Modelled according to its curators on a police enquiry in which the analysis of clues can reveal the author of a crime, a new exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris is re-examining the records of a major anthropological expedition that crossed what was then French-ruled West, Central, and East Africa in the 1930s in order to collect items of African heritage.
The expedition, which left from Dakar in Senegal in 1931 and arrived in Djibouti on the other side of the continent two years later, consisted of a team of French anthropologists led by Africa specialist Marcel Griaule. It travelled over 20,000 km and through 14 African countries, 13 of them under French colonial rule, and aimed to collect objects from these then French colonies.
It later became famous not only for the eminence of some of those who took part, though that tended to come later as their careers matured in Paris, but also for the number of objects it collected. It brought back some 3,600 cultural objects, 6,600 natural specimens, 370 manuscripts, 6,000 photographs, and 3,600 metres of film and 200 sound recordings, according to the exhibition curators, though the audiovisual material has mostly disappeared.
A write-up by the expedition’s archivist Michel Leiris was published under the title L’Afrique fantôme (Phantom Africa) in 1934. For connoisseurs of French anthropology in this formative period, the book is as well-known as fellow French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, a similar write-up of his experiences in Brazil in the 1930s and long seen as a foundational text of French anthropology.
Leiris recorded in sometimes excruciating detail the ways in which the expedition stole or appropriated the African objects that it brought back to Paris, most if not all of them now in the Musée du Quai Branly. It is this account, one of the clues in the Museum’s contre-enquêtes, that forms the basis of the new exhibition, entitled Mission Dakar-Djibouti, contre- enquêtes which closed on 14 September. Other clues include 350 of the collected objects and documents such as the expedition’s original field notes, now in the Museum’s archives.
The exhibition presents not only a fascinating counter-investigation of this important French collecting expedition across Africa in the pivotal decade of the 1930s when the French colonial Empire, then at its furthest extent, was already showing signs of its speedy dissolution in the decades following the Second World War, but also a thought-provoking example of how to come to terms with elements of colonial history today.
Leiris and his colleagues, travelling through territories under direct French colonial rule, collected religious and ceremonial items, everyday objects such as tools and furniture, and musical instruments, among many other materials. The stated aim was to document cultures that were threatened with disappearance as a result of colonisation as well as to fill out the collections of French museums and promote French anthropology through field research.
They collected far more objects than Lévi-Strauss did during his stay with the indigenous Bororo, Nambikwara, and Tupi-Kawahib people in Brazil, photographs of whom are reproduced in Tristes Tropiques, where they form the basis for his theorising about indigenous cultures. Some of the same discomfort that one may feel reading Lévi-Strauss’s book today applies even more markedly to the records of the French anthropologists on their expedition from Dakar to Djibouti.
Not only is there the obvious asymmetry between the bearers of the culture, under threat, as Lévi-Strauss acknowledges, precisely from tendencies that he himself represents, and the Western, in this case French, anthropologists who study them, but in the African case those cultures had also been shattered by colonial rule. French anthropologists then arrived to buy up artefacts at knock-down prices or make off with them in the guise of gifts or payments in kind.
Ethical questions arising from such situations have long been grist to the mill of European anthropology, but often they are debated in a perhaps excessively abstract way. One of the great virtues of the Dakar-Djibouti exhibition is that it not only re-examines the objects acquired during the expedition through a contemporary lens and in the light of a re-reading of the original records, but it also does its best to look at the expedition from the other side.
The African people who sold or gifted the objects to Griaule, Leiris, and their colleagues did not produce write-ups of their encounters with the French anthropologists for later generations to read, with the result that their voices can only be heard through the expedition’s field notes, Leiris’s write-up, or the records of the French administration in these then African colonies, if they can be heard at all.
To complete its counter-investigation, the exhibition has asked members of local communities in some of the African countries concerned for their views of the Dakar-Djibouti expedition, in some cases asking them to search their memories with a view to providing accounts of it when seen from the opposite side.
Oral history and the memories of parents or grandparents, perhaps passed down through family traditions, can be mobilised as clues in this kind of counter-investigation both to confirm, or to contradict, the accounts given by Leiris and his colleagues and to produce a picture of how this expedition is understood among African communities today.
