Tavia Nyong’o

In 1931, the twenty-nine-year-old French poet Michel Leiris departed from Bordeaux for what was to be a two-year ethnographic expedition across sub-Saharan Africa. The Dakar to Djibouti Mission, under the direction of anthropologist Marcel Griaule (himself only three years older than Leiris) was the first such major venture sponsored by the French state, and resulted in “approximately 3,700 objects” being exported from Africa to France: art and artifacts that formed the core African collection of what is today the Musée du quai Branly in Paris (2). Under the official title of “secretary-archivist,” Leiris’s responsibilities on the expedition included “maintaining the Mission’s general logbook,” an “inventory of all the objects and artifacts the team acquired,” and detailed records describing “the more than 6,000 photographs taken during the voyage,” according to Brent Hayes Edwards, whose translation of the unofficial journal Leiris also kept of the expedition has recently been published in English.

Phantom Africa, first published in French in 1934, was Leiris’s ongoing, day-to-day attempt to reconcile the creative impasse that had led him to agree to sign up for the African mission with the dull reality of his official responsibilities. It is also an astonishing document of colonial plunder, and the complicity of aesthetics and anthropology in its exercise. It was a strange position for a radical poet to find himself in; and the tension between official duty and private reverie runs throughout the journal. Since Leiris regularly strove to immerse himself in the worlds of ritual otherness he encountered, he periodically raged against the ethnographic project—half empiricist and half inquisitorial—that he found himself immersed in. Recalling that contradiction to an interviewer decades later, Leiris noted: “I had imagined that ethnography was a privileged mode of contact with other people. But I came to realize that it was often just bureaucratic work” (15).

For a poet whose sensibilities had been shaped by Afro-American jazz and the aesthetic radicalism of the Surrealist movement in Paris, such a descent into the colonial quotidian was frequently galling. Leiris’s initial assumption, that he could somehow “know” Africa by submitting to its embodied rigors, was frank in its exoticism. “I would rather be possessed myself, than study possessed people,” he confesses to his journal on 23 July 1932, “and I would rather have carnal knowledge of a “zarine” than know her ins and outs scientifically” (456).1 But in the end he could neither penetrate nor be penetrated by Africa (although he does idly contemplate writing a treatise on masturbation at one point). A sexually frustrated young husband separated from his wife Zette, and someone who could not initially find black women “really exciting” because they are “habitually too naked” (199), Leiris fills his journal with erotic interludes that often seem more persecutory than pleasurable. “I dream that I am cuckolded,” he writes on 1 August 1932, while the expedition is in Ethiopia, “and it is always a sort of punishment for not being a man, for traveling far away from all love, wasting my time in glacially intellectual occupations. It would surely be better to strut around like a hearty brute who shoots his load now and then, either for amusement or for hygiene’s sake” (464). Here and elsewhere in Phantom Africa, Leiris appears to reproach himself for not even being as good a dominating colonialist as the other Europeans he encounters.

Dreaming of an Africa that might prove a strenuous and manly reprieve from his depression and anxiety-fueled existence in interwar France, Leiris would be neither the first nor the last white man to drown in the pool of his colonial fantasies. But to read all 711 pages of Edwards’s translation, only to encounter, yet again, the same figure of European Man, consolidated and recentered through his confessional acts of emotional denuding and self-flagellation, would be intolerable. Leiris himself, whose storied career in letters lasted into the 1980s, was already calling Phantom Africa “quite dated” in a French preface to a 1951 edition (62). Finding another point of view on his early breakthrough in 1981, well after the first wave of decolonization had crested, Leiris declared that he would “have to revise my previous understanding of my profession by practicing an ethnography of militant fraternity, rather than of detached examination or artistic sampling” (60). These three options—sampling, detachment, solidarity—also span the arc of the “ethnographic surrealism” that historian James Clifford has associated with the cohort of interwar Parisian intellectuals, Leiris prominent among them, who were working at the nexus of aesthetic experimentation, communist and anarchist politics, and the still-coalescent “human sciences” of anthropology and sociology.2 What lies beyond this arc, of course, is a world that has been tilting off the axis of Eurocentrism since the mid-twentieth century, a world for which decolonization is not an event that has been completed but an ongoing process that obliges us to reconsider the inherited structures, such as the museum itself, still filled with the objects and knowledge systems that men like Leiris took.3

