Michel Leiris: Race, Poetry, Politics: Rereading the Mission Lucas

In 1945 Michel Leiris made a three-month trip to Africa as part of a delegation of specialists under the direction of A.-J. Lucas, the French “inspecteur des colonies.” This, Leiris’s second official trip to Sub-Saharan Africa, was very different from the previous, and best-known of Leiris’s African voyages, the expansive “Mission Dakar-Djibouti” of 1931-33. The earlier voyage was a scientific expedition that sought information on African religious and social life: its inquiries privileged African societies that had had the least contact with the West. During the “Mission Dakar-Djibouti” Leiris produced his provocative ethnographic journal L’Afrique fantôme, at times strongly critical of colonialists and colonial administration. The “Mission Lucas,” on the other hand, came about as a result of postwar French colonial reforms. It took place during a political impetus toward reform that occurred between 1944-46, as France attempted to curb the worst colonial abuses. ¹ The Lucas delegates were charged with investigating labor problems in Côte d’Ivoire, where various forms of forced labor “recrutement” for private enterprise continued unofficially. In public enterprise and the military, forced labor was still legal, and the harsh working conditions and low wages in Côte d’Ivoire produced a mass exodus to the English-controlled Gold Coast, which offered relative freedom and higher wages. ² The Lucas mission was to provide recommendations for the retention of African workers in Côte d’Ivoire as the formal abolition of forced labor was put into effect.