Mediated encounter with the African other: From seeing to hearing

For centuries, Europeans’ encounter with Africa and Africans was mediated through written or visual representations produced exclusively by Europeans and for Europeans. These representations were marked by their stability across historical periods and similarities across geographical spaces. Although stereotypical representations existed prior to the Renaissance (Cohen Reference Cohen1980), the arrival of sub-Saharan African slaves in Portugal from 1440 onwards and for the next 150 years drastically impacted perceptions of Blacks, which included equating ‘black skin with inferior legal status’ (Lowe Reference Lowe, Earle and Lowe2005:23). The image of the carefree ‘laughing black’ exploited in many advertising campaigns centuries later (see below) dates from that time. The slaves’ alleged happiness and carefree nature—‘the slaves are always happy they do nothing but laugh’ (Oliveira Marques 1578–80, cited by Lowe Reference Lowe, Earle and Lowe2005:10)—were framed as indexing Africans’ lack of civilization and as ratifying their putative intrinsic nature as slaves (see also Hall Reference Hall and Hall1997).

Instead of producing a counternarrative to the long-established circulating body of stereotypical discourses, France's nineteenth-century expansionism in Africa reinforced them with allegedly new scientific arguments (Boëtsch Reference Boëtsch, Blanchard and Lemaire2003). Nineteenth-century Parisian expositions meant to increase French people's awareness of the colonies became powerful sites of production and circulation of degrading representations of Africans, reaching a much broader audience than the visual and written discourse produced earlier (Bancel, Blanchard, Boëtsch, Deroo, & Lemaire Reference Bancel, Blanchard, Boëtsch, Deroo and Lemaire2002).

Finally, the development of First Age mass culture in the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new regime of cultural consumption that triggered drastic changes in ways of writing and reading. These included the increasing role of images in printed materials and new genres such as the presse illustrée and children's comic books. After seeing Africans (or at least a representation of them), French people heard them in literary and nonfiction work. While the rise of mass culture inaugurated the reign of public opinion (Kalifa Reference Kalifa2001), this new regime of figuration helped fix and naturalize ideological linguistic representations of Africans allegedly speaking ‘butchered French’. In printed materials from the early 1900s onwards, authors resorted to a fabricated nonstandard oral French variety to animate (Goffman Reference Goffman1981) new fictionalized African characters. Their use of a limited set of linguistic features tends to project a unified and therefore immediately identifiable ‘African way of speaking (bad) French’, naturalizing and materializing it as a reality. Moreover, their lack of a full-fledged linguistic repertoire added to their role as submissive, deceitful, and childish characters (viz. servants, soldiers, nannies), indexing their intrinsic subalternity (Delisle Reference Delisle2008). In other words, African fictionalized characters became the modern version of long-standing written and visual depictions in circulation for centuries.

The mass production and consumption of written materials led quickly to the emergence and circulation of a conventionalized African (i.e. ‘bad’) French variety ready-to-use in fast-produced written material and easily recognizable, understood, and remembered by poorly educated and inexperienced readers. As argued by Seillan (Reference Seillan2006:18) regarding reading practices in the nineteenth century, ‘very early, the reader wants to find what he thinks he knows, thus what he already knows’.Footnote ² The pleasure of reading was therefore derived not from the discovery of the unknown but from the iteration of the known. These typifying linguistic features helped create an African linguistic figure still pervasive in French people's imagination.

Linguistic ideology: From nation- to empire-building

From a historical point of view, the emergence of mass culture in Europe was contemporary with France's (and other European nations’) imperial expansion in Africa. Written materials such as newspapers, popular novels, posters, and so on became the main vehicles for justifying and popularizing France's colonial venture, which initially triggered little interest and enthusiasm from the French population. While France's nineteenth-century expansionism in Africa aimed to counteract the growing influence of its imperial rival, England, and to find new commercial outlets, it was also inseparable from its emergence as a modern State. Its Empire helped France define itself politically and culturally (Costantini Reference Costantini2008).

