhibited to the public at the pageant could not but evoke the modern reliquary box where families continue to keep their most sacred instruments of genealogical endurance. But the onstage performance also challenged older visual regimes and spiritual expertise. Instead of sacred relics, the suitcase contained a crown of fake jewels, soon to be displayed under stage lights. To transform a young woman into a beauty queen, the trinket elevated genealogical concerns to a national level, and established the Gabonese Government as the sacred protector of family politics.
The second break with older visual regimes came from the public nature of these transformations. In the nineteenth century, only higher initiates could “see” ancestors and pierce the secrets of the “night” (a metaphor for the world of spirits and extraordinary forces). Only they could create and take care of relics or mobilize extraordinary and invisible forces to produce material riches for the community. Today, the pageant unveils the contents of the valise under bright lights and in front of millions. Through the transparency of the TV screen, the performance violently pulls apart the system of nocturnal secrecy and esoteric knowledge, and allows ordinary spectators to witness the alteration of a person's destiny and the sacred instruments of her enrichment.
Invisibility and secrecy also evoke today the darker recesses of occult exchanges. In people's minds, spiritual experts and state elites can only accumulate wealth and influence if they sacrifice innocent people and recycle their vital force. The ability to “see,” always an ambivalent skill, is now more strongly associated with social annihilation. Instead of acquiring and circulating goods for the public, the rich and the powerful destroy people and, under the facade of their dazzling solicitude, use secret deeds to pursue individualistic ambitions.
In line with this transformation of the relation between the visible and the invisible, Joseph Tonda has tracked the magical rumors surrounding the frightening panoptical power of President of Gabon Omar Bongo Ondimba (1969–2009). One was that Bongo owned magic sunglasses so he could see his subjects naked, a skill compared to destructive witchery.Footnote 87 In a 2006 televised interview, the prime minister of Gabon praised Bongo with these words: “The Head of the State places his hand on the shoulder of each Gabonese citizen, to attend him along all his daily hardships.” The metaphor was steeped in Christian and patriarchal imagery.Footnote 88 But it also referred to predatory witchcraft—antisocial magical forces.
Indeed, the hand of the president conjured up an old rumor about the emblem of the ruling PDG party (Parti démocratique Gabonais), according to which the white hand pictured in it and superimposed on Gabon's flag, represents the limb of a Catholic priest sacrificed to empower Omar Bongo at the start of his presidency (figure 1). The story goes that in 1968 a Catholic priest of Fang origin named Father Jacques, stationed at the Mission St-Francois-Xavier in Lambaréné, regularly went on tours to assist sick and dying members of his parish. One day, after he entered a patient's house, a group of men attacked and seized him. They took Father Jacques to a secret place in the forest and demanded he give them his priestly magical powers. When he refused, they decapitated him and butchered his body. Alerted to the priest's disappearance, the police investigated in the village where he was last seen and found a man's severed left hand in a smoking house. None of the villagers were prosecuted. A few months later, Omar Bongo became the new head of the Gabonese state. He renovated the ruling party, for which the new emblem was designed. According to the legend, the hand in the emblem represented the limb of the murdered priest, along with the ropes that restrained him and stole his magical power.Footnote 89
Emblem of the Gabonese Democratic Party (Parti Démocratique gabonais); http://www.gabonlibre.com/BONGO-PDG-46-ans-Signification-de-l-embleme-du-parti-ouvrons-un-secret_a20070.html (accessed 2 Mar. 2015).
Both the tale of the party's emblem and the shiny suitcase containing Miss Gabon's crown signal the new, unpredictable ways in which the contemporary Gabonese elite play with the art of seeing and hiding, concealing and exhibiting. Aesthetics of acquisition provide engines essential to transforming people, acquiring assets, and accumulating mystical agency and material wealth. When they serve the predatory and destructive appetites of the dominant class however, the social and material exchanges they facilitate are haunted by threats of obliteration and destruction.
