Jeremy Rich chose an original theme by focussing on ‘how Libreville residents came to eat and buy food as they do today’ (p. xi). He succeeds in showing that this offers a strategic window – quite neglected by historians and others – onto the impact of colonialism in everyday life. The book is, indeed, an eye-opener, especially because the availability of food proved to be fraught with difficulties and anomalies from the moment the French founded the town at the entrance of the Gabon estuary in 1843. Up until the 1940s the place was constantly beset by severe food shortages, leading regularly to famines. Thus, Rich's data amply demonstrate how basic food is to everyday life, and to what extent it therefore constituted a crucial issue in the colonial regime's often quite desperate efforts to follow a clear policy line in the area. A central element in Rich's explanations is the massive dependence, again a striking continuity, of the Librevillois on imported food. Estimates of the present situation indicate that more than 80 per cent of the food now eaten in Gabon comes from outside the country (p. 105). Rich sets out to show that this is nothing new: a recurrent theme in his book is ‘the determination of the Libreville African community to act as consumers, buying rather than producing their daily sustenance’ (p. 105). Yet he emphasizes that this should not be explained by familiar stereotypes, still current in the ex-colony, of lazy Africans, unwilling to farm and mesmerized by the lure of foreign goods. Rather, he reconstructs a complex history behind the particular food habits of Libreville communities, marked by a complex interplay between European traders, missionaries, and local middlemen (notably the Mpongwe), in which colonial coercion and the uneven opportunities for wage labour came to play a confusing role.

The author reconstructs this complex history, full of unexpected turns and misunderstandings, on the basis of extensive work in archives in different parts of Gabon, France, and the USA. His archival labours must have been all the more demanding since he had to piece together his stories – especially for the nineteenth century – from different scraps of material found in files on various themes. Where possible, he mixes this with oral history on more recent events (the great famines of the early 1920s in the Fang areas and others). The result is a rich narrative, well analysed in discussion with the more general literature. Nineteenth-century missionaries were as surprised by the European-style dinners launched by Mpongwe middlemen as by their resolute refusal to be involved with agriculture – this was work for slaves (much in evidence in Mpongwe households) and even for Mpongwe women it was far below their status. Consecutive chapters highlight how the townspeople continued to defend this position throughout all changes and often in difficult balance with the inconsistencies of French policies. The French increasingly expected a solution for the continuing food shortages in the town – aggravated by the bad connections to more fertile parts of the interior – from the Fang, who were moving south in ever greater numbers in the second half of the nineteenth century. Contemporaries may have perceived these warlike immigrants as highly dangerous and savage, but, especially later on, the French came to welcome them as good workers, as well as for their logging enterprises.

Chapters 3 and 4 in particular offer a vivid analysis of how, time and again, the French penchant for quite brutal forms of coercion complicated the functioning of emerging food-market circuits. A striking example of how difficult it was to discern adversaries and allies in the colonial confusion is offered by the arrest of some fifty Mpongwe women who had marched against the government's headquarters to protest about the way it dealt with the food crisis in 1922. The arrest of the women threatened to become a scandal but the authorities concerned explained that these women were not representative of the African population because they were mainly the concubines of the town's European residents; this would explain why, despite all food shortages, they were still so neatly dressed. One chief even demanded the right to beat these women and thus force them to work in the fields. But the governor-general, after some hesitation, decided that the women's arrest had ‘insulted’ Africans and Europeans alike; he ordered their release and the transfer of the civil servants involved (pp. 75–6).

The great value of this study comes in particular from both the direct link with present-day problems and also the surprising concatenations that emerge from Rich's focus on food habits. The author uses the general literature (the Comaroffs, Cooper, Guyer, and many others) in imaginative ways but always returns to the vicissitudes of the food economy on the ground. Occasional excursions towards a wider perspective suggest that the Libreville struggles with severe food shortages were certainly not exceptional, when compared with other emerging cities on the continent. Yet it is also clear that the central role of the Mpongwe as a middlemen elite had special contours. It might be interesting to relate all the twists and turns of developments in Libreville to Jane Guyer's 2004 book on Marginal Gains. In particular, Guyer's exploration of how entrepreneurs in ‘Atlantic Africa’ succeeded in making their profits from the discontinuities between very different systems of value, might relate very well to Rich's data on the struggles of the Mpongwe elite. But this is matter for another article. The present book offers a fascinating story that has intriguing implications for the analysis of the vicissitudes of (post-)colonial developments at large.