From Film to Travel Narrative

4It is at this crucial moment that Petitjean’s film comes into play as it presents a counter-inquiry into the Dakar-Djibouti mission and accompanies the work of Daouda Keita, the director of the National Museum of Mali, in collaboration with the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. More specifically, Petitjean’s documentary is intended to situate and contextualise the Dakar-Djibouti mission as well as the art pieces that were stolen during it and have remained in France since 1933. These objects are both an ethnographic archive and a form of financial compensation paid to the French state in the aftermath of a mission that utilised public and private funds. In this context, one is reminded of such motorised expeditions through Africa as the Croisière Noire Citroën. Petitjean does not offer a linear account of the Dakar-Djibouti mission; rather, the documentary includes a reflection on the status of objects stolen during the mission.

Vehicular Mobility

9In fact, the Dakar-Djibouti mission obeyed the dictates of capitalist modernity. The latter, as Leiris understands it in his ethnographic and artistic quest, is expressed fleetingly in L’Âge d’homme. Indeed, L’Âge d’homme abandons the illusion that maintains and fosters the predominance of speed at the expense of personal introspection or an exploration of the individual’s interior landscape. The same is true of L’Afrique fantôme. Of course, recognising the futility of travel is not new. Interestingly, Leiris uses the journey to explore how to narrate the ego. In other words, he experimented with the autobiographical genre in ways that reflected the signs of depression he experienced during the mission and that remained with him throughout it and were amplified upon his return to France. The Ford trucks are mentioned on numerous occasions; they served as shelters during bad weather, as bivouacs during stops in the villages, and as places to fall back onto when hostilities arose between the villagers and the members of the expedition. The motorised vehicle is, for all practical purposes, the symbol of modernity’s victory. Of course, engine breakdowns, burst tires, and the towing of defective vehicles were all events mentioned in L’Afrique fantôme, but the overarching message is that motorised mobility works.

12However, according to de Certeau, this notion of metaphor still obeys a modernist trajectory. Movement becomes a euphoric form of being that sees itself capable of going beyond the limits of the physical body. This is what we witness in L’Afrique fantôme. The Frenchmen of the Dakar-Djibouti mission were able to move with the greatest ease until one of the vehicles broke down (a flat tyre, for example). They travelled in motorcars fitted for ethnographic surveys to ensure a spatial and mobile position of superiority as opposed to the populations they studied. In fact, the physical body of the ethnologists became a body-machine that did not suffer from exhaustion and gave them a vantage point from which to look down on local populations. The modernist principle represented by the Ford trucks (an American company, it must be noted) made French society uneasy at the time. One wonders why the French car industry was not invited to submit a proposal for a project that had such patriotic ramifications. Nevertheless, these vehicles allowed the expedition to travel at great speed. Leiris describes the expedition in L’Afrique fantôme when he notes that once a village was looted and stripped of its sacred objects, the expedition had to move quickly to another place to meet a governor or a local colonial official.

13In my view, the most interesting connection between L’Afrique fantôme and Petitjean’s film is the slow pace of the film as it links photographs, maps, and objects collected during the expedition and now catalogued in the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. I have chosen to speak of slowness because, admittedly, it seems more opportune to envision a process of slowing down in order to destabilise the exacerbated demand for mobility and displacement made in L’Afrique fantôme. However, what interests me more in comparing Leiris’s book and Petitjean’s film is to understand the formation of a mental space that corresponds, in L’Afrique fantôme, to the shape of the vehicles, which, in turn, serve as metaphors of mobility. To address the fact that Europeans are the owners of this technological mobility, we only have to look at the photographs inserted in L’Afrique fantôme, as well as the photographs of Griaule and his colleagues replicated in Petitjean’s documentary. Here, the modern scientists and explorers pose confidently next to or against their trucks, bivouacking in tents near their trucks, storing various objects in the trunks. This is also mobility; a way of ensuring control over space, mapping the territory, and establishing a trajectory. But how to make a film out of all this?