If Phantom Africa has a resonance in our own cultural moment, which I believe it does, that resonance pertains less to the reputational fate of interwar French intellectuals than to the contemporary cultural politics of the restoration of objects. Whether a matter of state policy, as in the now famous Sarr-Savoy report commissioned by French president Emmanuel Macron, or a question of direct action, as enacted in June 2020 by a group of five protestors, led by activist Mwazulu Diyabanza, who seized a Bari funeral pole from the Quai Branly and attempted to depart the museum with it in tow, our conjuncture is animated by efforts at what Achille Mbembe has aptly termed “making reparations to life.”4 In order to grapple with this effort, it is to Leiris’s official duties as bureaucrat of “booty” (2) that we must look, rather than his psychosexual predicament as colonial “cuckold,” or his contribution as a grand thinker of the ethnographic surreal.

“Booty” (butin) was Leiris’s own ironic term for a freight no amount of irony can distance his legacy from, particularly since he went on to work as an ethnologist at the Musée de l’Homme—forerunner to the Musée du quai Branly—from his return from Africa until 1971. No matter, then, that Leiris would remain a man of the left, cofounding the radical Collège de Sociologie with George Bataille and championing Algerian independence with Jean-Paul Sartre. It still remains the case, at least to this reader, that Phantom Africa confronts us less with the power of Leiris’s ideas than with the groaning weight of the African objects (and I would add all the intangible heritage of songs, stories, and ritual) he is thieving, and that remain in Paris to this day, as part of the primitivist accumulation that the contemporary museum has not been willing to dispossess itself of, and must even arm itself against the efforts of African activists attempting to make reparation.

Booty—with the unmistakable sexual connotation in English—blurs the line between commerce and theft. Edwards’s introduction directs us toward what he considers the most “egregious episodes” of cultural appropriation recorded in Phantom Africa: the “forced purchase” of kono ritual objects in Bla (in present-day Mali) in September 1931; the outright theft of Dogon statues in November of that same year; and the brazen copying and replacement of church paintings in Gondar, Ethiopia, in August 1932 (18). The mission brought along an official painter, Gaston-Louis Roux, for this last task, the ethics of which Leiris seems indifferent to—glibly referring at one point to “our grand pictorial operations” (466)—even as he dutifully records in his journal the predictable contretemps that ensue once the local authorities get wind of what the expedition is doing.

But theft, “forced purchase,” and trickery are all smokescreens in the end for the bad conscience of the expedition as such. Much as the criminalization of some transactions disguise the violence of all “free exchange” under market capitalism, the more outrageous instances of expropriation recounted in Phantom Africa only mask the injustice and incommensurability of the entire enterprise. Phantom Africa does occasionally record traces of Leiris’s bleeding-heart liberalism, aware that he is regularly inducing impoverished people to trade priceless heritage for desperately needed goods (like blankets in freezing weather). Such sentiments can hardly exonerate him. Despite Leiris’s insistence that he would never have taken African heritage for financial gain, but only to further the aims of culture, it is patently clear on every page of Phantom Africa that the mission was premised on an imbalance of power, wealth, and force of arms.

Since cultural appropriation was not the exception but the rule when it comes to the making of European ethnological collections, how are we to make good on contemporary calls for restitution? Such a question goes well beyond a reading of Phantom Africa, even as it is demanded by it. It is a question I wrestle with every time I visit Paris and, as is my wont, make a beeline for the Musée du quai Branly. Opened to much fanfare in 2006, the Musée draws crowds, and controversy, over its twenty-first-century approach to collecting and exhibiting indigenous arts. Its founding, that is to say, is premised on the ongoing authority of European preservation, interpretation, and control over the cultural heritage of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas: the West and the Rest. Often, when I visit, I tell myself it is because of an exceptional temporary exhibit on view. But as much as this is true, it is also true that I go to marvel at the sheer effrontery of this museum, from its vertical gardens outside to the dark, serpentine entrance hallway inside, which takes visitors through a winding, rebirthing trip, landing us at the “womb” of civilization. It is an incredibly grandiose exercise in “panoptic time,” to use Anne McClintock’s useful term for the colonial conviction that one can see back into humanity’s prehistory by observing contemporaneous “primitive” cultures.5 As a postcolonial subject only one generation removed from being a target of such imperial and aggrandizing vision, I can hardly explain why I am drawn back to this inexplicable, sacrilegious collection. Like Diyabanza and comrades, I see myself stolen in this collection, a theft that, as a consequence, robs me of the vitality with which I might protest it. It is like that old imperialist joke about the natives fearing that the camera would steal their souls. Wandering through the Quai Branly I feel the weight of that joke: the camera really did steal our souls! It is not that I imagine that a dismantling of the museum, and the repatriation of each object, would somehow repair that breach. It is more that I feel bidden to return to the museum the way others feel compelled to return to the scene of unsolved crimes, in search of a possible clue to its solution. For the black diasporan, history is the coldest of cases.

