Field Notes · The Coast Today · 13 min read

Fanon, the camera, and the body at the village ring — visiting Evala

A visitor lifts a camera at the edge of the wrestling circle. Fanon explains, sixty years ago, what the gesture risks. Our photography protocol is the practical answer.

By Fèmi · Cotonou, June 2026

A visitor walks into a Kabyè village on the day of an Evala bout. He has come from Lomé, the airport before that, an airport before that. He carries a camera. The wrestlers are visible at the centre of the village circle, in traditional dress, oiled, bare-footed, intensely physical. The visitor lifts the camera. This essay is about what should happen in that gesture.

Why Fanon, here

Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist who wrote Peau noire, masques blancs (Seuil, 1952) and Les Damnés de la terre (Maspero, 1961), is not the obvious reference for a travel guide. He wrote about colonialism, race, the psychic life of the colonised. He did not write about West African festivals. But Fanon developed, in Peau noire, an analysis of the colonial gaze that turns out to be precisely the analysis a visitor to Evala needs.

Fanon’s argument is that the Black body, under the gaze of the colonial-era European observer, is objectified before it is encountered. The observer does not see a person; he sees a body. The body becomes spectacular — visible in its physicality, hyper-present, but stripped of the interiority, the subjectivity, the history that would constitute the person inside it. The gaze is not malicious; it is structural. It is what the colonial frame had taught the observer to do. And the observer’s camera, in the era of the photograph, completed the operation: the image fixed the body as object, the photograph that could be looked at again later, the print that could be hung in a museum vitrine.

Fanon was writing about a particular historical situation. The descriptive insight he produced — that there is a way of looking at a Black body that strips it of personhood — outlives the historical situation. It is the insight that the visitor to Evala needs to carry in his hand alongside his camera.

The technical conditions at Evala

The wrestlers at Evala are exposed in a specific sense. They wear minimal traditional dress — a cotton wrap, no upper garment, no footwear. The bouts are intensely physical: bodies in contact, sweat, the occasional injury. The crowd is close. The wrestlers are young — most are between sixteen and twenty. They are, in the moment of the bout, performing a passage that the cosmology of their community has constructed as central to their personhood.

The technical conditions for photography are, in a sense, excellent: the light is direct, the bodies are in motion, the frames are dramatic, the colours of the dust and the cotton and the bare skin compose well. A visitor with a long lens and a decent eye could produce striking images. The images would be, in Fanon’s vocabulary, exactly the colonial gaze made digital: bodies as spectacle, identity as material, the act of recognition turned into the act of consumption.

Our protocol — and what it is doing

Our photography protocol for Evala is strict. No close-up zoom on the wrestlers’ bodies. No flash near the ring. No portraits of individual Awala members without their explicit permission through our coordinator. The wrestlers can be photographed in wide shot, in the context of the crowd and the village, with the framing that situates them as members of a community rather than as individuated bodies on display.

This protocol is not, primarily, a politeness. It is the practical application of the Fanonian critique. The protocol is what allows the visitor to use the camera without enacting the gaze that Fanon described. A wide shot of the village circle, with the wrestlers visible as participants in a community ritual, holds the wrestlers in their personhood. A close-up zoom on a wrestler’s body, taken without consent, in the middle of his passage through the most concentrated rite of his young adult life, does not.

The walk back from spectacle to witness

There is a fundamental decision that the visitor makes when he arrives at the village ring at Evala. Either he is here to consume images, or he is here to witness an event. The decision is not theoretical; it is enacted in every lift of the camera. The visitor who keeps the camera at his hip during the bouts, who watches with his eyes and not through the viewfinder, who allows the recognition song to enter the body rather than to be captured by the microphone, has chosen the witness position. The visitor who lifts the camera, frames the close-up, captures the wrestler as image, has chosen the spectacle position. Both are available. Heritage and Routes operates under the witness assumption.

This is not anti-photographic. It is anti-extractive. There are forms of photography that the protocol welcomes: the wide shot, the documentary frame, the crowd, the village, the elders in their ceremonial dress, the women of the community in their celebrating cloth. These photographs document the event; they do not extract from the wrestlers. The line is not difficult to maintain once it is held in mind.

Fanon ended Peau noire, masques blancs with a wish: O mon corps, fais de moi toujours un homme qui interroge ! — O my body, make of me always a man who questions. The visitor to Evala, with his camera in his hand, is a man with a body and an instrument. The instrument can be used in a way that respects the bodies in front of him as bodies-of-persons, not bodies-as-spectacle. The work of questioning the impulse to capture is, in this case, the work of being a respectful witness. The camera is yours. The use is your decision. Use it as a man who questions.

Sources : Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Seuil, 1952) ; Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre (Maspero, 1961) ; Raymond Verdier, Le pays kabiyè (Karthala, 1982) ; Marc Augé on the gaze in Le Dieu objet (Flammarion, 1988).