Heritage specialists from some of the African countries concerned were also given the opportunity to work on the objects collected by the expedition and its records at the Musée du Quai-Branly, with today’s French anthropologists working with African peers in order to provide a joint account of how the expedition might be understood some 90 years after it took place.
Interviews were carried out with members of local communities in Senegal, Mali, Cameroon, Ethiopia, and Djibouti, and institutions such as the Abomey-Calavi University in Benin and the Gondar University in Ethiopia, as well as the Musée des Civilisations Noires in Dakar and the national museums in Mali, Chad. Cameroon, and Djibouti, were invited to work with their French peers.
Counter-exhibition: Entering the exhibition, housed in one of the mezzanine exhibition spaces at the Musée du Quai Branly, visitors are shown a map of the route followed by the expedition and given background information on French anthropology in the early 1930s, just a few years after the foundation of the Institut d’ethnologie, the Paris Ethnology Institute, in 1925.
This part of the exhibition consists largely of documents and photographs, notably of expedition members and the preparations undertaken for it. The next section presents some of the objects collected by the expedition together with the results of contemporary counter-investigations.
One of the most striking results concerns a boli, or ritual object, and an animal mask acquired by the expedition from the kono religious shrine in Diabougou in Mali in September 1931, both on display in the exhibition. According to Leiris in L’Afrique fantôme, the objects were acquired through a transaction, which, as well as involving pitifully small sums, was also carried out in an underhand manner and, given the presence of the French occupying authorities, something akin to force.
“Lutten [a member of the expedition] separated the mask from the feathered costume to which it was attached and passed it to me so I could wrap it in the canvas bag that we had bought with us,” Leiris writes.
“He also gave me, this time at my request, a sort of pig-like object [the boli], also of a dark brown colour (made of coagulated blood), that weighed at least 15 kg, and I wrapped it up with the mask. We then all rapidly left the village and got back to our cars by crossing the surrounding fields. As we were leaving, the local chief wanted to give us back the 20 Francs that we had given him. Of course, Lutten let him have it. But it wasn’t any the less shoddy for all that.”
While the objects were not exactly stolen, they might as well have been, given the way in which they were collected and the desire of the local chief to give back the 20 Francs and to take them back to the shrine. In an accompanying film made in 2021, a group of local people in Diabougou, in some cases descendants of the keepers of the shrine, are shown discussing the episode from Leiris’s write-up and the loss of the ritual objects.
For them, the acquisition of the objects was nothing less than theft, however it is presented in Leiris’s somewhat shame-faced account, and it is as thieves that the expedition is remembered in local oral history. In one particularly poignant moment visitors are shown the ruined remains of the original shrine, now deserted and its religious objects dispersed, with one of the local people saying that “these practices have now completely stopped” and their original meanings been forgotten.
Throughout the exhibition, it is such episodes that most fully bring home to visitors the insights that can be gained by counter-investigating the objects collected by the Dakar-Djibouti expedition, though in the majority of cases, perhaps a little over half, there is no record of how they were acquired.
The exhibition provides much food for thought not only about the circumstances of such anthropological collecting expeditions but also about the history of French anthropology and its links to colonialism. The methods that it pioneers through its model of historical “counter-investigation” also suggest ways of producing greater contemporary understanding, this time by producing double narratives that contain contributions from both sides, the collectors and the collected, the anthropologists and those who provided the raw materials for anthropological investigation.
In a film closing the exhibition, anthropologists and heritage professionals from France and Africa reflect on lessons learned from the Dakar-Djibouti counter-investigations. While it is not easy to find people at places visited by the expedition who can speak about local responses to it, they say, and the bulk of the documentary material is on the French side, there are still some people who can remember their parents or grandparents speaking about it. The use of photographs and other materials in interview sessions can help to catalyse such memories.
Overall, the anthropologists say, the discipline of anthropology in France today has been transformed as a result of the incorporation of multiple viewpoints, calling into question the validity of the anthropological gaze and rewriting episodes such as those recounted by Leiris or Lévi-Strauss with respect to the views of the bearers, as well as the interpreters, of the cultures concerned.
Counter-investigations such as those carried out on the Dakar-Djibouti expedition and recorded in the present exhibition can also help put together plans for restitution, with Mali mulling over a request for the return of the kono mask and boli, for example, nearly 100 years after they were taken.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 25 September, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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