“Les Otages”, a captivating counter-investigation on the traces of colonial spoils in “French Sudan”
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It’s a treasure hunt through time, to break the silence surrounding the history of objects looted during the colonization of French Sudan, territory of present-day Mali. In the museums of France, the labels affixed under these treasures most often consist of a few words, indicating the name of the officer who made the “donation” and the date of arrival in the collections. These objects are however the silent witnesses of a violent colonial history. That we preferred to keep buried?
In The Hostages, counter-history of a colonial bootypublished Wednesday, August 31 by Marchialy editions, the Franco-Finnish journalist Taina Tervonen sets out on the trail of these jewels, manuscripts, weapons and everyday utensils, constituting the famous treasure of Ségou, a Malian city formerly capital of the Toucouleur empire founded by the warrior and religious leader El-Hadj Oumar Tall in the 19e century. Loot looted by French Colonel Louis Archinard during the capture of the city in 1890.
From Dakar and Saint-Louis in Senegal – the guide’s birthplace –, via Le Havre, the town of origin of the commander of the French troops in Sudan, or even Fréjus, where a “acclimatization and transit camp” for the Senegalese skirmishers, the author recounts, in the first person, her research in the meanders of still under-exploited archives and her encounters with the memorial guardians of these symbolic objects of colonization.
Starting with the famous saber attributed to El-Hadj Oumar Tall, whose empire was defeated by French soldiers at the end of the 19th century.e century. In November 2019, Edouard Philippe, then Prime Minister, returned it to Senegal. This is the very first work officially returned to Africa. But the origin of the saber remains doubtful. So Taina Tervonen leads the investigation in these Senegalese regions “sandy” whom she knows well, having grown up there until she was 15 years old.
“Stolen”
The journalist, regular contributor to the magazine XXI and information site Days, takes the reader to the “cave-office” of the archaeologist Abdoulaye Sokhna Diop, who was the first to affirm in 1998 that the object had nothing to do with El-Hadj Oumar Tall. Then she stops in Halwar, the latter’s birthplace, to meet the heirs and report in the form of simple and powerful dialogues their version of the history of the Segovian treasure.
At the Parisian Musée du quai Branly, Taina Tervonen also made a surprising discovery when she went through the archive registers in order to locate the objects of this loot whose value had been estimated between 200,000 and 250,000 French francs by the colonial administration. Several references to jewelry are marked with a red cross: “ “Stolen,” reads the handwritten caption », she says. What increase his thirst for answers. So she continues to search. Until realizing that other pieces of the treasure have also been lost.
Incorrectly attributed inventory numbers, misplaced labels, fire at the Natural History Museum in Le Havre following enemy bombardments during the Second World War, followed by flooding in 1994 and, finally, burglaries at the Army Museum as well as at the Palais de la Porte Dorée in 1914 and 1937… It is impossible to know the exact number of pieces from the Ségou treasury which have disappeared from the reserves over the decades.
But, as regards the 96 gold and silver jewels looted and brought back to Paris, Taina Tervonen’s counter-investigation will establish that only 22 of them remain in the Quai-Branly reserves. “I can’t help but think of one of the many objections to restitutionsshe wrote. African states claiming the works would not be able to protect them against theft and trafficking. »
This is also the observation of Felwine Sarr, author with the French art historian Bénédicte Savoy of the report on restitutions commissioned by Emmanuel Macron in March 2018, Restoring African heritage (ed. Philippe Rey/Le Seuil), and whom Taina Tervonen met in Dakar. ” Basically, there is always this idea that the African is incapable, regrets the Senegalese intellectual. We tell ourselves that we are among those who know better. But what is interesting in the debate on restitution is precisely this: the symbolic space it opens up and which allows us to reinvent this relationship. Perhaps that is the power of these objects. »
“Know where we are going”
For “knowing where we are going” the author is convinced, like the jeweler she meets in Saint-Louis and to whom she shows the incomplete registers listing the pieces of Segovian loot kept in French museums, that it is necessary to know“where we come from”. In his book – his second, after The Undercity (ed. Marchialy, 2021), she therefore strives to tell the violence of colonization through the words of the victors and the vanquished, unearthed from the archives during her quest around the origins of the treasure.
Thus, following in the footsteps of the saber attributed to El-Hadj Oumar Tall, Taina Tervonen immerses herself in the story of her grandson Abdoulaye who, almost like the objects, will be taken by force to Paris, where he will integrate the military school of Saint-Cyr before dying of tuberculosis shortly afterwards. According to the story circulating in Senegal, the saber was taken from the hands of this 11-year-old child by Colonel Archinard, while he was trying to defend his mother against the settlers.
In letters sent to his captor and of which Taina Tervonen publishes valuable extracts, the crown prince, who says despite his kidnapping “ dedicated and grateful” when he arrived in France, ended up “overflowing with cold anger towards this colonial administration whose intention was to cut him off from his origins in order to prevent him from reigning and hindering French interests in the future.
It is this domination that the book tells The hostages. An enslavement which, finally analyzes the journalist, “requires controlling the gaze, limiting its frame, whether it is objects from elsewhere placed in museums to tell of a natural superiority, or young people who are educated up to a certain point and that one authorizes to look only what arouses admiration”.
The Hostages, counter-history of a colonial bootyMarchialy editions, 300 pages, 19 euros.
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