Interweaving Mobile and Immobile Forms in Dakar – Djibouti, 1931. Le butin du musée de l’Homme

14What is the exact signification of the mobility at the heart of our inquiry? First of all, we must consider Petitjean’s documentary, which he intended to be a counter-investigation of the journey with regard to the objects of Marcel Griaule’s ‘Africanist’ collection, the ‘treasure’ of the Dakar-Djibouti mission, which is now housed at the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. The film is constituted according to a logic that emphasises camera movements that reveal the presence of objects stolen during this ethnographic mission. These objects are, of course, silent. Do these objects, in Mali or Ethiopia, have words, intentions, secrets, or forms of possession? In Petitjean’s documentary, they are not always accompanied by a voice-over narration. They appear, in Petitjean’s view, as the expression of a “museological zoology” without strong expressiveness, an artificial presentation that makes legible their dislocation from their constitutive home or space of belonging. Petitjean shows that these objects are detached from the reality of the men and women who, if we take the example of Burkina Faso in L’Afrique fantôme, are the subject of Emanuel Macron’s speech in Ouagadougou.

15Petitjean’s film is unique in the sense that it documents the objects of the Dakar-Djibouti mission; it tells the story of this undertaking through photographs of the places the expedition visited and looted. The film emphasises how the various raids and thefts of the members of the expedition assembled an original and unique collection of African artifacts. The sacred objects were brought back to Europe, where they were catalogued and archived before they found their final destination in the halls and storage rooms of the Musée de l’Homme, Place du Trocadero. The film’s point of departure consists in the observation that these objects do not exist by and for themselves. Instead, their apparent inertia reflects a state of dispossession. They appear to exist only through the control of the human beings who define their use and meaning, a reality that is amplified by colonialism. However, Petitjean’s film tells us that we must also recognise that the meaning and power of the objects do not depend solely on the technical mastery of the men or women that claim them. Rather, the point of the documentary is to emphasise that the objects have a presence and the power to communicate in as vital a way as a human being who speaks to or is addressed by another human being. In other words, these objects are orphaned and deracinated from their place of origin. They express a foreign ecumene at the heart of a European exhibition and museum practice. In describing the journey undertaken by the members of the Dakar-Djibouti mission, the documentary raises the question of the restitution of looted objects that have long been referred to as primitive. The documentary does not merely propose the pure and simple restitution of the object to its place of origin; it proposes that African museology rethink the destiny of these objects, their journey of departure, their theft and deportation to better ensure their return.

17Petitjean’s documentary film operates in a different way. The objects of the Dakar-Djibouti mission are framed in a concrete and direct manner. They exist in their immobility, which sometimes makes the documentary seem less like a film than a collection of snapshots that recall the photographic cliché of the instantaneity of the captured image. The objects of the Dakar-Djibouti mission are therefore captured and captive. This is not simply a play of words. These objects do not speak to the common man or woman who is not initiated into the specificity of the African cultures that Leiris and the members of the Dakar-Djibouti mission studied. These are silent objects, and they bear witness to nothing; they are a mere presence, a form at most. Their plasticity is that of an object revealed by its shape, the density of the material carved in stone or wood.

18It is crucial to consider that mobility is never neutral in such a context; it is linked to a principle of exploration which translates the presence, during the Dakar-Djibouti mission, of a drive associated with a quest for knowledge, an epistemophilic drive. What interests me about the relationship between Petitjean’s film and Leiris’s book is that the documentary is the exact opposite of the speed of colonial expeditions, which also thwarts Leiris’s writing project. We know that writing takes time; it imposes on those who are destined to it a certain will, persistence, and determination. Writing requires a technique that is specific to each person; it is expressed in the handling of the instruments useful for this exercise, whether it be the use of a pen, or today’s computer, or the way an author composes a manuscript. The writing of L’Afrique fantôme was subject to the accelerated movement related to the use of the Ford trucks that served as living quarters; it required Leiris to write his field journal every evening after the ethnographic work had been completed. This, however, is not to say that Leiris wrote in a hurry. Rather, he divided his writing project into single leaflets written with a keen sense of organisation, whether in notebooks or on worksheets. Leiris maintained this writing mode throughout his life until L’Âge d’homme, which appeared after L’Afrique fantôme and obeyed the logic of photomontage. Subsequent autobiographical writings, such as La règle du jeu, were based on worksheets that had to be ordered and sequenced. In this context, the spatialization of the writing process and material is no longer just a question of mobility, as I have already indicated earlier in relation to the automobile’s journey during the Dakar-Djibouti mission. Mobility is also a question of scripted displacements, indicating, as in Leiris’s case, the mobility of the writer himself in the exercise of composition. More specifically, mobility resides in the ways in which the writer establishes, in his writing, a technique that resonates with the modernist dictates I have emphasised in relation to the avant-garde traditions of the first decades of the twentieth century.

