Féral Benga: African Muse of Modernism

In 1923, at the age of seventeen, François Benga (1906–57) left his native Dakar, Senegal, and traveled with his father to Paris. His father, who treated the young Benga badly, worked for the French colonial administration in Senegal and was educated by Catholic missionaries in France. While on this trip, François ran away and worked odd jobs to make ends meet. In 1925, learning that the Folies Bergère was on the lookout for black dancers, Benga auditioned and was hired. He then adopted the stage name "Féral" (wild, untamed) and within a few years became one of the star attractions of the Parisian music-hall scene. From the mid-1920s into the 1930s, Benga was the "darling" of the international elite dance and performing arts circuit and attracted the attention of some European and American modern artists. The latter group, whose depictions of him are briefly discussed in this essay, include Richmond Barthé, George Platt Lynes, James A. Porter, and Carl Van Vechten.

Féral Benga's body, I argue here, serves as a nexus through which the black Atlantic is revealed as a creative dialogue between white modernists and those of the black diaspora. Benga's role as a dancer and artist's model lays bare the extent to which African and African American artists have played a central, rather than peripheral, role in the formation, as well as the deformation, of modernism and primitivism. Just as important, Benga's corporeality and its visual representation by others brought not only Africa, but also the silence of and blindness to the homoerotic into the orbit of primitivism and modern black Atlantic discourses.¹

In the April 1926 music-hall revue La Folie du Jour (Madness of the Day), amid a jungle décor, Benga was featured as one among other African male dancers dressed in loincloths who pounded the drums while accompanying Josephine Baker, showcased as the character Fatou in her infamous banana dance. Shortly thereafter Benga drew attention to himself when he danced in the revue Tout Pour Joséphine (Everything for Josephine), in which he performed a comic drag homage to Baker, topless and donning a grass skirt. In this revue, Benga starred opposite the French chanteur and actor Dorville (born Georges-Henri Dodane), who in the parody is supposedly extremely near-sighted and mistakenly seduces "a horrible Negro" ("un affreux nègre") instead of the Black Virgin (la Vièrge noire).² This is just one of many examples of music-hall revues that were filled with the crudest primitivist stereotypes designed to entertain white

Unknown, Féral Benga in the revue La Joie Commence, 1935. Photograph, 8 1/2 x 10 1/8 in.

Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France

Lucien Waléry, Tout Pour Joséphine, 1926. Photograph.

Courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France

colonial fantasies of taboo and desire. In this and other performances Benga showcased his talents as a highly accomplished dancer. Known for his physical dexerity, "impish good looks," and "carnal choreography," Benga gained popularity in Paris as the male counterpart to Josephine Baker, with whom he became very close friends and danced with periodically at the Folies-Bergère, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, and the Casino de Paris.³

From the mid-1920s into the 1930s and 1940s, Benga appeared in a barrage of onstage tableaux that included the primitivist revue Sur le plateau de la négresse (On the Tray [Lip] of the Negress), in which he starred alongside the electrifying female Malian dancer Melka Soudani. Clearly, both African performers were complicit in "primitivist excesses" of the period and "gravitated unapologetically towards primitivism as an affirmative racial discourse."⁴ For many black artists and performers in the United States and abroad, primitivism was a distinctive and valuable trait associated with blacks that "constituted an auspicious new trend in white thinking."⁵ In addition, primitivism's embrace became a symbol of black investment in modernity. Perhaps most important, primitivism created...