At the heart of France's nineteenth-century colonial discourse was the mission civilisatrice ‘civilizing mission’, which overlapped with Republican universalism. France's imperial expansionism was articulated as a political and moral act whereby ‘backward’ African and Indochinese populations would be saved from barbarianism and primitivism. Colonization was therefore an instrument for spreading the ‘enlightenments’ of French civilization, a ‘duty’ to humanity: ‘Colonization is legitimate when the people who colonize bring with them a treasure of ideas and opinions that will enrich other peoples; henceforth colonization is not a right, it is a duty’ (Ligue des Droits de L'homme 1931, cited by Costantini Reference Costantini2008:89). This belief rested, of course, on the idea that humanity was divided along an evolutionary axis on which Africa and France represented the opposite extremes.

France's colonial venture was based on the notion of assimilation, whereby indigenous populations would give up their customs, religious beliefs, and languages to conform to the Republican idea of the nation as one and indivisible. Note that one century earlier similar coercive policies had been implemented in the newly founded Republic (1789) to eradicate linguistic diversity. The eradication of the ‘unintelligible’ and ‘backward’ varieties called patois was the outcome of a series of legislative stipulations often accompanied by physical and symbolic violence exerted on the resistant and therefore presumably antirevolutionary citizens. France epitomizes what Silverstein (Reference Silverstein, Brenneis and Macaulay1996) calls the ‘culture of monoglot standardization’, not only with language policies that disfavored usage of languages other than French but with its intolerance of internal variation in French within and outside its Hexagonal boundaries. I argue below that France's centripetal language ideology has partly shaped French people's current representations of Africans as incompetent speakers of French.

France's mission civilisatrice was strongly imbued with language ideologies inherited from the seventeenth century that shaped the myth of French genius (Dauzat Reference Dauzat1954; Meschonnic Reference Meschonnic1997). The latter was attributed to the ‘clarity’ of the language, which led Count of Rivarol (1784/1991:39) to conclude: ‘what is not clear is not French’. The myth of French's genius was also inscribed ‘in a conquering linguistic nationalism’ (Rey, Duval, & Siouffi Reference Rey, Duval and Siouffi2007:703). The fact that French spread transnationally, owing to France's aggressive expansionist politics in Europe and its colonial enterprise in North America, was interpreted as reflecting its ‘perfection’ as a language (Vigouroux Reference Vigouroux2013). One can safely argue that in the late nineteenth century, the discourse on Africans’ alleged inability to speak ‘proper French’ not only ratified the exceptional character of the language as sophisticated and ‘undoubtedly one of the most complicated in the world’ (Delafosse Reference Delafosse1904:264) but also justified the cultural and racial ordering that colonization assumed.

Petit nègre as ‘cultural avatar’Footnote ³

France's nineteenth-century colonial expansion was made possible partly by the recruitment of local African soldiers, called tirailleurs sénégalais ‘Senegalese infantry’, who engaged in wars and occupations of territories. Despite their name, the tirailleurs sénégalais never consisted of a homogeneous body; the regiment included individuals from different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds recruited from different colonies in order to meet changing needs on the ground.

As ethnic and linguistic diversity kept increasing with new recruits, the French military authorities encouraged the shift from Bambara to French as the language of instruction and communication in the colonial army (Van den Avenne Reference Van den Avenne2012). This language shift was framed as epitomizing France's mission civilisatrice: ‘The organization of black troops is the regenerated African civilization, it is the crowning of our endeavor’ (Mangin Reference Mangin1910:350). Colonial troops were then perceived as one of the privileged sites for spreading French and by extension French Republican civilization. The teaching of French in the army drew upon the Tower of Babel ideology, according to which multilingualism impedes effective communication and favors divisions. Based also on the strong correlation between language and belongingness, African soldiers’ acquisition of French was considered a way of building up their loyalty toward the metropole.

As shown in the previous section, similar arguments had been used in the post-French Revolution years to justify the imposition of French over other regional languages. In post-Revolution France the spread of French was meant to form new citizens by liberating them from their position as subjects of the monarchic power. In the colonies and the colonial army, the imposition of French was meant to form the subjects of the new imperial power.