19Petitjean’s film ends with the presentation of the Boli, an object that Leiris stole with Marcel Griaule to form the Africanist collection. The Boli is one of the most sacred objects in the Bambara and Malinkee cultures of Mali. The Boli is mostly made of unbaked clay and consists of sacrificial layers that incorporate human and animal fragments. This ritual object can be in the shape of an animal, a human, or it can remain shapeless. There are many such objects in the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. It should also be noted that, in L’Afrique fantôme, Leiris recounts the process of stealing the Bolis. In the following passage, Leiris expresses a feeling of dishonour mingled with shame. He writes :

En même temps, Griaule envoie Lutten aux voitures pour préparer le départ et nous renvoyer immédiatement Makan avec une grande toile d’emballage pour envelopper le Kono (que ni les femmes, ni les incirconcis ne doivent voir, sous peine de mourir) et deux imperméables, l’un pour Griaule, l’autre pour moi, car il commence à pleuvoir.

• 14 Michel Leiris, Phantom Africa, translated by Brent Hayes Edwards, Calcutta, Seagull Books, 2017, p. (...)

[At the same time Griaule dispatches Lutten to the cars to prepare our departure and to send Makan back immediately with a large packing cloth to wrap the kono (which neither the women nor the uncircumcised may see, under pain of death) and two raincoats, one for Griaule, the other for me, as it is beginning to rain.]14

• 15 Michel Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme, Paris, Gallimard, coll. «  Tel  », 2021, p. 104.

Devant la maison du Kono, nous attendons. Le chef de village est écrasé. Le chef du Kono a déclaré que, dans de telles conditions, nous pourrions emporter le fétiche. Mais quelques hommes restés avec nous ont l’air à tel point horrifiés que la vapeur du sacrilège commence à nous monter réellement à la tête et que, d’un bond, nous nous trouvons jetés sur un plan de beaucoup supérieur à nous-mêmes. D’un geste théâtral, j’ai rendu le poulet au chef et maintenant, comme Makan vient de revenir avec sa bâche, Griaule et moi demandons que les hommes aillent chercher le Kono. Tout le monde refusant, nous y allons nous-mêmes, emballons l’objet saint dans la bâche et sortons comme des voleurs, cependant que le chef affolé s’enfuit et, à quelque distance, fait rentrer dans une case sa femme et ses enfants en les frappant à grands coups de bâton. Nous traversons le village, devenu complètement désert et, dans un silence de mort, nous arrivons aux véhicules. Les hommes sont rassemblés à quelque distance. Lorsque nous débouchons sur la place, l’un d’eux part en courant vers les champs et fait filer en toute hâte un groupe de garçons et de filles qui arrivaient à ce moment. Ils disparaissent dans les maïs, plus vite encore que cette fillette aperçue tout à l’heure dans le dédale des ruelles à mur de pisé et qui a fait demi-tour, maintenant sa calebasse sur sa tête et pleurant.15

• 16 Leiris, Phantom Africa, 154.

[We wait outside the house of the kono. The village chief is crushed. The chief of the kono has declared that under such conditions, we can remove the fetish. But a few of the men with us seem horrified, to such a degree that the fumes of sacrilege are beginning to waft around our heads; with a single leap, we find ourselves completely out of our depth. I give the chicken to the chief with a theatrical gesture and now, as Makan has just arrived with the tarp, Griaule and I demand that the men go and fetch the kono. They all refuse, so we go ourselves, wrapping the holy object in the tarp and creeping out like thieves while the devastated chief flees and, some distance away, drives his wife and children into a hut with heavy blows of his stick. We cross through the village, now completely deserted, and reach our vehicles in dead silence. The men are gathered in the distance. When we come into the square, one of them sets off running toward the fields and hastily breaks up a group of boys and girls just arriving. They vanish into the corn even more quickly than the little girl we saw a little while ago in the maze of mud-walled lanes; when she saw us she made an about-face, holding her calabash on her head and weeping.]16

20This is, without a doubt, looting. Bambara fetishes, which are called Boli or Kono (Kono is in fact a cult in which the Boli is the object of choice), are objects to which many powers are attributed. The Kono is used by the chief, a member of the blacksmith caste, who acts as a judge. Of this stolen loot, which was later exhibited as one of the masterpieces of the Musée de l’Homme in the 1980s, as well as in a New York cultural centre devoted to African arts, we must remember the abduction reported in L’Afrique fantôme :

• 17 Leiris, Phantom Africa, p. 105.

