A few years ago, when the debate about the return of African objects that had found their way to European museums during colonial ventures gained momentum, a famous book came into play.

It was also natural to refer in these discussions to “L'Afrique fantôme”, Michel Leiris' field journal published in 1934, which he had written as a member of a nearly two-year French ethnographic expedition across sub-Saharan Africa from Dakar to Djibouti.

It is openly described how the expedition, which collected mainly for the Ethnological Museum in Paris, which is to be redesigned, recently accumulated more than 3500 objects.

It was bought up, which somehow seemed interesting, and it was also pressed and stolen,

where even with more or less forced sales it was not possible to get through.

The latter primarily concerned objects that had a high ritual and sacred value for the colonized natives.

Helmut Mayer

Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for "new non-fiction".

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Probably the best known was the description of the theft of such sacred objects among the Dogon in western French Sudan (today Mali).

Leiris, the dedicated left-wing anti-colonialist, is there himself, as in other cases, to bag these pieces.

Not necessarily because the noble scientific purpose of collecting seems to justify the means - although the official argument of saving evidence of soon-to-be-extinct cultural practices also comes into play - but because, in a strange counter-calculation, he considers the sacrilege committed with the robbery as appropriate taking possession of sacred objects, "which to buy", as he writes in a letter, "would be a thousand times more shameful than to steal them".

Which brings us to the peculiarities of this author, who had just turned thirty when he left for Africa as secretary and archivist of the Dakar-Djibouti expedition: a still young writer, influenced by the surrealist movement, an upper-class communist even then, a despiser Europe and its civilizing slogans, enthusiastic about black dance and jazz, not yet an ethnologist, but using ethnological literature as a means to leave pale Europe behind as well as a personal existence that is felt to be inauthentic and merely literary, based on imagination and the art of words, before which he disgusts.

A history with exotic appeal

So not necessarily a man you would expect as an archivist and secretary of such an expedition on behalf of the state.

But this is where the fact that ethnography in France was not yet institutionally well established came into play, which in turn encouraged its typical links with the literary-artistic field - and the young Leiris, who probably knew about his work as editor of the avant-garde magazine "Documents", which also had ethnographic items in its program to add to the merely fine arts, made contact with the organizers of the Ethnological Museum, which in 1937, a flagship project of the Front Populaire, became the Musée de l'Homme.

What emerged from this constellation with “Phantom Afrika” is an outstanding piece of confessional literature – Rousseau is a revered godfather for Leiris – and at the same time a document on the self-understanding and practice of this French ethnography of the pre-war years.

Above all, the former is of course lost to a perception that only uses the text as a testimony to the colonial robbery of art and cultural assets.

Irene Albers rightly notes this in the foreword to the new issue of "Phantom Africa" ​​that she is responsible for.

The Berlin Romance Studies professor, who is well known as an expert on Leiris and his environment, has not only achieved that the book, which has been out of print for some time - was published by Syndikat in 1980/84 in the middle of the "ethno boom" and was taken over by Suhrkamp a year later - again was launched.

On the contrary, following the footsteps of French editions that have since appeared, it has become a significantly expanded edition.