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The 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition’s Dahomean Sound Archives: Chronicle of a Research-Creation Project

Cécile Van den Avenne
Traduction de Julia Mc Laren
Cet article est une traduction de :
Les archives sonores dahoméennes de l’Exposition coloniale de Paris (1931). Chronique d’un projet de recherche-création [fr]

Texte intégral

  • 1 An insight into Yewhe Yeton’s musical work can be gained, on the one hand, through his participatio (...)

1In the spring of 1931, a regiment of African riflemen left Fréjus, France, where they were stationed, to take part in the large Colonial Exhibition in Vincennes. In the autumn, while still there, they were requisitioned to record “indigenous” music. A Dahomean rifleman named Hounsou recorded a song in which he took the lead vocals, and the chorus sang: “Mède Mi Wá. We are not prisoners; we are men too.” This song is the starting point for a research-creation project I am carrying out with Yewhe Yeton, a musician as well as singer, beatboxer, and artist-collector from Benin. For several years, he has been developing a laboratory for researching, collecting, and archiving Beninese rhythms, some of which are starting to disappear. He travels the country with his recording equipment and archives these recordings in his Cotonou studio. He draws on them for his own creations, blending these traditional rhythms with the modern music he plays, particularly hip-hop. Archiving, of course, but with a view to putting them back into circulation, in an approach firmly rooted in contemporary musical creation.1

2In deciding to work together, we wanted to go beyond a heritage approach to the songs we had collected, without being content to draw on these fascinating and captivating collections to make them the subject of a decontextualized, dehistoricized contemporary sound creation, which would depoliticize the history of collecting and would overlook both the languages and what is expressed through them. We combine our interests as a researcher (in sociolinguistics and history) and as an artist-collector and musician, rooted in a territory and with a deep knowledge of this music.

The Colonial Exhibition Sound Archives

3The introduction of the phonograph at the beginning of the twentieth century revolutionized the way in which we worked on language(s), making it possible to record and preserve oral testimonies. In France, the linguist Ferdinand Brunot, in partnership with the Pathé recording company, created the Archives de la parole (inaugurated in 1911 at the same time as the Institut phonétique de Paris, which became the Musée de la Parole et du Geste in 1928), modeled on the Phonogrammarchiv in Vienna and Berlin. Although the first recordings were made at the Sorbonne, investigations were soon organized to record dialectal French. The field of investigation then expanded outside France (to Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Greece), marking a turning point in collection campaigns: not only were linguistic testimonies collected, but also recordings of popular music. From then on, languages, songs, and music were viewed as a whole.

  • 2 The collection has been fully digitized by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and is available on (...)

4For the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, Philippe Stern, then working for the Musée de la Parole et du Geste, recorded an anthology of “indigenous songs, music, and dialects,” again with the support of Pathé. Three hundred sixty-eight recordings were used to produce one hundred eighty-four 78-rpm records, equivalent to around twenty hours of listening.2

5While some of the performers were singers, dancers, and musicians from the French colonies in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, hired as extras or artists, a number were African riflemen requisitioned for the occasion (for a description of the recordings’ institutional and logistical organization, see Cordereix 2006).

6This collection campaign’s historical context is specific. Large-scale scientific expeditions were undertaken at exactly the same period in Africa (Dakar-Djibouti mission 1931–1933; Labouret mission, Senegal-Mali 1932). These expeditions were largely multi-disciplinary: while the primary focus was on collecting ethnographic and artistic objects, they also had a linguistic and musicological dimension (recordings and collections of musical instruments). These recordings echo another linguistic collection campaign, carried out in the particularly constrained setting of the First World War colonial prison camps near Berlin by a team led by linguist Wilhelm Doegen, founder of the Lautarchiv in Berlin (on this collection, see in particular: Ahuja et al. 2011; Hilden 2022; Hoffman 2024).

  • 3 Online interview: “Musicologie: Hommage à Gilbert Rouget,” Canal Meroe Africa, YouTube, posted 2018 (...)

7The 1931 recordings formed the first part of the sound archives created by André Schaeffner in 1932 at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. In an interview, Gilbert Rouget, Schaeffner’s assistant and later successor at the Musée de l’Homme, refers to this collection as having trained his ear.3 However, it then became outdated, not least because of the conditions in which it was collected: music recorded outside the country in a studio by musicians largely forced to perform. Forced both by the technique—recording a piece lasting around three minutes statically in front of a phonograph horn—and by the form of requisitioning they were subjected to and the request: to play music “from home” outside the context socially connected to their performance. Ethnomusicologists have lost interest in this collection, going so far as to forget its existence.

