“Féral Benga, the Dakar dancer…heart shaped chest, smoothly tapering legs like Josephine Bacaire’s…Round-eyed: the whites of his eyes circularly showing as if in ceaseless apprehension or fury; nevertheless a beguiling worldly personage, and good company.” – Glenway Wescott
What does it mean when the memory of your existence has been documented solely through the eyes of others? When it comes to Féral Benga, the handsome performer did not write or record anything about himself, nor leave behind anything of his own that could help elucidate his true essence. Instead, there are images; photographs and paintings, sculptures and film clips, all created by artists inspired by his beauty, hoping to capture it in their uniquely creative styles. From these, as well as from textual anecdotes by those who knew him, we can begin to put together a more complex image of Benga, a dancer who navigated life fearlessly, living an openly gay life while still opting to play the part and jump through the hoops of others to pursue his own particular aspiration.
François Benga was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1906 and his father was an employee of the French colonial administration. Benga was also the illegitimate grandson to an auctioneer and notary, a man who was regarded as one of Dakar’s wealthiest property owners. Despite growing up in what would appear to be a well-to-do and well-established family in Senegal, Benga’s relationship with his father was strained, and during a trip to Paris together, François ran away from his dad. Benga at the time was only seventeen years old, but still chose to remain and live in Paris by himself. Soon after that, his father disinherited him.
Though there is no confirmed information on the details behind Benga and his father’s spat, it is possible to posit that François’ burgeoning sexuality in a country that still treats homosexual activity as illegal may have had something to do with it. Adding to that, a trip to Paris at the time may have been exactly what Benga needed to open his eyes to the existence of a much more sexually liberated city.
Now on his own in Paris, Benga began to work odd jobs to make ends meet, and attended dance rehearsals in his spare time. Before long, he auditioned for a role at a renowned cabaret music hall in Paris, the Folies Bergère, and thanks to his flexibility and handsome appearance, landed a job as a walk-on performer in the chorus line. At the time, revues at the Folies Bergère were notorious for featuring extravagant costumes, lavish sets, and often nude women. It is perhaps best known as the venue where, in 1926, Josephine Baker caused a sensation dancing in a skirt made of a string of artificial bananas and not much else. With dance as his primary art form, Benga himself emerged in the early ‘30s as a darling of the Parisian music hall scene, and rose the ranks to begin dancing alongside Baker, simultaneously forging a close friendship with the much admired performer. Benga incorporated in his dances Africa’s sensuality by performing in nearly nude performances, but unlike Ms. Baker, he never actually got fully naked. Instead, he usually performed in a skimpy loincloth, attire perceived to be traditional African Native garb.
It is at the Bergère where François earned his stage name, “Féral”, French for the word “Untamed.” The name “Féral” further enhanced Benga’s exotic appeal, painting him as a wild African tribesman, which was, of course, a fetishized persona created for him by Parisian booking agents. In actuality, François was known to be shy and introverted in real life. Nevertheless, he used his popularity as a native African to his advantage, capitalizing on the dance trend of the time that blossomed first in Paris and then New York. While both he and Baker, who together performed a dance called the “Danse Sauvage”, were admired for their artistry and technical prowess in dance, they were in effect the byproducts of a Western World fad. Both dancers exemplified the hyper-eroticized racial stereotypes of the time, and their popularity skyrocketed from being crudely exoticized by the white audiences. Benga was even at one point deemed the “Black Mercury” to Baker’s “Ebony Venus”. Aware of this dynamic, Benga nevertheless pandered to the audiences, but quietly dreamed of one day forming an authentic West African dance troupe for European and American audiences, one that would not compromise the fundamentals of traditional tribal dance movements.
In addition to the impact Féral made in the world of dance, his fetishized physical beauty caused a stir in both the New York and Parisian homosexual circles at large, with gay artists in particular flocking to use him as a model. As a result, Benga played quite an important role in the visual arts, serving as a subject for numerous well-known artists across several media. It is in this role as a muse to visual artists that Féral Benga’s life and visage are best documented, and is therefore for what he is often best remembered.
