Table Of ContentPhantom
Africa
THE AFRICA LIST
M IC H E L LEIRIS
Phantom Africa
TRANSLATED BY BRENT HAYES EDWARDS
M I
CALCUTTA LONDON NEW YORK
SERIES EDITOR: ROSALIND C. MORRIS
PAP
TAGCPE
www.bibliofrance.in
This work has been published via the
Publication Assistance Programme Tagore,
with the support of Institut Fran^ais en
Inde/Ambassade de France en Inde.
Seagull Books, 2017
First published in French as
LAfriquefantome by Michel Leiris
© Editions Gallimard, Paris,
1934 and 1981
English translation
© Brent Hayes Edwards, 2017
ISBN 978 0 8374 2 377 1
British Library Cataloguing-in-
Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
Typeset and designed by
Sunandini Banerjee, Seagull Books,
Calcutta, India
Printed and bound by Maple Press, York,
Pennsylvania, USA
Contents
Introduction to the English Translation 1
Brent Hayes Edwards
A Note on the Text 53
Phantom Africa 57
Preamble to the 1981 Edition 59
Preface to the 1951 Edition 62
Part One 67
1931 69
1932 245
Part Two 341
1933 679
Appendix 705
Translator s Acknowledgments 710
The members of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti. with the collapsible boat paid for by the Societe des
amis du musee d'ethnographie duTrocadero (SAMET), May 1931. Front row left to right: Andre
SchaefTner. Georges Henri Riviere. Marcel Gnaule. and Marcel Larget (at the prow of the boat);
back row: Jean Mouchet. Michel Leiris. Oukhtomsky, Eric Lutten. Jean Moufle, Gaston-Louis Roux.
This and all other images in the volume, unless otherwise mentioned: from a private collection
All rights reserved.
Introduction to the English Translation
B rent H ayes E dw ards
Long regarded as a classic, Michel Leiriss 1934 Phantom Africa is nonethe
less a singular work that defies categorization, whether in terms of its place
in its author’s career or in relation to a literary genre or scholarly tradition.
Though often described as one of the monumental works of French anthro
pology (arguably equaled in its importance and influence only by Claude
Levi-Strauss’s 1955 Tristes Tropiques), Phantom Africa, as the heteroclite
musings of a writer with no training in the field, cannot really be described
as an anthropological study in any straightforward sense. It documents the
history of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, the first major state-sponsored
French ethnographic expedition, and yet Leiriss book is hardly a measured
or authoritative report of the team’s research or a dry enumeration of its
findings, compiled by the man who was its official “secretary-archivist.”
Instead, as Leiris himself put it bluntly in the preface to the first edition, it
is “simply a diary”: the 647 entries he wrote nearly every day of the Mission,
from its departure on 19 May 1931 until its return on 16 February 1933,
exhaustively recording not only events but also his impressions, his states
of mind, his obsessions and anxieties, his dreams, even his erotic fantasies.
Organized under the direction of anthropologist Marcel Griaule
through the Institut d’ethnologie at the University of Paris and the Museum
national d’Histoire naturelle, the “Mission ethnographique et linguistique
Dakar-Djibouti” made its way east across the African continent, moving
through a number of French colonies in west and central Africa (regions in
the contemporary countries of Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger,
Cameroon, and the Central African Republic) as well as the colonies of
other European powers (including the Belgian Congo, Nigeria, and Anglo-
Egyptian Sudan), to independent Ethiopia (where Emperor Haile Selassie
had assumed the throne in November 1930) and Djibouti (then part of the
| colony of French Somaliland).1 In March 1931, the French parliament
I voted to provide a subsidy of 700,000 francs to the expedition which was
I supported by no fewer than “three governmental ministries and twenty-five
| official and scientific establishments” (as Leiris noted in one of his draft
prefaces for the book), a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, and even
i an April 1931 fundraiser featuring a boxing exhibition by the bantamweight
j world champion “Panama” A1 Brown.2
; The main purpose of the expedition was to gather African art and
I artifacts for the collections of the Museum national d’Histoire naturelle and
! the Musee d’ethnographie du Trocadero in Paris, and on this score the
I Mission was a resounding success: what even during the voyage Leiris came
I to describe as the expeditions butin (that is, “loot,” “booty,” or “spoils”)
included approximately 3,700 objects, providing the core of the redoubtable
African collection at the Trocadero, subsequently transferred to the Musee
I de THomme and most recendy to the Musee du quai Branly.3 Despite the
I air of benevolence attached to this enterprise—which for Griaule represented
\ a means of preserving and publicizing the richness and diversity of “native”
I I On the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, see Paul Rivet and Georges-Henri Riviere,"La Mission ethno-
• graphique et linguistique Dakar-Djibouti." Minotaure 2 (1933): 3-6; Jean jamm, "Objets trouves
; des paradis perdus: A propos de la Mission Dakar-Djiboutiin Collections Passion (jacques Hainard
| and Roland Kaehr eds) (Neuchatel: Musee d’ethnogaphie, 1982), pp. 69-100; Jean Jamin,
; "Introduction;’ in Michel Leiris. Miroir de I'Afrique (Jean Jamin ed.) (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 16ff;
; James Clifford. “1933. February: After Two Years of Ethnographic Research, the Mission Dakar-
: Djibouti Returns to Paris," in A New History of French Literature. (Denis Hollier ed.) (Cambridge,
; MA: Harvard University Press. 1989). pp. 901-08; and Alice L Conklin, In the Museum of Man:
Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850-1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2013)
1 p.202ff.