8I have been gravitating toward these recordings for the past ten years. I consider them to be a link in the chain of linguistic investigation in a colonial context, following on from my work on the first descriptions of African languages in the colonial era and on the use of local informants in the nascent Africanist linguistics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Van den Avenne 2017). Some of the recorded texts are personal or historical narratives, unique testimonies of colonized people allowing us access to voices absent from colonial administration-written archives and produced not in the language of the colonizers but in the various local languages.

9The research I am carrying out is therefore part of a historical perspective from the bottom up, which seeks to resurrect forgotten and little-heard voices, on the sidelines of power, following the destinies of individuals of minor importance who have left few traces in written archives (Van den Avenne 2022). What stories do songs tell? As fascinating sources, they are often part of an “art of resistance,” allowing an “infrapolitical” “hidden text” to be performed, in the words of James Scott (2009).

Listen, Understand, Restitute4

  • 4 To bring our research-creation project to fruition, we benefited from a residency as part of a join (...)
  • 5 The unpublished typescript is conserved in the Musée Guimet archives.

10It all began by sharing with Yewhe Yeton via WhatsApp. Online digitized collections are a priori available to everyone, globally, but it is very difficult to find the 1931 recordings, especially for a musician from Benin whose digital practices do not include consulting (and knowing) Gallica, the BNF’s online catalogue (for a reflection on the links between digital uses and restitution in a completely different field, see in particular: Largy Healy 2011). The first step in our shared work was to listen to all the recordings classified as “Dahomean” and to read the library records referencing them on the BnF website at the same time, as well as the typescript catalogue by Mady Humbert-Lavergne, Philippe Stern’s “assistant” on this recording campaign.5 From one medium to another, from the recordings noted down to their current archiving, via the vinyl pressings and their annotation, the lack of knowledge of languages, places, and surnames has in some cases produced chains of misinterpretation that a listening session with two people and the linguistic skills of a Fon language speaker has made it possible to dust off. Below is an example. The recording numbered 3926, in the handwritten notes taken at the time (which are either by Philippe Stern or Mady Humbert-Lavergne), is described as follows:

Oussou from Porto Novo – Ahombi (?)/Dahomey – How we marry

11The label on the record reads:

Dahomey/ How we marry /Spoken by Ahombi/Language Oussou from Porto Novo

  • 6 Alongside the recordings, the Musée de la Parole et du Geste commissioned a photographer to report (...)

12The patronym has become a language name, and the word whose incomprehensibility is pointed out by “(?)” becomes a patronym. Uncorrected, as this would require rare linguistic skills and a great deal of hard work, the whole thing has been archived as is on the Bibliothèque Nationale de France website. Listening to the recordings has enabled us to give the lead singer of the vast majority of these Dahomean recordings (twelve of the fourteen songs in this set) a social, if not biographical, dimension. Listening allows us to trace elements of socialization through the language and music performed. Hounsou is this singer’s patronym, as it has come to us. On the records and in the catalogue describing the recordings, he is the only musician credited by name. On the photos taken in the camp, he is also the only one whose name appears on the back of a full-length portrait, with the words “Hounsou, singer.”6

Hounsou, singer, Dahomey (Benin). International Colonial Exhibition, Paris, 1931.

Hounsou, singer, Dahomey (Benin). International Colonial Exhibition, Paris, 1931.

Photo Paul Pivot.Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

  • 7 Guided listening session with Yewhe Yeton, May 2024.

13From the way he sings and the language he uses—a variant of Goun, influenced by Ayizo—we can place Hounsou as belonging to the Tofinu culture of the Ouémé region. Given the songs he sings, he has possibly been initiated into certain Vodún cults, for which he now acts as custodian to others. Some of the work songs he recorded are still the songs of fishermen, whose activity is the main economic resource of the communities in this region.7

14Yewhe Yeton knows the rhythms that Hounsou plays and sings, as he was raised in the same region in a family of traditional musicians. He also knows and understands the language in which Hounsou sings. The first stage of this research-creation was to work together to produce accurate knowledge of these recordings by both reading the archives and listening attentively.