CONCLUSION
I have argued in this essay that fundamental patterns connect the controversial parading of Gabonese fashionistas in the urban scene, the domesticated walk of beauty queens onstage, the solemn visits of politicians to destitute areas, and the weary lines of men and women summoned to “donations” of commodities exhibited on well-dressed tables. Looking across these spectacles, I have tried to recapture in new and productive ways the agency of visual tactics. Beyond critiquing aesthetics as illusion, concealment, and commodification, I have sought to uncover their tremendous transformative energy. The persuasive and sensory powers of aesthetics, I propose, not only alter people's identities, beliefs, and experience; they also put things, assets, and resources into motion. The notion of aesthetics of acquisition that I have developed here seeks to analyze spectacles and representational strategies as transactional devices.
I am not the first to suggest that images and spectacle should be analyzed beyond reductive accounts of illusion and concealment. Aesthetics of acquisition push the critique to a new level. The notion expresses how, exhibited onstage and disseminated through moving images, the legibility, reputation, economic life, and social value of persons and things can change and alter. In this visual economy, aesthetic spectacles convert the values of goods and assets, and circulate them among various agents. Aesthetics of acquisition thus re-evaluate exhibition and advertising as transformative modes of valuation, circulation, and transaction.
These are not simple, straightforward processes. Aesthetics of acquisition work through complex trajectories of display and deception, parade and concealment, and transformation and illusion. By bringing material goods to the provinces, for example, politicians aim to camouflage the revenues that they derive from national resources and steal from ordinary tax payers. In turn, the counter-gaze of the Gabonese public, in the street and in front of their television screens, scrutinizes the elite and applies synoptic visuals to critique its performance and alter its electoral success.Footnote 90 The deals enabled by aesthetic spectacles often remain implicit, or they recede into the realm of the criminal, breaking explicit norms of social and economic exchange.
In the precolonial era, the Gabonese used aesthetics to manifest the reality of otherworldly entities and to produce riches. Today's aesthetics of acquisition appropriate aspects of both these older practices and colonial and postcolonial tactics of sublime magic and commodity production, to put material and symbolic assets into motion and enhance their value. It would be a mistake, however, to reduce the parading of beauty pageants, the commodity donations orchestrated by politicians, and the street-walking of Libreville's fashionistas and sex-workers to a linear process of commodification. In modern Gabon, aesthetics of acquisition include moments when people and things can harness a moment of “transactional life,” and enhance their desirability and social value by embracing the visual appeal of a commodity. But people and things are not necessarily transformed into merchandise in the process. Instead, breaking from the legacy of colonial visuals and the submissive dynamics of lineage patriarchy, the Gabonese who play with the signs of the market often seek to augment their unique fetish value. For them, adopting the look of an exchangeable commodity can realize a dream of individualization and self-control.
As Birgit Meyer has masterfully argued, aesthetics need to be analyzed as powerful means of persuasion. Sensual experiences and spectacle encourage the materiality and tangibility of the religious experience, and celebrate the feeling body as a site of pleasure and salvation. But the notion I develop here goes beyond modes of being and belonging, and beyond the possibility of transforming the self and the community of believers. Aesthetics of acquisition, I have shown, work primarily as acts of conversion in the most powerful sense of the term. They materialize and transmute material assets and symbolic values that people can bargain with and circulate in the social, cultural, and economic realms.
Today's aesthetics of acquisition partake in what Jean and John Comaroff have called “occult economies,” a notion that theorizes African people's fears about economic and spiritual vulnerability.Footnote 91 In people's minds, visual tactics of uncovering, exhibiting, converting, and acquiring goods can also derive from destructive processes of bewitching people. Nestled at the cusp of secrecy and spectacle, they are often linked to the hidden labor of malevolent witches who prey on victims in an invisible realm.
In contemporary Africa and beyond, the notion of aesthetics of acquisition relocates visual strategies firmly to the center of social experience and social action—an adjective I write here in its broadest sense. Visual tactics are found in the midst of political relations and conflicts, in normative debates about gender, class, and generational hierarchies, and in the dreams and drama of the mystical realm. The relentless disputes that people carry on about fashion, appearance, dream-like visions, and the power of “images” show that aesthetics are not just about alienation, illusion, or persuasion. They are part and parcel of concrete economies of production, exchange, and accumulation.