The existence of a contact language that emerged from the encounters between French colonists and Black Africans was first mentioned in 1904 in Maurice Delafosse's book Vocabulaires comparatifs de plus de 60 langues ou dialectes parlés à la Côte d′Ivoire et dans les régions limitrophes ‘Comparative vocabularies of over 60 languages or dialects spoken in Ivory Coast and neighboring regions’. The language called Petit Nègre (lit. ‘small Negro’) appears at the end of the volume, in the section Langues étrangères ‘foreign languages’, along with Hausa, Pular, Arabic, and Pidgin English. Petit Nègre and Pidgin English are lumped together as patois des langues européeennes ‘Patois of European languages’. The entextualization of linguistic forms into this lexicon was part of the Africanist tradition of recording languages in order to map a territory and, more importantly, its people (Irvine Reference Irvine1993; Blommaert Reference Blommaert2008).

Imbued with European nationalism, this ‘textualization enterprise’ came with the essentializing work of associating specific people with relevant languages (e.g. if people speak Igbo, therefore there must be an ethnic group called Igbo), creating new ethnic groups (Harries Reference Harries1988; Errington Reference Errington2008). Moreover, this inscription of Petit Nègre into the regimented textual genre of grammars and lexicons ratified its existence as a reportedly authentic variety. As I argue below, it thus contributed to the erasure of its fabricated character, especially since Delafosse's status as a linguist gave credit to his analysis, at least for some.

Allegedly spoken by indigenous domestics and soldiers, Petit Nègre was compared to Pidgin English based on the European origin of both language varieties, respectively French and English, and, on their putative nonintelligibility by the native speakers of their lexifiers. One may wonder why Delafosse preferred to name it Petit Nègre instead of Pidgin Français, which would have been more consistent with the comparison he established with English pidgins. Unlike Pidgin English, the category Petit Nègre does not refer to a named language (viz. French); it iconizes a people (as Petit Nègre is spoken by Black Africans) and more importantly indexes a state of subjection and the assumed inferiority of its racialized speakers.Footnote ⁴ Delafosse (Reference Delafosse1904:264) continues his description by highlighting the simplicity of Petit Nègre, which he contrasts with French.

As argued above, the characterization of African languages as simple and unsophisticated helped shape the putative refined character of French. Linguistic and political ideologies shaped the earlier descriptions of African languages as the latter shaped the ideology of French's linguistic superiority. This hypothesis prompts us to examine how colonies helped construct the image of the metropole and not just the other way around (Said Reference Said1977).

Although we lack ethnographic accounts of interactions between African infantry who did not share a common language, many factors suggest that Petit Nègre (also known as Français Tirailleur) was more a fabricated written variety than an oral variety that has never been spoken. This is not to deny the normal indigenization of French in Africa as elsewhere outside Francophone Europe. While for the majority of French readers of that time, iconographic and written representations mediated their only relationships with Africa and Africans, for others they preconstructed their ‘encounter’ with them, as in the case of French officers sent to work with African recruits.

In 1916, an anonymous communication course book catering to French officers sent to the colonies was released containing recommendations for specific linguistic structures and examples of ready-made military orders. Indeed, based on the assumption that intellectual limitations prevented Africans from learning French competently, the army decided to teach French officers the artificially concocted variety of Petit Nègre rather than teaching ‘real’ French to the African recruits.

The stated aim of the thirty-five-page book titled Le français tel que le parlent nos tirailleurs sénégalais ‘French as spoken by our Senegalese infantry’ is to ease officers’ communication with their soldiers and to enable them to be understood promptly. It opens with preliminaries that present the language Petit Nègre as a code that earlier tirailleurs had allegedly developed during their contacts with their European instructors (Anonymous 1916:5). More importantly it has fixed rules, which justifies the very undertaking of the grammatical description. The rest of the book is divided into two parts. The first part, with its descriptive grammatical rules, uses expert categories such as ‘possessive or demonstrative adjectives’, ‘personal pronouns’, and ‘numerals’. The second part is a language-in-use section with common French military orders translated into Petit Nègre, along with short meta-comments on vocabulary or structure.