In 1930, Benga was cast and starred in Le Sang D’un Poete, (The Blood of a Poet), an avant-garde film directed by the openly homosexual French creative, Jean Cocteau. Benga’s role in the experimental film was as the “L’ange Noir”, or the “Black Angel”, his skin color clearly of importance to the part. Photographers also flocked to use Benga as a model, including Eli Lohar, Lucien Waléry, George Platt Lynes, and Carl Van Vechten. Waléry, a Polish photographer who rose to prominence photographing female cabaret stars, produced numerous postcards, cabinet cards, and other materials of popular consumption of Benga. His most well known portrait is a dynamic image of Benga hoisting a machete in the air, a pose recreated from the dancer’s signature “Danse Du Sabre”. Benga also posed for numerous photos taken by the writer Carl Van Vechten, including one of Benga holding white lilies against his bare chest while staring straight into the camera. Other of Vechten’s portraits have Benga posed with a variety of accessories, including an African mask, bongo drums, gardenias, grapes, and even a cigarette. In some of these images Benga dons a business suit, other times in the photos he is shirtless, and in several he is completely nude. Benga’s nude form was also captured numerous times by George Platt Lynes, a photographer who became famous for shooting explicitly homoerotic images during a time where homosexuality was still very much proscripted.
Benga as a muse and model also extended to the realm of the more traditional fine arts. In 1938, a nude Benga was painted by the famous Russian Surrealist painter, Pavel Tchelitchew, and the painting, entitled Deposition, was purchased and owned by Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of the New York City Ballet. Benga also posed for the African American artist James A. Porter, in what would be one of the more dignified portraits of the dancer, entitled Soldat Senegalese. But the most acclaimed piece of art to be made of Féral Benga would come in the form of a statue made by African American sculptor Richmond Barthé. In 1934, Barthé went on a tour to Paris, where he was exposed to a plethora of classical art as well to performances by Benga and Josephine Baker. Thoroughly enchanted by Benga, the sculptor completed what is considered his signature piece of work, only months after seeing the dancer perform. The sculpture, which most recently sold in 2020 for over half of a million dollars, is a graceful, full-figure male nude that stands two feet high and was inspired by Waléry’s machete photograph. At the time of its debut, the sculpture was immediately admired for its daring sexual allure, what with the figure’s tilt of the head and closed eyes, as if in ecstasy, along with his tightly clamped thighs, bent knees, raised heels and swirling arms. The sculpture was heavily analyzed and psychoanalyzed with discourse that included viewing the sword in Benga’s hand as both phallic and erotically charged but also eliciting fear of danger and even castration. The piece has since been deemed integral to the history of Black art, as in it Barthé celebrates the beauty and virtue of male Blackness at a time when that was simply not being done. The sculpture effectively helped usher the Black male body into the realm of respectable fine art.
In addition to this vast collection of visual documentation, Féral Benga’s life is perhaps best recorded in Africa Dances: A Book About West African Negroes, written in 1935 by Geoffrey Gorer, an anthropologist and author who was also Benga’s partner. The book was the result of a trip that the pair made together to Africa in 1933, where they studied native dances as they were being performed in remote parts of Africa. The trip was, in fact, Benga’s idea, who had already been intending to go with the idea of composing a black ballet in mind. Benga invited his lover along to join the three month tour, and Gorer later confessed that he was influenced to go on the trip as “The idea of the journey attracted me enormously, romantically.”
Africa Dances serves as an important work in that it is one of few existing texts which details Féral Benga’s life and conveys what the dancer was truly like. In fact, with regards to intimate details about the life of Féral Benga, much of what we know comes from Gorer’s close observations about him in the book, things which perhaps only a lover could pick up on or find out. This includes the disheartening detail that Benga’s dancing, choreography, acting and modeling careers only brought him sporadic income throughout his life, revealing that Benga was in a constant hustle for income.
Gorer also describes in the book meeting Benga’s family in Dakar, stating that they were francophone and civilized, and that Benga himself was a “Europeanized African…whose position in Paris was rather like that of the fashionable divorcée in the nineteenth century: a person whom it was chic to be seen with in the right places and inappropriate everywhere else.” Gorer also enlightens readers about Benga’s general disposition: “Actually he was very shy, much distressed by the fact that because he was a negro and a dancer everybody considered that they had a right, if not a duty, to make sexual advances to him.”
After Africa Dances was released in 1935, Gorer and Benga would slowly drift apart but keep in touch, though only two letters have been found written by Benga to Gorer. In them, Benga addressed, “Mon cher Geoffrey” and signed them “Je t’embrasse, ton Féral” (I kiss/embrace you, your Féral). As a result of this distancing, the details of Benga’s life become more difficult to trace after 1939. In 1962, however, Gorer republished his book with a new preface that summarized the details of Benga’s later years. Gorer explains that at the start of WWII, Benga was trapped in France as a result of German occupation, and in response to the Nazis’ hateful opinions of French-speaking Negroes, spent four years hiding in the countryside. Though the hosts hiding Benga treated him well, the dearth living conditions nevertheless took a toll on the dancer’s overall health and wellbeing.