15Yewhe Yeton offered to incorporate the archive musically, in the literal sense, to reincarnate it, to sing with it. In the first of the selected pieces, he works in the form of a relay, where Hounsou sends out the theme, which he himself takes up, only to give the lead back at the end of the piece to the man he considers a grandfather, an ancestor. In the second piece, he restores the percussion, specific to the rhythm played, giving rise to a rapped piece born of the repetitive loop of the song started and taken up by the backing chorus. In a third, he samples more, taking elements from recorded stories, which he mixes with a piece where a recorder (and another probably Yoruba musician called Dahou, according to the handwritten notes) takes the lead. The proposals are different each time, but what they have in common is the way in which he creates an unprecedented dialogue between past and present. The effect is striking every time, with his voice placed within (and not on) the sound archive.

16The next stage of our research-creation is to build a sound and musical narrative (in the form of a podcast, currently being written) around the journey that took African men from Dahomey to France: conscripted in Dahomey, in barracks in Fréjus, requisitioned for the great Colonial Exhibition between the two world wars. Is it possible, through the songs we have collected, to construct a narrative capable of shedding light on migratory journeys that have never been thought of as such? How do the songs travel and what do they reveal in the back-and-forth of departure and arrival between the countries? The ultimate step will be to bring these songs and their stories back home and see what effects they still have today.

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Bibliographie

Ahuja, Ravi, Heike Liebau, and Franziska Roy, eds. 2011. When the War Began, We Heard of Several Kings: South Asian Prisoners in World War I Germany. New Delhi: Social Science Press.

Cordereix, Pascal. 2006. “Les enregistrements du musée de la Parole et du Geste à l’Exposition coloniale: entre science, propagande et commerce.” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 4: 47–59.

Hilden, Irene. 2022. Absence Presence in the Colonial Archive. Dealing with the Berlin Sound Archive’s Acoustic Legacies. Leuven University Press.

Hoffmann, Anette. 2024. Knowing by Ear: Listening to Voice Recordings with African Prisoners of War in German Camps (1915–1918). Durham: Duke University Press.

Largy Healy, Jessica (de). 2011. “Pour une anthropologie de la restitution. Archives culturelles et transmissions des savoirs en Australie.” Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie 24, accessed June 3, 2024, http://journals.openedition.org/ethnomusicologie/1747.

Scott, James C. 2009. La Domination et les arts de la résistance: fragments du discours subalterne. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam.

Van den Avenne, Cécile. 2017. De la bouche même des Indigènes. Paris: Vendémiaire.

Van den Avenne, Cécile. 2022. “La voix des ‘indigènes,’ ou comment rendre audible[s] des voix rendues muettes. Sociolinguistique dans les archives coloniales.” Nouvelle Revue Synergies Canada, accessed June 26, 2024, https://doi.org/10.21083/nrsc.v2022i15.6536.

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Notes

1 An insight into Yewhe Yeton’s musical work can be gained, on the one hand, through his participation in BIM (Benin International Musical) and, on the other, by listening to his two recently released single tracks, available on all platforms: “Vê é Vê” and “Awe.”

2 The collection has been fully digitized by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and is available online, accessed June 26, 2024, https://gallica.bnf.fr/html/enregistrements-sonores/exposition-coloniale-internationale-de-paris-1931.

3 Online interview: “Musicologie: Hommage à Gilbert Rouget,” Canal Meroe Africa, YouTube, posted 2018, accessed June 26, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TUAgpaCBG4.

4 To bring our research-creation project to fruition, we benefited from a residency as part of a joint EHESS-Camargo program.

5 The unpublished typescript is conserved in the Musée Guimet archives.

6 Alongside the recordings, the Musée de la Parole et du Geste commissioned a photographer to report on the performers and musicians present. The 157 photos are also available online.

7 Guided listening session with Yewhe Yeton, May 2024.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Hounsou, singer, Dahomey (Benin). International Colonial Exhibition, Paris, 1931.
Crédits Photo Paul Pivot.Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8661/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 282k
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Cécile Van den Avenne, « The 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition’s Dahomean Sound Archives: Chronicle of a Research-Creation Project »Gradhiva [En ligne], 38 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 juin 2025, consulté le 15 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/8661 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/1451n

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Cécile Van den Avenne

EHESS, IMAF, CerCLEs
cecile.vandenavenne[at]ehess.fr

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