2 On the funding of the Mission and the boxing exhibition, see Conklin. In the Museum of Man,
p. 209; Bennetta Jules-Rosette. Black Paris: The African Writers' Landscape (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1998), pp. 26-33: Brent Hayes Edwards, "The Ethnics of Surrealism," Transition 78
(1998): 86-91.
3 Leins first uses the word butin in writing about the ignominious episode with the kono in the
French Sudan (Mali); see the entry for 6 September 1931 (in which I have translated butin as
"loot"). On the history of the Musee de 1'Homme and the Musee du quai Branly, see Conklin, In
the Museum of Mon. and Sally Price. Pahs Primitive: Jacques Chiracs Museum on the Quai Branly
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
cultures—there can be no doubt that it was undertaken explicitly in the |
service of the French colonial empire. In December 1931, while the Mission j
was in Dahomey, Paul Rivet (one of the founders of the Institut d’ethnolo- i
gie and later the driving force in the establishment of the Musee de !
l’Homme) wrote that the main task of an ethnographic museum was to j
serve as “an instrument of cultural and colonial propaganda,” adding that j
it should function, above all, as a “precious and indispensable center of j
documentation” for colonial bureaucrats, providing them with information j
about the “populations they are called to manage.”4 In terms of the univer- ;
sity, too, the Mission underlined the complicity between the academic
discipline of anthropology (then still in the process of being institutionalized ;
in France) on the one hand, and the colonial administration on the ■
other. As evidenced by the endless series of drinks and meals with colonial ;
functionaries littered throughout Phantom Africa, one of Griaule’s main j
goals was to foster amicable relations and supportive contacts between !
administrators in the colonies and social scientists in the metropole.5
The Eye of the Ethnographer
A young poet somewhat adrift in the bohemian tumult of post-World War ;
I Paris, Michel Leiris was an unlikely participant in such an endeavor. He I
would later write that, at first glance, his involvement in the Mission ;
Dakar-Djibouti might seem to have been the result of nothing more than a j
“fortuitous circumstance.”6 In February 1929, the twenty-seven-year-old !
broke with the surrealist group of writers and artists orbiting around Andre i
Breton, and a few months later found his first stable job—working in the j
editorial office of the short-lived but remarkable journal Documents, newly \
founded by Georges Bataille, Georges Henri Riviere, and Carl Einstein.7
That summer, in the offices of Documents, Leiris met Griaule who soon ;
4 Paul Rivet note dated 14 December i 931, Archives du Musee de I'Homme, quoted in Jean j
Jamin, “Introduction,” Miroir de I'Afrique, p. 26. j
5 See Jamin, “Notes bibliographiques," in Michel Leiris, Zebrage (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 266.
6 Michel Leiris, Scratches: The Rules of the Game, Volume I (Lydia Davis trans.) (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 196. The French original is Biffures (Paris: Gallimard. )
1948), p. 230. ;
7 On Documents, see Michel Leiris,“From the Impossible Bataille to the Impossible Documents,” i
thereafter invited him to be part of the team for his next ethnographic mis
sion to Africa.8 In November, increasingly riven by depression and anxiety,
Leiris began treatment with a psychoanalyst who agreed that he might ben
efit from “a more strenuous life for a while” and counseled him to accept
the invitation.9 Thus, while Leiris joined the Mission Dakar—Djibouti pardy
because he was “weary of the life of literary Paris between 1925 and 1930
(as he would explain in a publicity flyer for Phantom Africa)*® and compelled
by a longstanding desire “to break open my horizons, 11 his departure could
also be called therapeutic—in other words, as Denis Hollier observes, “one
could almost say that he left on prescription”12
What was Leiris hoping for when he left? Perhaps the most revealing
evidence is an essay published in Documents toward the end of 1930 called
“The Eye of the Ethnographer,” in which he looks forward to the prospect
of the Mission. For Leiris, any European of his generation couldn’t help but
in Leiris, Brisees: Broken Branches (Lydia Davis trans.) (San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1989),
pp. 237-47.The French original is Michel Leiris.“De Bataille I'impossible k I'impossible Documents,"
Critique 195-6 (1963): 685-93. See also Hollier’s introduction to the reprint edition of
Documents published by the Editions Jean-Michel Place in 1991: Hollier,'The Use-Value of the
Impossible" (Liesl Oilman trans.), October 60 (Spring 1992): 3-24; as well as James Clifford.
