Mary Kingsley landed in the French African port of Libreville in May 1895. Her meanderings exposed her to the cosmopolitan background of the settlement's inhabitants. She watched a French official interrogate an English-speaking African. When the administrator had finished with the man, a Senegalese soldier dragged the prisoner out of the room. Afterwards, she visited fields grown by Vietnamese convicts recently banished to Gabon. Kingsley met other foreign residents of the colony after she left the safe confines of the port. Kru workers from the coast of Liberia accompanied her aboard English steamers that stopped at Libreville.

The Englishwoman's experiences demonstrate the connections that tied Libreville to a wider Atlantic and imperial world in the late nineteenth century. French Catholic missionaries in the 1890s marveled at the bewildering mixture of languages spoken in their hospital. Nuns cared for men from Senegal, the Gold Coast, Kru towns, southern Vietnam, and the interior of Gabon. The small local population of Libreville, made up of free and slave people claiming a common Mpongwe ethnic identity, did not satisfy state and private demands for specialized and menial labor. Americans and European residents turned to immigrants as a result.

The case of Libreville both supports and challenges histories of the African Atlantic world. The Atlantic slave trade has furnished a central point for understanding contact and movement between African coastal communities. Formations of multiracial intellectual communities in the black Atlantic during the rise and fall of trans-Atlantic slavery have recently received attention from a range of perspectives. Within these studies, the use of unfree labor as slaves and unpaid contract laborers has rightly been the main topic under review. Even after the formal abolition of slavery, cheap foreign labor and constrained workforces continued to play a key role in Fernando Po, São Tomé, and Angola. Libreville at first glance fits into this discussion. Taking its name from a short-lived French attempt to resettle repatriated slaves on the same lines as Sierra Leone, the town certainly had a heritage built on servitude.