Besides being counter-productive in a military context, where clear communication could truly be a matter of life and death, this ‘codified artifactualisation’ (Blommaert Reference Blommaert2008) reflects a conception of language as learnable chunks of decontextualized words and fixed structural units. One of the guiding principles of the book is to always favor ‘simple’ structures in order to conform to the alleged simplicity of what is lumped together as ‘the primitive dialects of our Western Africa’ (Anonymous 1916:5). Based on this principle, gender distinctions for nouns referring to inanimate entities should be ignored while nouns for animates should be constructed on the model of masculine form + femme ‘female’, so that chienne ‘female dog’ became chien-femme (lit. ‘dog female’) (Anonymous 1916:8). Verbs were to always be used in the infinitive form preceded by an emphatic pronoun, as in moi partir (lit. ‘me go’) or lui manger ‘him eat’; prepositions are proscribed as well as synonyms, because they are likely to ‘confuse the Native’ (Anonymous 1916:17). Articles should also be omitted as Senegalese infantry are said to fuse them with the noun they relate to, as in mon latête (lit. ‘my the-head’). Sentences are to follow the subject-verb-predicate structure. The putative simplicity of ‘African languages’ claimed by the course book is based on what Mufwene (Reference Mufwene1989) characterizes as analytical hypermetropia, inaccurate comparisons that overlook similarities between target and source linguistic systems. Ironically, most of the alleged simplified structures presented in the book appear to be cognitively harder to process than their native versions as in: Ces dix bons tirailleurs sont partis ‘These ten good tirailleurs are gone’ translated into Ça tirailleurs dix y en a bons, y a partis ‘That tirailleurs ten there-be good there-be gone’; le bon tirailleur obéit toujours ‘The good tirailleur always obeys’ translated into Tirailleur y a bon lui obéit toujours ‘Tirailleurs there-be good him obey always’. Moreover, the suggested structures run contrary to one of the book's key instructions of using as few words as possible.

There is no evidence of an African language or any naturally evolved pidgin that operates with such grammatical rules. The tirailleurs must have found the structures used to address them more confusing than those of natural French itself. The variety produced in the textbook is disconnected from the interactional ecology it is presumably associated with. It no longer indexes conditions of acquisition with very limited and regular inputs of the native variety of the language; rather, it allegedly indexes the speakers and their incompetence.

The course book presented as a written formalized inscription is actually an ideological projection, which suggests that Français Tirailleur should be interpreted as a metadiscursive account of French standardized grammar rather than as a variety really spoken by Africans. Moreover, the course book illustrates the strong influence played at that time by written representations of languages, which constructed orality as an impoverished version of the written text.

In the military course book, just like in literary and nonliterary work published around the same time or afterwards, part of the ideological work performed on Petit Nègre is evident from how it is written. For instance, nonstandard spelling is generally used to animate the tirailleurs’ words and index their nonnative French accent, as in the examples below.

1. (1)

   1. a. y en a cartouchi canon

      lit. ‘there is cartridge canon’  (Anonymous 1916:10)

   2. b. Une, deux ! Une deux ! Gardavou ! Baïonnetocanon ! Demitouradroite !

      ‘One, two! One, two! Attention! Fix bayonet! Right face!’ (Couturier Reference Couturier1920:10)

The epenthetic vowel [i] (cartouchi < cartouche) in (1a) reflects the stereotype according to which words in sub-Saharan African languages end only with an open syllable, that is, with a final vowel. In (1b), the spelling is not standard (< garde à vous; baïonnette au canon; demi tour à droite), even though the pronunciation it supposedly reflects is.

Since Ochs's (Reference Ochs, Ochs and Schieffelin1979) seminal paper on the methodological and theoretical implications of the activity of transcription, scholars have called attention to the underlying ideology in the inscription of oral speech, whether by language experts such as linguists or by other institutional actors (see Vigouroux Reference Vigouroux2009 for references). The transformation of oral speech into a written form always runs the risk of constructing a prejudicial image of the speaker and their language variety, even when using standard spelling. It is particularly true when access to a given variety is exclusively mediated by printing material, as in the case of tirailleurs and more generally Africans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Moreover, when inserted into a standard written text, the nonstandard spelling and therefore the status and value of the variety it allegedly captures are assessed in relation to the linguistic environment. Indeed, reading is a socializing process by which readers acquire knowledge of what a legitimate written text is or is supposed to be like. Therefore, when exposed to Petit Nègre in fictional and nonfictional work, the reader was likely to construct it as ‘bad French’; likewise, its speaker was constructed as incompetent. As amply illustrated in the literature, the same tends to apply to any nonstandard oral speech transformed into written material. This has to do with the fact that, in a literate society, speakers’ ideology of ‘good language’ is strongly shaped by the written representation of the latter. Yet, as illustrated by the Taubira case at the opening of the article, when strong prejudices exist about certain kinds of people, their linguistic competence will be devalued independently of how they actually speak. As a matter of fact, Minister of Justice Taubira is a very eloquent speaker of standard French by any objective measure.