It may seem willful, on the part of this reviewer, that I have not stressed either Leiris’s writerly evolution over the course of this text, or the multiform African voices that we encounter in it. Surely there are more African persons who speak back to the colonial monologue than I am crediting here? Surely Leiris is more than the sum of his worst moments? To answer these questions would be certainly to engage, as I fail to engage, questions of translation and the translatability of culture. It may seem all the more odd an omission on my part, insofar as these questions were presumably central to the decision of Edwards —a major thinker on questions of translation in African diasporic literature—to decide to undertake this monumental and painstaking task.6 My own resistance to dealing with these matters in this essay, even as I recognize how skillfully Edwards has dealt with them in his introduction, his translation, and his editorial notes throughout, is that I want to turn the spotlight elsewhere.7 Even as I recognize there is immense historical, biographical, and ethnographic texture in Phantom Africa, I cannot but help but feel that so much of it falls into the background for me when the questions I am truly left wrestling with are brought into relief. These questions have less to do, finally, with translation than with truth-telling, and I mean truth here in the complicated sense Achille Mbembe means when he notes:

Ultimately, no real restitution could occur without what we must indeed call avowal, that is to say, the capacity to tell the truth. From this viewpoint, to restitute was part of an unconditional duty—part of the infinitely irrecusable thing that is life, all life, of that form of debt that was the debt of truth.

The truth is that Europe took things from us that it will never be able to restitute. We will learn to live with this loss. Europe, for its part, will have to take responsibility for its acts, for that shady part of our shared history which it keeps denying or of which it has sought to divest itself. The risk is that by restituting our objects without giving an account of itself, it concludes that, with the restitution complete, our right to remind it of the truth is removed. If new ties are to be woven, Europe must honour the truth, as the truth is the teacher of responsibility. This debt of truth cannot be erased as a matter of principle. It will haunt us until the end of times.8

Like Mbembe, I want an account of the truth of colonialism within which loss is constitutive and irreparable, an account that lives up to the nature and scale of what Denise Ferreira da Silva elsewhere calls “unpayable debt.”9 This hauntology of colonial objects is what I look for in Edwards’s radical black translation of Leiris.

Phantom Africa makes no secret of its haunted nature. Leiris named his book L’Afrique fantôme for a variety of reasons Edwards explores in his introduction (51–52). If, as the title suggests, Africa is a phantom or specter that recedes as Leiris approaches it, it is perhaps less because Africa is somehow ineffable or unknowable and more because there is no real way, try as he might, for Leiris to exempt himself from the concrete relations of extraction that bring him into contact with Africans. “Africa” is a phantom, that is to say, because his will to capture, possess, and be possessed by it has killed it, leaving only zombified “booty” to be hauled to the ethnological museum for cataloging, preservation, and display.10 That this spectral Africa cannot represent a living Africa should go almost without saying, except that to leave this unsaid would let ethnology and its anthropological legacies off the hook a little too easily. More nearly, the prospects of present-day African and African diasporic readers confronting colonial-era documents like Phantom Africa can only remind us all of the power of the revenant. As Marx remarks, they weigh like an alp (not the mountain range, but a mythic German elf that attacks dreaming sleepers) on the breasts of the living.11 The alp of “Africa” lay on Leiris’s chest, as it remains on ours.

Tavia Nyong’o is chair and William Lampson Professor of Theater & Performance Studies, African American Studies, and American Studies at Yale University. The author of The Amalgamation Waltz (2009) and Afro-Fabulations (2018), he is presently working on a short monograph on critical negativity and worldmaking in black studies.