Searching for the Origin(al)

Abstract

Abstract This article offers an archaeology of one of the most popular and widely reproduced images across Senegal and its diaspora: the portrait of Amadou Bamba (1853-1927), founder of the Mouride Sufi Brotherhood. Seen as a powerful source of baraka or blessing, the black and white portrait can be spotted virtually everywhere in Mouride spaces from Touba to New York, from Dakar to Beijing. Despite its physical ubiquity, the photograph’s genesis remains shrouded in mystery. Building on two years of archival and field research in Senegal, this article seeks to reframe the significance of this iconic image by focusing on narratives of its origins. Taken between 1914 and 1916 to illustrate Paul Marty’s 1917 Etudes sur L’Islam au Senegal, this portrait was one, among many others, that the colonial administration collected in an effort to monitor and document the activity of Senegal’s local Muslim leaders. In an attempt to bypass a Foucauldian view of photography, which reveals mechanisms of control and yet mutes the “Other,” this article also considers Mouride disciples’ accounts of this image’s history. Their analyses subvert monolithic interpretations of the portrait as an image of surveillance and render the instability of the photographic language, even when the colonizer is behind the camera.