Modern written or oral representations of an alleged ‘African way of speaking French’ often resort to structures similar to those associated with Petit Nègre in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century popular literature and nonfiction work (Vigouroux Reference Vigouroux, Stroud and Prinsloo2015a). This would again credit the hypothesis of français tirailleur as an ‘ideological written variety’ (Houis Reference Houis1984) produced intertextually by a collective imagination.

As illustrated in the next section, advertising campaigns capitalized on and fed this collective ideological framing of Africans and their state of linguistic subalternity. Moreover, they contributed to spreading the latter's social and linguistic typification to an audience wider than the readers of penny literature or army officers presented above. The Banania advertising, to which we turn now, helped popularize not only the figure of the Senegalese soldier in French people's popular imagination but also the linguistic feature y'a bon, with which it became intrinsically associated.

The y'a bon Banania event

France's nineteenth-century expansion in West Africa brought new forms of consumption to an urban working class emerging from the development of industrialization. Chocolate, an expensive commodity initially consumed by a small privileged elite, became affordable to the new urban working class in the form of bars and powder. ‘As a metaphor for the Self and a stereotype of the Other, chocolate serves as a window onto the continuities and tensions in French culture and thought concerning alterity, primitivism/exoticism, racism, gender, class’ (Terrio Reference Terrio2000:239).

In 1915 an advertising campaign for the chocolate powder Banania was launched with the image of a sitting cheerful Senegalese soldier, sporting a big smile while spooning out a cup of chocolate. The tirailleur image was chosen to embody both France's patriotism and colonial grandeur at a time when French troops were suffering heavy losses in the war against Germany. Close to 200,000 African soldiers were enlisted during WWI to come to the rescue of French soldiers. During that time, the image of the Senegalese soldier was exploited in aggressive advertising campaigns (i.e. postcards, posters, movies, photographs, artifacts) to stimulate French natives’ patriotism and encourage them to enroll in the army. As Deroo (Reference Deroo, Blanchard and Lemaire2003:114) argues: ‘The tirailleur is used to convince the nation of its resources to defeat and more importantly stigmatize the Germans: [considered as] barbarians, even more savage than those one [France] opposes to them (i.e. the Senegalese tirailleurs)’.

Despite the positive images associated with the tirailleurs, French people's ambivalence toward them is nonetheless evident. On the one hand, celebrated for their military exploits, they were also feared for their cruelty and savagery. On the other hand, portrayed as childish and naïve, they were also demonized for being sexual predators (Bloom Reference Bloom2008). The inscription y'a bon that accompanied the image of the tirailleur carefully directed the attention of the targeted customers, children and their parents, to the unthreatening image of a relaxing soldier producing a child-like exclamation of satisfaction thanks to their brand of chocolate. It also capitalized on the French people's negative stereotype of the tirailleurs’ way of speaking French. This strategy was facilitated by the fact that children, targeted in this advertising campaign, had already been exposed to instances of Petit Nègre. For instance, by 1909 Louis Forton's highly popular comic book series Les Pieds nickelés displays short sequences of this fabricated variety. In Les Pieds nickelés s'en vont en guerre ‘The Pieds nickelés go to war’ published in 1915, the exclamation y a pas bon is uttered by one of the tirailleur characters. (See Costantino Reference Costantino2011 on the use of Petit Nègre in comic books.)

