1/Black Europeans You Should Know: Battling Siki, Being African Under The French Colonial Rule And During Josephine Baker's Golden Era
Battling Siki Or The Eternal Tale Of Double Standard Between Africans and Black Americans
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Black Europeans You Should Know is a series in which I introduce you to Black figures who made history in Europe and/or their homeland. Each instalment will be behind a paywall, so to read the entire first-ever story of Black Europeans You Should Know, I invite you to subscribe below or upgrade your subscription to a paid one. A monthly subscription is 6 €, and a yearly one is 48 €.
This story is long overdue. In November 2023, when I started ideating Black Europeans You Should Know, I initially thought about writing only about Josephine Baker. Then, I remembered my research on a man called Battling Siki.
However, before telling you more about him, I wanted to give you some context about the Paris Josephine Baker landed in in 1925. The dancer and singer arrived in the French capital when it was thriving culturally. Think about Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, depicting the writer’s first years in Paris during the Roaring Twenties, or Montmartre and Montparnasse neighbourhoods becoming the place-to-be for writers and artists like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Modigliani, Chagall, and many others. It was also a period in which artistic and cultural movements flourished, such as cubism, Arts Déco, dadaism, and surrealism.
And rightly because it was such an intellectually and artistically prosperous period, I had to mention Senegalese Léopold Sédar Senghor, Guyanese Léon-Gontran Damas, and the Martiniquans Aimé Césaire and the Nardal sisters, as these figures contributed to building culture around Black diasporas; they created Négritude, a literary and political movement through which intellectuals fought against colonialism.
Founded by René Maran, Léo Sajous, and the sisters Paulette and Jane Nardal, La Revue du Monde Noir was a publication where Négritude culminated thanks to essays, stories, poems, and articles articulated around the themes of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and reflections around Black identities throughout the diaspora. Interestingly, in 1928, Jane Nardal wrote in the periodical an essay entitled Josephine Baker, the Bal Nègre, and the State of Black Musical Expression in Paris:
For years now, all of Paris has crazed itself over black culture. The bourgeois French woman exudes the exotic appeal of Africa by draping herself in leopard skins, the well-to-do white man imagines himself accessing the “primitive” depths of his nature as he boogies to the late-night croonings of a jazz band, the up-and-coming artist is considered behind the times if she fails to reference the masks of Gabon on display at the latest ethnographic exhibition in her newest painting.
An unsuspecting observer of this phenomenon might claim that white Parisians are celebrating black culture. But, in fact, this fascination with all things “African” is an insult to blacks of all cultural and national backgrounds because it naively asserts the sameness of all blacks everywhere.
[…]
What is most damaging is the compliance that some black artists of today show in regards to white stereotypes of black culture. Such affirmation of the misguided imaginings of white audiences serves to encourage whites to continue on their path of ignorance and insult. Josephine Baker is a prime example of this submission to white fantasy: “she plays into the fantasy that whites create for her,” and seems “happy to sing ‘Bake that Chicken Pie’ despite its racial slurs; to accept a gift of a monkey and a leopard as her pet companions; and to present herself as a Tahitian, if that [is] what her public desire[s].” In short, “Josephine Baker’s performance in La Revue Nègre reinforce[s] stereotypes of blacks.”
The very title of Baker’s showcase in La Revue Nègre instantly puts the white audience member at home in her or his limited view of Africa as a continent filled with primitive people: the “Danse Sauvage,” it is called. Baker’s dress–or lack thereof–contributes to this stereotype of backwardness. Baker’s blackness and nudity are experienced concurrently with the label of “savage,” leading the audience to believe that both of these elements in and of themselves denote inhumanity. Of course, Baker has no hope of presenting a truly authentic African experience for the audience: she herself was born and raised in the United States. The jazz-based music that accompanies the Revue reveals the show’s American origins, but at the same time provides yet another opportunity for the audience to associate disparate black traditions as being one.
Besides the fact that Jane Nardal is denouncing here a major case of negrophilia, I shared this essay because, despite a plethora of books, articles, documentaries, and podcasts about Josephine Baker, few well-known sources discuss the African and Caribbean people's presence in France at the time, which makes finding out about their living conditions or rights in France or the colonies difficult. If there is context, it is given through the spaces that Josephine Baker navigated, which were mainly white.
Mentions of her achievements as a performer and a spy for France during WWII are plentiful, whereas criticism of her work as a performer by Black people in France and its colonies is rare. That is why Jane Nardal’s testimony feels refreshing and eye-opening about what a Caribbean or an African person could think of Josephine Baker at the time.
Furthermore, it is interesting to observe that the entertainer was as controversial for her contemporaries as for Black French people today. It is no wonder, then, that French journalist, podcaster, and activist Rokhaya Diallo penned an article for The Washington Post in reaction to President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to have Josephine Baker enter the Pantheon:
Baker’s story is often used in France to push forward the myth of a republic that is supposedly more welcoming to Black people than the United States is. Indeed, throughout the 20th century, France has built this narrative by welcoming many African American artists, including Sidney Bechet, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Nina Simone and others who could not stand oppression in the United States anymore.
