Terre d’ébène (La Traite des Noirs)

A reporter already celebrated for his anticolonial exposés on Argentina, Albert Londres read with keen interest André Gide’s Voyage au Congo, published in 1927, which vigorously denounced French abuses in Equatorial Africa. Londres then set off for four months in Africa, accompanied by an illustrator, Georges Rouquayrol, whose live sketches would illustrate his articles for Le Petit Parisien: a major investigation into the practices of colonists exploiting the “moteur à bananes.” It was published between October and November 1928 under the title “Quatre mois parmi nos Noirs d’Afrique,” before being reissued in book form by Albin Michel.

Albert Londres prefaced the volume with an important statement of principle: “I remain convinced that a journalist is no altar boy, and that his role is not to walk ahead of processions with his hand in a basket of rose petals. Our trade is not to please, nor to harm—it is to put the pen into the wound.”

The wound is that of a damning and virulent account that left readers appalled and provoked furious controversy and violent denials from mining and forestry companies, as well as from the general government of French West Africa (AOF), which dispatched “a counter-offensive in the form of a mission composed of twelve journalists and twelve members of parliament tasked with dismantling his testimony, introduced in Dakar by the Minister of Colonies himself. Little remains of it.” (Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, “Terre d’ébène. La traite des Noirs, un livre d’Albert Londres,” Alarmer, 3 July 2022). Against threats, insults and the lawsuits that were never brought, Londres held firm: “I retract nothing from the account that earned me so many epithets; on the contrary, with a clear conscience, I add to it. This book will bear witness.”

Against those who practice “civilization by groping in the dark,” Londres describes the petty scandals of this vast land, the daily meanness of the colonists, the “trade goods”—obsolete and useless items that France sold to Africans—and an apartheid not yet named as such. He mocks: “Gone are the early enthusiasms, romantic colonization, sought-after risks, the hut in the bush, the conquest of the Negro soul, the little mousso! Now one embarks with one’s wife, children and mother-in-law. It’s the colony in curlers!” But it is not all laughing matter: “In the age of the automobile, a continent is being depopulated because it costs less to use men than machines! This is no longer economics, it is stupidity.”

Londres died tragically on 16 May 1932, in the fire aboard the Georges Philippar in the Gulf of Aden, while returning from a trip to China. His daughter, Florise Martinet-Londres, together with three field journalists who had been his companions, decided to create a prize in his memory: the Prix Albert-Londres, first awarded in 1933, which has honored the best French-language reporters every year since; it is often considered the equivalent of a “Nobel Prize” for journalism, an award that otherwise does not exist.

Rare.

Small stains to the spine of the binding, otherwise a good copy of this important collection.