The Fetish of Textuality: David Boilat’s Notebooks and the Making of a Literary Past

This chapter sketches the beginnings of literary modernity in Senegal through an analysis of a remarkable nineteenth-century collection of textual artifacts.This collection includes a multilingual corpus of poetry, calligraphy, folktales, and songs, as well as the textual components of several leather-bound protective amulets that for centuries Europeans called “fetishes.” The collection was assembled by David Boilat, a mixed-race priest, who pasted his findings into the pages of a notebook before sending them to anthropologists in Paris. Boilat’s notebook reframes the residues of many different textual practices and performance genres as texts that can be quotable, transportable, and readable in new ways. This subsumes collected artifacts into a new textual order, founded on the principle of readability. Nearly a century later, a young Léopold Senghor would incorporate some of Boilat’s collections into an early anthology of African writing in French, thereby consecrating them as literature.