It was convenient to welcome those who did not have a historic argument to settle with France. Yet, during this time, France was a violent colonial power. As Baker was dancing on Parisian stages, France was still exhibiting colonized populations in “human zoos.”
Baker made France look good. Though her heroism is incontestable, she always expressed gratitude to France and never criticized its colonialism.
Isn’t it fascinating to note that despite a 96-year gap between Jane Nardal’s essay for La Revue du Monde Noir and Rokhaya Diallo’s article for The Washington Post, Josephine Baker is still the Black figure that makes France feel great about itself when it comes to its relationship with Blackness?
And it is no wonder she is still positively perceived in the French system and culture today. In 1963, just before Martin Luther King gave his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech during the march on Washington, it is dressed in her Résistance uniform that Josephine Baker told in front of a crowd of 250 000 people:
When I was a child and they burned me out of my home, I was frightened and I ran away. Eventually I ran far away. It was to a place called France. Many of you have been there, and many have not. But I must tell you, ladies and gentlemen, in that country I never feared. It was like a fairyland place.
[…]
But I must tell you, when I was young in Paris, strange things happened to me. And these things had never happened to me before. When I left St. Louis a long time ago, the conductor directed me to the last car. And you all know what that means.
But when I ran away, yes, when I ran away to another country, I didn’t have to do that. I could go into any restaurant I wanted to, and I could drink water anyplace I wanted to, and I didn’t have to go to a colored toilet either, and I have to tell you it was nice, and I got used to it, and I liked it, and I wasn’t afraid anymore that someone would shout at me and say, “Nigger, go to the end of the line.” But you know, I rarely ever used that word. You also know that it has been shouted at me many times.
What a better ambassador for France, and the idea that it has always been the nation of the Rights of Man and The Citizen than Josephine Baker after reading these words. She made it feel like France was a fairyland, which it really was for her, as a Black woman born under the Jim Crow laws in the United States of America. Of course, being in a country where you were allowed everywhere you were refused in your home country would make you feel free, liberated, respected, and above all, human. Yet, meanwhile, she was saying these words: France had just finished fighting a gruesome war against Algeria (and other African ex-colonies) - one of the biggest scars in French colonial history along with Indochina.
What is striking about Josephine Baker throughout the 20s and the 60s in France is that she didn’t seem to have any connection with the Black French-speaking people there. Indeed, when she made her speech in 1963, she never referred to Black people in France or the colonies. Instead, she focused on her personal experience as a Black American woman, which is valid and fair yet flawed, especially when she lived in France when it was a colonial empire.
It doesn’t mean she was oblivious to the racial dynamic existing in France—quite the opposite.
In a brilliant piece for Lit Hub, poet, dancer, and archivist Harmony Holiday recalls a 1973 conversation between James Baldwin and Josephine Baker commissioned by Time magazine to a young Henry Louis Gates. Jr that should have been part of a series of interviews about the Black American expatriate life experience. Yes, “should have” because the piece, as explained by Harmony Holiday, was quickly killed as “Time claimed to have rejected Gates’s account of this conversation because its subjects weren’t relevant enough for the pages of their elevated gossip columns in that specific year; but what they really rejected was this glimpse of Black Americans existing outside of the fame-makers’ imaginations. Time refused to spread that rumour and give it more momentum. America resents the Black people who get away, from W.E.B. DuBois to Paul Robeson, from Jimmy to Josephine, always attempting to make a scandal of the pursuit of sanity and self-knowledge that’s really at the centre of exile.”
Reading Holiday’s words confirms even more that Europe, and especially France, is a place where some Black Americans found solace as they lived in a system that wasn’t built to oppress them. And rightly because Josephine Baker wasn’t one of the subjects of the French colonial empire, she could “[critique] her white audiences in France, not pandering to them, by the way she discusse[d] them in private. When she [took] to the stage, eyes splayed in a pretend bulge, ass kissing a skirted bunch of bananas barely covering it, she [was] showing whites their callow understanding of Blackness, laughing at them. She use[d] them to abdicate that image by serving it back to them, their ridiculous Black fantasies.”
As a French-Cameroonian, I struggle with this idea of Josephine Baker being subversive and mocking her white audiences. I am sceptical about the impact of her “danse sauvage” when she so famously sang J’ai deux amours (I have two loves), a song written for her, which was about the desire to leave one's home country for Paris the Beautiful, Paris the Great, Paris the Mesmerizing. Not Paris and France, a city and a country oppressing Black Africans and Caribbeans.
