Funny name for a bookstore… In Saint-Louis du Senegal, at 57, rue Blaise-Diagne, L’Agneau carnivore unfolds its gray wooden shutters on the white walls of the historic city. In the window, two bronze leopards from the kingdom of Dahomey watch over a pile of novels with faded covers next to a cat, who is alive and asleep in the sun.
To be a good bookseller in sub-Saharan Africa, you have to go find the book where it is hidden and not shrink from the horny opportunity, or from the copies, if they are well made. Gilles Le Ouzon knows this well, he who for fifteen years has opened this astonishing place of culture and hunts everywhere for the books that fill his stalls.
“Since the nearby Gaston-Berger University bookstore closed a year ago, I’ve been the only bookseller as far as Thiès, a big three-hour drive away,” he points out, as if he had to justify his mission as the sole provider of reading for the 300,000 inhabitants of the city of Saint-Louis, the 800,000 of the agglomeration, to which are added the 30,000 students of Gaston-Berger.
Enough to make any bookseller dizzy, but not “Souleymane Gilles” as his African friends have renamed him. He knows well, to his great regret, that illiteracy still affects 50% of the sector and that books are not a priority when the plate remains empty, which reduces his potential clientele.
Feed all reading desires
The “toubab”, as Europeans in Senegal are called, knows how to adapt its shelves to Saint-Louisians and tourists passing through this city classified as a UNESCO heritage site, which aims to become the capital of African photography. the West with its museum and soon its festival. Not reluctant to buy the novels of tourists who lighten their suitcases, nor those that chambermaids collect in hotels, and even less the stocks offered to him here or there, he is able to feed all the desires to read. , its main secret being to “seize opportunities and anticipate demand”.
It is on the strength of this adage that he buys in Dakar, in the summer of 2021, a good stack of La Plus Secrète Mémoire des hommes by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, well before the Goncourt prize is awarded, betting that the former high school student from Saint-Louis would be the winner. So when the book is missing everywhere else, he quietly continues to sell it, without earning a CFA franc on it, but who cares, he wants to be present at the rendezvous of this moment in history.
Born in Ardèche 70 years ago, Gilles Le Ouzon was from the cradle promised to Africa, the continent that his mother crisscrossed in the service of foreign affairs of France. Madagascar, Zanzibar, the Comoros… he follows her according to his assignments, managing a hotel here, a craft furniture store there, a shop selling wooden ship models elsewhere.
At the end of 2007, dreaming of an ultimate pilgrimage to the lands of her youth, and of a place of rest, her mother asked her to bring her back to the old Fort Faidherbe, now Fort Dagana, an hour and a half from Saint-Louis. . He who thought he was just passing through these neighboring lands of Mauritania puts down his suitcases in this place steeped in history, still moved fifteen years after his first entry into the city by the Faidherbe bridge that the mother and the son cross at night.
“Understanding Senegalese Culture”
The eyes of the 83-year-old lady do not see the iron bridge there, but a collapsed Eiffel Tower. Gilles Le Ouzon does not say if he reads this nocturnal vision as an allegory of the history of France in West Africa, but he endeavors from the opening of his Carnivorous Lamb to supply it with books and documents. of history. Because man loves the resurrection of the past, whether through the Rougon-Macquart saga by Emile Zola, which he has just finished rereading, or In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, one of his favorite authors of which he sells a few volumes.
“I grew up without television. At home, with my mother, we listened to the radio and read books. When I was young, I already had a real taste for them and more particularly for travelogues,” he recalls. For lovers of the genre, he always offers a few and adds a good stock of souvenir books from the place, a few novels from France – by Gilbert Cesbron or René Barjavel that Senegalese passing through are happy to read – and African novels.
On this last point, the bookseller is formal, almost peremptory: “You have to have read these twenty novels if you want to understand Senegalese culture”, he specifies, pointing to a counter where Prison d’Europe d ‘Abdel Aziz Mayoro Diop, Under the storm by Seydou Badian or The Bàttu strike by Aminata Sow Fall. Without forgetting his bestseller, Une si longue lettres de Mariama Bâ, and Karim, the novel by Ousmane Socé which is also the favorite book of a great lover of the city and its bookstore, the economist Amadou Diaw.
His bias being to share culture, the man has made up a second-hand library alongside new books, in which students come to draw. “And even though I believe that a book should not be given away, but rather sold at a symbolic price, I confess that I sometimes give in to my desire. Like giving a gift to a teenager who stubbornly assures me that he doesn’t read… I know that the important thing is to start putting your nose in a book, “he says.
Old paper, bronze and wood
To build up his fund, he had the chance to recover part of the stock of the Sumbala African bookstore, when it closed its walls in Paris, to which were added journals from the Fundamental Institute of Black Africa (IFAN). or the Center for Research and Documentation of Senegal (CRDS) in Saint-Louis, which these institutions did not wish to keep. Historical books, magazines often not found elsewhere in which an intellectual like Felwine Sarr spent hours looking when he was a student and which the designer Rama Diaw, the stylist from Saint-Louis, also comes to leaf through when she feels like a somewhat historical inspiration. An office awaits the barge, available, next to Button, Pressure and Corneille, the three cats of the place.
In addition to the pieces designed for the cultured elite of the area, there are books found all over the fairs. “Obviously, like any object that has value, the books are copied in Asia and come back there, badly glued, with missing chapters and sewn with mistakes”, regrets the bookseller at war against this general scourge in sub-Saharan Africa. This drama of the copy also undermines the financial balance of New African Editions of Senegal (NEAS), a very counterfeit publisher.
The fact remains that when the copy is worth reading, and it allows Gilles Le Ouzon to sell a book to a client who could not afford a real one, the professional gives in to temptation. He knows that some of his dictionaries are fakes but has leafed through them and prefers to sell them cheap rather than leave students without this precious usual… He knows that “almost all the texts by Camus circulating here are also fakes”.
Even if his shop has become a meeting place where the neighborhood shares a coffee or a bissap while discussing everything and nothing, the sale of books is not enough for the merchant to live. A reason that authorized Gilles-l’antiquaire to come to the aid of Gilles-le-libraire, knowing that historical objects provide him with three quarters of his turnover. On his phone on the day of our visit, Gille Le Ouzon receives the offer of a Dogonne door found in Mali that he will bring because he knows it to be authentic at first glance.
On its walls, next to limited-edition postcards that he produces himself and photo books on the region, which he co-signs, African sculptures are next to passports, those wooden objects that you had to bring to once passed from one village to another, and a whole range of bronze weights which were once used to weigh gold.
Strange marriage of paper, bronze and old wood on the shelves of this bookstore whose name all those who are unaware of the work of the Andalusian Agustín Gómez-Arcos question. The Carnivorous Lamb is indeed one of the works of this Catalan author who wrote in French but remains very little known. But never mind the question! Gilles Le Ouzon delights in all the questions from his customers, he who, like Paul Valéry, expects the reader to “not enter without desire”, so much “It depends on whoever is passing by whether I have fallen or treasure. Whether I speak or remain silent.” An adage in perfect resonance with the spirit of the place and the man.