“Documents: A Decomposition," Visual Anthropology Review 7( I) (Spring 1991): 62-83; Jean Jamin,
"L’ethnographie mode d’inemploi: De quelques rapports de I’ethnologie avec le malaise dans la
civilization,” in Le Mol et la Douleur (Jacques Hainard and Roland Kaehr eds) (Neuchatel: Musee
d’ethnographie. ! 986), pp. 45-79; Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe, ou le gai
I sovoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Editions Macula. 1995); Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain
| Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Catherine Maubon,"Documents:
j La part de I'ethnographie," Les Temps modernes 602 (December 1998-January 1999): 48-65;
; Julia Kelly "Discipline and Indiscipline: The Ethnographies of Documents" Papers of Surrealism 1
\ (7007). available at http://bit.ly/2pcEJDI past accessed 5 May 2017]; and Edwards,"The Ethnics
| of Surrealism."
; 8 While in Africa, Leiris wrote a vivid description of his first encounter with Griaule in the offices
of Documents, in one of his drafts for the preface of Phantom Africa. See the note to the entry
j for 4 April 1932. The French original is Michel Leiris. "Projet d'avant-propos (suite)," in L'Age
| d’homme precdde de I’Afrique fantdme (Denis Hollier ed.) (Paris: La Pleiade, 2014), pp. 721-4.
I a,so Den,s Hollier,"Notice" to L’Afrique fantdme. in L'Age d'homme precede de I'Afrique fantdme
: p. 1009.
; 9 Michel Leiris- Manhood A Journey from Childhood to the Fierce Order of Virility (Richard Howard
I trans.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 139-40.
| 10 Leiris- ,,pri®re d’inserer de la Sedition hors-collection (1951)," in L’Age d'homme precede de
; I'Afnque fantdme, p. 748.
II Leiris. Scratches, p. I97.lnthe 1966 Fibnlles [Tendrils], the third volume of his autobiographical
quartet La regie dujeu. Leins terms it a need for a “complete and utter break" (rupture de ban).
See Fibnlles (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). p. 82. ;
12 Hollier/'Notice," p. 1009.
view an “exotic land” through “distorting glasses”: “without realizing it, he
sees everything that comes from men of other climates or other races
through his white mentality, that is, in an entirely phantasmagorical way.”13
The attraction of a “scientific” expedition, then, is that it might provide an
antidote to this inevitable distortion:
A research trip undertaken in accordance with the standards of
ethnography—such as the expedition from Dakar to Djibouti in
which I am planning to take part, under the direction of my friend
Griaule—should help to dissipate no small number of these errors
and, consequently, to undermine a number of their consequences,
including racial prejudice, an iniquity against which one can never
struggle enough. This suffices to give this enterprise a great human
significance in addition to its scientific interest.14
In one of the first articles he published after his return, Leiris was still
describing travel in terms of its supposedly curative “human” potential:
More than an art of acquiring learning, the art of the voyage is, it
seems to me, an art of forgetting: forgetting all questions of skin,
of smell, of taste, and every sort of prejudice .... Far from being
bound only to a desire for distraction or for culture, the art of voy
aging should be the foundation of a new humanism which proves
to be more and more necessary every day but which unfortunately
remains entirely to be created.15
At the same time, Leiris saw the expedition as a sort of fulfillment of
“certain childhood dreams” of Conradian romantic adventure in the “heart
of the black continent”: “the fact remains,” he later reflected, “that in spite
of its indisputable justification and the eminently academic auspices under
which it was carried out, for me it still had the same blazing allure as a gam
bit by some daredevil or desperado.”16 Even as he claimed it could be a way
13 Leiris, "L’oeil de I’ethnographe (a propos de la Mission Dakar-Djibouti)." Documents 2(7)
(1930). collected in Leiris, Zebrage, p. 33.
14 Leiris, "L’oeil de I'ethnographe,” p. 33.
15 Leiris. "L’Abyssinie intime,'" Mer et outre-mer I (June 1935), in Zebrage, p. 56.
16 Leiris, Fibrilles, p. 83.