Avant de quitter Dyabougou, visite du village et enlèvement du deuxième Kono, que Griaule a repéré en s’introduisant subrepticement dans la case réservée. Cette fois, c’est Lutten et moi qui nous chargeons de l’opération. Mon cœur bat très fort car, depuis le scandale d’hier, je perçois avec plus d’acuité l’énormité de ce que nous commettons. De son couteau de chasse, Lutten détache le masque du costume garni de plumes auquel il est relié, me le passe, pour que je l’enveloppe dans la toile que nous avons apportée et me donne aussi, sur ma demande – car il s’agit d’une des formes bizarres qui hier nous avait si fort intrigués – une sorte de cochon de lait, toujours en nougat brun (c’est-à-dire sang coagulé) qui pèse au moins 15 kilos et que j’emballe avec le masque. (…) Lorsque nous partons, le chef veut rendre à Lutten les 20 francs que nous lui avons donnés. Lutten les lui laisse, naturellement. Mais ça n’en est pas moins moche…17

• 18 Leiris, Phantom Africa, pp. 154-5.

[Before leaving Dyabougou, we visit the village and make off with a second kono, which Griaule found by slipping surreptitiously into the special hut. This time, Lutten and I carry out the operation. My heart is beating very loudly because, since yesterday’s fiasko, I am more keenly aware of the enormity of our crime. With his hunting knife, Lutten cuts the mask from the costume adorned with feathers onto which it is sewn, passes it to me to be wrapped in the cloth we have brought, and gives me, upon my request—for it is another one of those bizarre shapes that so strongly intrigued us yesterday—a sort of suckling pig, made of the same brown nougat (i.e. coagulated blood) and weighing at least 15 kilos, which I wrap up with the mask. We quickly carry the whole thing out of the village and return to our cars through the fields. When we leave, the chief wants to return the 20 francs we have given him. Lutten lets him keep them, naturally. But it doesn’t make things any less ugly...]18

21Petitjean’s film gives this “enormity” of the “crime” the greatest importance in that the end of the film is devoted to long sequences that film the external appearance of the Kono. The secret of the fetish is thus preserved insofar as the internal form of the object, despite its abduction, bears witness to the persistence of Bambara culture in absentia. Something remains of the secret contained in the fetish, something of the intimate appearance of the object persists and resists the gaze; something of African culture cannot, ultimately, be violated. Thus, as I have argued, Petitjean’s film challenges the technological acceleration, machinic mobility, colonial penetration, and domination, i.e., the dynamics of industrial modernity described by Leiris in L’Afrique fantôme. Petitjean’s film thus highlights a double dynamics: on the one hand, the immobility of the Kono and Boli objects recalls a secret habitability antithetical to the automobile raids described in the tourist magazines of the interwar period, which were fond of adventures that presented a mapped and technologised African continent. On the other hand, Griaule’s ethnographic project attempted to target and penetrate African worlds that defended their inviolability.

The Silent Object

22Something of this appearance remains in Petitjean’s film in the form of a secret, matrix-like, and silent (im)mobility that facilitates a reflection on the restitution of stolen objects. Thus, the film proposes a regressive mobility, as if it were possible to consider African sacred objects in the history of their dispossession. In fact, Petitjean’s film enacts a mobility in reverse, a backward movement that allows us to retrace the history of the Dakar-Djibouti mission, to explore the variability of its expressions of mobility and immobility. Situated within a more political context, the film gives space to the Kono, a sacred object around which initiation rites are organised. The Kono is present when boys are circumcised, preparing them to become adults and learn about the origins of humanity. Filming the Kono enacts a counter-inquiry since its contemplation – at the very end of Petitjean’s film and within the framework of the Africanist collection; Petitjean mentions that during the preparations for the documentary, he had to wait a year before filming the ethnographic collections of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle – makes the Kono an active fetish that overrides the colonial project. It is from the plasticity of the Kono, whose forms are ill-defined, composed of earth, bark, chewed nuts, sacrificial blood, and human and non-human fragments, that the possibility of a secret emerges. This secret is, however, not shapeless. It is an inaccessible secret, at least for the uninitiated such as ourselves; it does not provide the possibility of entering into the sanctuary where it is linked to initiation and unfolds its full value. Thus, we are brought back to the enigmatic character of the object, to the zone of influence of Bambara culture. We can understand that the apparent immobility of the Boli or the Kono is a vital and structuring power. It signifies a spirit of resistance that opposes the technical, frantic, and precipitous mobility of the colonial survey of the Dakar-Djibouti mission and its use of Ford trucks as ethnographic vehicles of conquest.

