Michel Leiris’ “Phantom Africa” resembles one of these postcards, with the motif changing depending on the viewing angle: At first glance, it depicts the diary of an ethnological field study. Leiris accompanied the Dakar-Djibouti Mission, this notorious French Africa expedition from 1931 to 1933, as an ethnological Secretary and Archivist. The writer, who is close to the French surrealists, describes it – on almost a thousand pages! – cultural and religious rituals.
At least that’s his job. Because if it stayed that way, one would be surprised why this ethnology classic, which was first published by Gallimard Paris in 1934 and the German translation is out of print, is now being edited and expanded in a new edition by the Berlin publisher Matthes & Seitz. Outside of seminary libraries, who should be interested in this brick?
In fact, Leiris, a jazz and philosophy-loving big-city intellectual, accompanies a two-and-a-half-year orgy of collections bagging Dogon masks and Ethiopian church paintings, ritual cloaks and blood-smeared fetishes, an undertaking that to this day is considered crucial to the scholarly development of ethnology is applicable. But what if the locals didn’t hand out their cult objects voluntarily? What if the expedition – like almost all European field research of the time – resorted to criminal methods such as intimidation, blackmail, theft, robbery and violence to steal masks, statues and religious objects?
Michael Leiris: “Phantom Africa”. Translated from the French by Rolf Wintermeyer and Tim Trzaskalik. Matthes & Seitz Verlag, Berlin 2022. 968 pages, 68 euros.
(Photo: m&s)
“Phantom Africa” mutates from a heroic story into a dark crime thriller, which, given Leiri’s psychoanalytically colored writing style – he also describes his dreams and inner conflicts, sometimes admits his own feelings of shame and guilt in view of the behavior of his expedition colleagues – has more than just historical significance Has.
Leiris makes so-called field research recognizable as a barely disguised robbery, describes the arrogance of the colonialists as well as the powerlessness of the Africans and en passant throws some of his own favorite myths overboard. And this despite, or precisely because, the author himself is in a moral dilemma. Once he hopes to find a cure for his tiredness with civilization in Africa, even “to develop a heart” – then his well-known Ennui grabs him again.
Leiris had agreed to the Africa expedition in 1931 on the advice of his friend Georges Bataille. His psychoanalyst also endorsed the trip. Because what could be better for a writer with writer’s block, sexual phobias and alcohol problems than immersion in supposedly primitive and unspoilt cultures? In any case, Leiris hoped for a personal transformation. Africa would awaken the healthy child in him.
Leiris had read the travelogues of André Gide and Arthur Rimbaud before his own journey
It’s no wonder that the expedition secretary’s notes primarily reflect his own mental fragility. At one point, Leiris ponders the question of why he is more sexually attracted to well-dressed European women with their taboos than the nudity he encounters in some places in Africa. Before his trip, Leiris had long been one of the Paris Surrealists, who exaggerated their political-revolutionary attitude with an outspoken enthusiasm for Africa. Her hope: in a foreign country one could get rid of one’s bourgeois character.
Leiris isn’t the first to do this. Arthur Rimbaud, for example, gave up writing poetry to sail to Africa – and years later came back sick but full of wild stories. After traveling through the French colonies in the late 1920s, André Gide published popular travelogues such as “Voyage au Congo” and “Retour du Tchad”. Leiris knew both. And followed in Rimbaud’s footsteps the illusion of being baptized as a rebel in Africa.
Similar fantasies of transformation, or their condemnation, also play a part in the debate about cultural appropriation today. But one thing also becomes clear to Leiris at some point: he cannot deny his nation and class. His libidinous Africa fantasies are repeatedly shattered by political reality. In particular, Leiri’s idea of seeking salvation from the locals seems increasingly absurd, since they themselves hold religious rituals to escape their miserable living conditions.
Leiris doesn’t even try to be objective, he describes his emotional world in detail
It’s the literary qualities that make “Phantom Afrika” stand out and make it Leiris’ perhaps not best, but most successful work. Claude Levi Strauss later declared him one of the “most important writers of the century”. The author always wrestles with his own conflict of interests, he questions the authenticity of performances by the Africans, suspects that not only the Europeans cheat the locals, but that the latter also serve up their own fairy tales to the invaders. The fact that Leiris doesn’t even try to be objective, but rather incorporates emotions such as joy, worry, frustration, sexual desire and shame in sometimes brash comments makes what was once vilified as “frivolous” a pioneer of a fundamentally new experimental ethnography.
When expedition leader Marcel Griaule later opposed the publication of “Phantom Africa”, it was mainly due to Leiri’s unembellished descriptions of robbery: such as the report of the illegally stolen Kono mask in Mali. When the head of the Kono wants to keep the whites away from his sanctuary with demands for complicated animal sacrifices, Griaule gets rude: he tells the village chief that “in retaliation for the fact that we’re obviously being made fun of here, the Kono will, for a fee of 10 Francs is to be extradited if the village chief and the village notables do not want to be taken away by the police allegedly hidden in the truck… Terrible blackmail!… The village chief is devastated.”
Griaule then sends one of his employees to fetch the mask, which “neither women nor the uncircumcised may see, lest they die.” Panic breaks out in the village, men with sticks hastily herd their wives and children into the houses, while Leiris notes, half amused: “Surrounded by an aura of particularly powerful and brazen demons or bastards, we leave the people in their amazement”.
Africa had not healed Leiris as a person, but put him on the right track as a writer
Even the expedition secretary is obviously not immune to the power rush he feels as a “white man with a knife”. Although he lends the company a certain humanity in “Phantom Africa”, Leiris ultimately does not question the colonial power structures.
The approximately 3,500 objects collected by the Dakar-Djibouti mission are now the pride of Parisian ethnographic museums – even if Emmanuel Macron has promised to return some of them. But Leiris was to revise many of his earlier ideas: he made further trips to Africa and the Caribbean, became friends with the Afro-Caribbean-French Negritude co-founder Aimé Césaire, and worked for Jean Paul Sartre’s magazine Les Temps Modernes and grows into a lawyer for the anti-colonial left in the 1950s.
Africa had not healed Leiris as a person, but put him on the right track as a writer. In a letter to his friend Bataille, he writes that as an ethnographer you can only write about your own experiences: “However intensely we imagine living the experience of the local person, we can never slip into their skin.”