The comic book Tintin au Congo ‘Tintin in the Congo’ published in 1930 has come to epitomize in the modern popular French imagination what the author of the volume, Hergé, called the y'a bon banania style (Sadoul Reference Sadoul2000:73), although, as I have shown, it was just one instance of a long textual chain of linguistic and cultural stereotypes in circulation in several literary genres. In the Congo episode, Tintin discovers Africa, which is pictured as wild and terrifying, inhabited by dangerous animals and bare-chested belligerent people wearing raffia skirts and sporting protuberant lips. The French variety animated by African people differs strikingly from Tintin's and his dog's polished French, which is closer to a written than an oral variety. The nonnative linguistic features of Hergé’s African characters are the same as those displayed in the 1916 course book mentioned above. Although he acknowledged how ‘utterly conventional and unfaithful to reality’ his linguistic rendition of Africans were, Hergé still wondered in a 1971 interview “how… to make these black people sound like black people?” (Sadoul Reference Sadoul2000:73). This comment illustrates the process of ‘iconization’ (Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000) whereby linguistic features are linked to and appear to resemble the social image of the speakers themselves (‘sound like black people’).

Although the Banania advertisement was revamped a few times over the years, the slogan y'a bon was not abandoned until 2005, when the company was accused of racism. Worth noting is that the rice pudding brand Yabon created in 1963 by Banania is still in circulation, with no pending prosecution.

The image of the tirailleur, which disappeared from the Banania boxes in the late 1960s entered new networks of circulation and consumption, as it was commoditized in the form of artifacts. Thanks to aggressive marketing of a large selection of derivative products (viz. fridge magnets, mugs, teapots, plates, coffee tables, trays, cake servers, miniatures, key holders, rattles, posters, etc.), the Banania tirailleur has become a significant part of French popular culture, not to mention a highly profitable economic venture for companies manufacturing these items.Footnote ⁵ The artifactualization of the Banania brand has fostered new kinds of relationships between the consumer and the product that translate into new practices such as collecting, and a new discursive framing of the brand, as illustrated below (Moore Reference Moore2003; Manning Reference Manning2010).

The resemiotization of the tirailleur image and his y'a bon slogan into collectibles and ‘cool vintage gifts’ has contributed to the reproduction, circulation, and naturalization of offensive race-based linguistic and cultural stereotypes. Despite being erased from the chocolate box and the newly produced Banania commodities, the discursive memory of the y'a bon slogan and its association with Africans is still vivid in French people's imagination. The artifactualization of the Banania brand naturalizes a sociolinguistic and cultural order whose arbitrariness is ‘misrecognized’ (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu and Richardson1986) as it disconnects the representations of both the tirailleur and his alleged speech from the sociohistorical processes that constructed them.

This naturalization is confirmed by the acquittal of the priest who was prosecuted for making a public racial slur about Christiane Taubira. On May 19, 2015 a French court concluded that a ‘truly offensive and racist character [was] not entirely proven’ in the y'a bon Banania y'a pas bon Taubira slogan. Indeed, the judges considered that the priest ‘may have used the contentious slogan thereby privileging its allegedly humorous character, and possibility of rhyming the related product with the name of Christiane Taubira, and conflating the number of (poetic) feet of the two utterances into one catchphrase’. They also stated, ‘This is common practice in protest marches as exemplified, in a similar register, by slogans such as Mitterrand fous le camp ‘Mitterrand fuck off’ or Sarkozy ça suffit ‘Sarkozy that's it’.Footnote ⁶ Several processes of erasure are at play in this court's judgement: (i) the disconnection of the y'a bon slogan from the sociocultural order and power dynamics that produced it; (ii) the delinking of y'a bon from the long history of its usage to index Africans’ alleged intellectual inferiority and primitivism; (iii) the casting of Christiane Taubira as a political figure rather than Black, which makes it possible to connect the incident with other political ones and to deflate its racializing and racist underpinning; and (iv) the framing of the y'a bon slogan as a mere signifier (i.e. a poetic phrase), which erases the indexical value of its signified.