23Petitjean’s film is unique in its exploration of issues of mobility and immobility; it uses archival images and is structured around a voice-over narrative as well as a set of narrative and filmic procedures that assert its counter-inquiry. As is the case with his documentary on the children of Duplessis, Petitjean goes in search of an inadmissible history that contradicts the narrative superiority claimed by the elites of this world with the avowed objective of making the voices of the subjugated and vulnerable audible. The situation brought to the fore of the film devoted to the Dakar-Djibouti mission is similar to that of Petitjean’s other films, whether it is the Quartier de l’Horloge being destroyed to make way for the Halles and the Centre Pompidou, or the traumatised children of Duplessis wandering around in search of someone to recognise them while the omnipotent, authoritarian, and intransigent state refuses to acknowledge their suffering and abuse at the hands of the state and the Catholic church, condemning them to a state of perpetual political and inner orphanhood. Petitjean’s film situates us in France in the context of calling into question the colonial desire to classify ‘native’ objects whose proper use, function, and symbolism must be explained. Thus, colonialism claims to know, better than the ‘natives’ could, what their culture is about, and maintains that the practice of this culture must be improved by the ethnological project, the epistemophilic drive of ethnologists (the will to know, the hunger for knowledge) that accompanies the love of power.

25Thus, Petitjean does not submit to the predictable scenario of a decolonial discourse that could serve as an academic thesis. He merely shows the objects and includes a voice-over narration (Damien Bonnard) that tells a story of dispossession in a counter-investigative gesture about the the ‘underside’ of of the Dakar-Djibouti mission. However, the sobriety of the images of the objects of the Africanist collection of the Dakar-Djibouti mission is accompanied by the refusal to assert an ideological discourse, to share the injustices, wrongs, and responsibilities of each of the mission’s participants. The sacred objects, though addressed to an absent audience, nonetheless make us feel that we are usurpers and voyeurs. The filmed objects are reduced to their simplest expression and they inflict, through this counter-inquiry, an affect that invites the audience to try to become one with them. However, this is done without any hope of actually succeeding in identifying with these objects, in taking some responsibility for the theft of the African objects, or in trying to explain why and how to put ourselves in the shoes of Leiris as he was writing L’Afrique fantôme. In the end, all of this is useless.

26This desire to do the right thing, to decolonize top down, is a false empathy that is associated with a bad conscience. This affect is irrelevant for Petitjean. Empathy is a way of masking the reality of the object that is offered to us: masks, objects whose symbolic function is unclear since they are constrained by the exoticising ‘museum zoology’ discussed previously. And why should this didactic imperative be necessary since Petitjean’s film is not an ethnographic documentary? The slowing down of the flow of images in Petitjean’s film (objects that do not speak to us, whose ventriloquism is silent) foregrounds inertia and stillness as the central qualities of these objects, whereas the ethnographic device of the Dakar-Djibouti mission was mobility.

27Is this film really an investigative search for the end of a history of which the Dakar-Djibouti mission stands as a reminder? Unless we consider that the slowing down of the images is sufficient to grasp the destabilising affect the objects confer on the viewer and whose origin cannot be fully understood, thus allowing the audience to slowly contemplate the conditions of possibility of decoloniality, such a conclusion to the film seems questionable and unlikely. Im/mobility is the subject of this special issue. In the context of this article, immobility refers to the sacred object, the fixed image captured by the filmmaker, the slowness of the sequences filmed by Petitjean in his desire to concretise the places of ethnographic exploration. This reveals itself as a being-there-for-death in the shape of a sacred object that becomes an art object (from the African world to museum collections). This is what Petitjean’s film shows: the remains of the ethnographic exploration of the Dakar-Djibouti mission, the disembodied objects, soulless in their dislocation. However, I do not believe in this final statement; I prefer to imagine objects that were brutally torn from their original home by a fundamental act of colonial violence exercised, as it was, through the rise of modern ethnography.