Gorer also reports that once the war was over, Benga returned to Paris where by 1947 he was operating a nightclub and bar called La Rose Rouge at 53 Rue de la Harpe, in partnership with the bisexual filmmaker, Nico Papatakis. The club was well known and popular amongst the fashionable and wealthy Parisian crowd, and ran for over eight years. It featured an African cabaret, with all hired performers, including the dancers and drummers, being African students studying at Paris universities. It also only used authentic African material for its repertoire of songs, dances, and pantomimes. Seemingly, Benga was able to come close to achieving that dream of his, of one day forming an authentic West African troupe that would showcase traditional tribal dances to Western audiences. Sadly, Gorer's summary ends with the fact that he last saw his former partner in person on a trip to Paris in 1951, and that Benga passed away circa 1957, his body interred at the Saint-Denis cemetery in Châteauroux, France.
Despite making quite the name for himself amidst the elite, leaving a lasting impression in numerous lanes of the art world, the question remains as to why Féral Benga did not, in his lifetime, achieve the level of fame and success as compared to his female counterpart, Josephine Baker. Historically, Ms. Baker’s name and image are universally associated with pre-war Parisian entertainment, while Benga, who was right there beside her, is all but forgotten. There are likely numerous factors that played into this dichotomy, the first and perhaps most obvious one being Benga’s homosexuality. Benga did not lead his life in the closet as he ran around amongst various gay social circles in both Paris and Manhattan and associated himself with numerous well-known gay artists. Though male homosexuality at the time was more accepted and apparent in these particular cities and circles, on a grander scheme it was still very much taboo. Ms. Baker, on the other hand, though now known to be bisexual, in the public eye led the life of a woman who had been married to men (albeit several) and had numerous children, thereby fitting into a more prescribed lifestyle outside her line of work.
The other key factor likely at play here was Benga’s gender. By being a male in the same industry as Ms. Baker, Benga was possibly transgressing the typical gender dynamics of primitivism at the time, which predominantly centered on the white male’s objectification of and dominance over the bodies of black women. Black male bodies in this environment were more frequently perceived as threatening, in particular to white males, so holding them back or suppressing their visibility was much more likely to occur. Despite all this, Benga did what he could to make a name for himself, embodying racial tropes in order to forge an identity in the Western public’s imagination that would be a digestible characterization of an African man. By conceding to mass appeal, Benga was able to propel his career forward, becoming a lead dance figure in Paris despite fleeing from Senegal with no background in the art form. In the end, however, it may have ultimately stunted his career, leaving him unable to break out into other roles beyond the racially stereotypical ones that he first accepted. In fact, when Benga debuted a classically-inspired dance at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in 1933, it was panned as “not African enough”. Without Gorer’s love and attention though, we may not have known that the literate and introverted François Benga was a much more complex individual simply overshadowed by his stage persona’s “Féral” character thrust upon him. But as an artistic muse, Benga broke the mold, bringing the visual artwork of a gay black man to the forefront, and for that he should be remembered.
REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING
Disclaimer: some of the sources may contain triggering material
Di Liscia, Valentina. “Féral Benga, the Cabaret Dancer Who Redefined Black Masculinity”. Hyperallergic, 2021, August 10, https://hyperallergic.com/667913/cabaret-dancer-feral-benga-redefined-black-masculinity/
Lindstrom, Lamont. “Geoffrey Gorer and Féral Benga, a Collaboration”. History and Anthropology. February 22, 2013. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, p. 183-205.
Major, Gerri. “Society: Paris Chit Chat”. Jet Magazine. 23 July 1953. Johnson Publishing Company, p. 46.
Porter, Dorothy. “Africa Dances by Geoffrey Gorer. Faber and Faber, London, England. 363 Pages, 62 Photographs and Maps. $3.50”. The Crisis Magazine. November 1935. Crisis Publishing Company Inc, p. 346.
Rolle, Elisa. Days of Love: Celebrating LGBT History One Story At A Time. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014.
Vendryes, Margaret Rose. “Casting Féral Benga: A Biography of Richmond Barthe’s Signature Work”. 2003 June, http://static1.squarespace.com/static/533b9964e4b098d084a9331e/t/544d279de4b048f0ef60c7f9/1414342557362/Vendryes_on_Barthe.pdf
Vendryes, Margaret Rose. Barthé: A Life in Sculpture. Jackson, Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2008.