Defending himself a few months earlier, the priest had pleaded that he had been unaware of the racist connotation of the Banania brand. He claimed that he had not had access to a computer or cellphone, nor had he ever read newspapers or watched television. He built his defense on the disjunction between the production of discourse and its interpretation. By framing the y'a bon slogan's contentious character as a modern interpretation that he was not aware of, he implicitly ratified (or at least did not question) the legitimacy of its existence in the first place. Furthermore, he explained to the court that his Banania reference was meant to evoke the destruction of family values that would be produced by the Taubira law supporting gay marriage. By framing Banania as a product of consumption, a chocolate drink, the priest dismissed his attackers’ interpretation of the latter as a discourse on blacks. Those who decry the racist reading of the Banania brand use similar arguments, resorting to a nostalgic discourse of childhood as in the following example.

1. (2) Y a bon Banania !

   C’était pour moi le bon temps, le temps de ma jeunesse (j'ai plus de 80 ans) je me régalais de ce chocolat au lait le matin pour déjeuner, ceux de mon âge n'y ont jamais vu de connotation raciste (Leshan)Footnote ⁷

   ‘It represented for me the good times, the time of my youth (I am over 80 years old), I enjoyed this milk chocolate in the morning for breakfast; those of my age never saw any racist connotations in it’

A similar Proust's-madeleine-like discourse is found among collectors of Banania artifacts who have developed an affective relationship with the brand, as illustrated below.

1. (3) POUR L'ANCIEN, BANANIA LUI EVOQUE SES SOUVENIRS DE PETITS DEJEUNERS ET SES APRES MIDI DE DECOUVERTE A TRAVERS LES JEUX ET DECOUPAGES BANANIA (Jean)Footnote ⁸

   ‘For this old guy, Banania evokes memories of breakfasts and afternoons of discoveries through Banania games and cut-outs’

The reasons why Banania's 1915 advertising message has been effective for so long are correlated to the multilayered linguistic and political ideologies that sustain representations of Africans as second-class citizens in modern Hexagonal France. The colonial images that had shaped the ‘African Other’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are now shaping that of the post-colonial immigrant. As the following example shows, the expression y'a bon has been recontextualized as a derogative category indexing Africans in France (Blanchard & Bancel Reference Blanchard and Boncel1998). A song titled y'a bon la sécu ‘y'a bon French public welfare system’ has been circulating on YouTube for several years and was even broadcast in 2010 on one of France's most popular radio networks.Footnote ⁹

Sung to a Calypso rhythm, the lyrics reinforce the perception that African immigrants are taking advantage of the French public welfare system and unemployment benefits. Africans are portrayed as greedy Third World immigrants rejoicing at the opportunity to sponge off of naive French people. Although Africans are not explicitly mentioned, the y a bon utterance is unambiguously understood as referring to them, as seen in one of the videos accompanying the lyrics. Pencil-drawn Black characters are portrayed with protuberant lips; women are shown carrying bags on their heads while men are depicted wearing a traditional West African boubou (i.e. a long loose-fitting garment covering the whole body from shoulders to ankles) and a Kufi prayer cap.Footnote ¹⁰

Africans’ alleged lack of command of French indexed by y'a bon is also meant to iconize their social exclusion from the category of legitimate French citizens (Vigouroux Reference Vigouroux2015b). This rhetoric is informed by the long-standing ideology inherited from the Jacobin regime, according to which the French language is the defining feature of the Nation. The racial and linguistic nature of the attacks launched against Minister of Justice Taubira shows how her haters, such as the CIVITAS priest, perceive her as unsettling the ideological construction of France as a white nation. The fact that she ranks third in the French government (after the President and the Prime Minister) combined with her impressive oratory skills, which are celebrated even by her fiercest political opponents, constitutes a direct threat to the subaltern linguistic and cultural position to which her detractors want to confine her and others of African descent.

Since 2009, the antiracist association Les Indivisibles has bestowed annual Y'a bon Awards upon French public figures (e.g. journalists, politicians, intellectuals, scholars, or artists) identified as most strikingly demonstrating support for systemic racism. The recipients are awarded a gold banana in absentia, as they usually do not dare honor the invitation to the Oscar-like ceremony. The cross-event trajectory is achieved here through the recontextualization of y'a bon into a racist trope. It is part of the already long (and potentially endless) discursive pathway that this article sought to uncover.