Maybe mocking her white audiences by ‘giving them Africa’ was her best weapon against the racism she observed in France at the time. Yet, the seeming lack of contact with the French-speaking Black diasporas makes the mockery much less impactful.
As the Frenchest of Black Americans quickly rose to stardom after she arrived in Paris in 1925, the same year, Battling Siki - the first African to become the boxing World light heavyweight champion - died assassinated in the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, New York, USA, the native country of Josephine Baker.
I could have chosen to talk about the Nardal sisters1 - which I’ll do at some point - but I preferred introducing you to Battling Siki because his life is in total contrast with Josephine Baker’s. And as uncanny as it is, he was born, like Josephine Baker, in Saint-Louis, except his Saint-Louis was in Senegal, Africa, not Missouri, US. Weird reasoning; I hear you. However, it was interesting to observe that if Josephine's St.Louis was ripe with segregation, racism, and poverty, Siki’s Saint-Louis was made to look like one of the jewels of West Africa and the French colonial empire.
Considered the first city Europeans built in West Africa and the first permanent French settlement in Senegal, Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal was founded in 1659 and took its name after King Louis IX, also known as Saint Louis. The city was a neuralgic point for the ivory, beeswax, hides, ambergris, and slave trade. Thus, Saint-Louis quickly became an essential economic, social, and cultural centre in Senegal. During the French Revolution, its inhabitants became citizens. It became a French commune in 1872 and the capital of French West African colonies from 1895 to 1902.
FOR THE MOST CURIOUS: SAINT-LOUIS THROUGH THE LENS OF MAMA CASSET OR WHEN FASHION REFLECTS SOCIETY
You might have heard of Malian and Ghanaian photographers Malick Sidibé (1936-2016) and James Barnor2 (1929), who captured the excitement of their respective countries right before and after their independence. Saint-Louis photographer Mama Casset (1908-1992) is one of the most prominent African photographers. Yet, his work is less known, probably because many of his pictures disappeared in a fire that destroyed his studio in 1982. Nonetheless, the images left from his work are a marvellous testimony of Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal opulence. Mama Casset’s portraits of Saint-Louis’s middle class are not fashion or documentary images. Yet, they provide a very clear idea of why Saint-Louis was considered the jewel of West Africa within the French colonial empire.
Below are some of Mama Casset’s portraits of Saint-Louisiennes throughout the 50s and 60s that attest to this city’s influence in the French colonial empire.
In contrast to other French colonies, people born in a commune were citizens, not subjects; therefore, they could vote, present themselves as candidates in local elections, and have a representative in the Chamber of Deputies. Hence why, Battling Siki, born in 1897, was a French citizen.
Unlike Josephine Baker, who ran away from her native St.Louis, Missouri, Battling Siki’s story - whose real name was Amadou Louis Mbarick Fall - of leaving Saint-Louis-du-Sénégal has something very romanticizing about it.
Like all little saint-louisiens did when a boat was in sight, a young Battling Siki jumped from a cliff to get the coins passengers threw to him and his friends. The story says a Dutch dancer noticed the future champion and brought her to Marseille when he was just an 8-year-old boy. Nothing attests to his parents giving him their blessing to go; all we know about them is that, unlike Mama Casset’s opulent subjects, Amadou Louis Mbarick Fall’s family were modest fishers.
Once in Marseille, it seems the Dutch dancer abandoned the young boy who had to fend for himself, finding odd jobs here and there. We are then catapulted to a 14-year-old Battling Siki working as a busboy in Nice, the age when his boxing talent was discovered after he knocked out an unruly drunk client. He trained in a gym where he was a cleaner, and from 1912 to 1914, he participated in 16 bouts, won eight of them, and got six draws and two losses before joining the 8th Colonial Infantry Regiment during WWI.
At the time, there weren’t many African soldiers in the French army, for the government was afraid it could give colonised men ideas to rebel, so unlike during WWII, when they were called massively, African soldiers needed to enrol to be part of the Colonial Infantry Regiment. So, it must be noted that Amadou Louis Mbarick Fall not only chose to become a soldier in the French army but did so underage! His choice to volunteer was probably motivated by laws that prevented many Africans in France from accessing certain professions.
After fighting in Gallipoli and at the Battle of the Somme, he received the Croix de Guerre, the Médaille Militaire - two military decorations for his heroic part in the war - and above all, he came back with lungs scarred from the effects of mustard gas and shrapnel in the legs. Yet, between 1919 and 1922, he won 43 bouts out of 46.
1922 was a decisive year and, unfortunately, the beginning of the end for Battling Siki. His manager arranged a bout between him and George Carpentier - the first French professional boxer to become World champion. This boxing match marked the return of “The Orchid Man” - George Carpentier’s moniker - to the ring. He was one of the first boxers to reach celebrity status in France and internationally as he starred in movies and befriended Hollywood stars. In fact, this encounter was meant to promote one of his movies.
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