In Phantom Africa (1934), the logbook of the Dakar-Djibouti scientific mission led by France in Africa between 1931 and 1933, writer Michel Leiris expressed his bitterness at having participated in what he described as a sacrilege, a full-fledged raid under the guise of science. Behind the "urgency to safeguard the traces of cultures disappearing upon contact with colonizers and the modern world," according to ethnologist Marcel Griaule, who led the expedition, all means were justified to extort the 3,200 objects methodically sent at each stage to the Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro, ancestor of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris.

The loot is now housed at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, which is partially exhibiting it to the public starting April 15 - this time, with a unique approach: the objects have been reexamined by African specialists. In 2020, the Parisian establishment decided to launch a "counter-investigation," just as writer Kamel Daoud did in The Mersault Investigation (2013), a novel that provides a name, an identity and nearly a voice to the Arab killed in Camus' The Stranger (1942).

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