In September 1931, Le Cri des Nègres (The Negro’s yell), then Paris’s foremost radical pan-African paper, ran an article attacking “a certain European woman.” The short piece, signed by someone called Tia Tanindrazana, charged that the woman posed as “the delegate of Malagasy women in Paris,” but that she really pursued “manifold investigations in order to identify our [Madagascar-based] collaborator” so as to denounce him before the authorities. 1 As other sources corroborate, the woman in question, Madeleine Razafy, had used the Colonial Exposition in Paris’s Bois de Vincennes, where the French state feted its alleged mission civilisatrice, to proselytize among Haitian nationalists on behalf of her husband, the Malagasy socialist Abraham Razafy. 2 In truth, Madame Razafy was not a spy. Yet the article’s two real authors—or one of them, at least—were. In falsely denouncing Razafy, they sought either to discredit a socialist competitor threatening to drain anticolonial sympathies from their own communist organizations, or simply to deflect potential suspicions of their own snooping by pointing the finger of blame at a “certain European woman.” Eight months after the article’s publication, one of its authors, the Guadeloupean communist Narcisse Danaë, was expelled from the French Communist Party (PCF) and denounced as a “scoundrel” who had spied on his comrades in the service of Paris’s police prefecture (although the charge remains unproven). 3 The other, a Malagasy activist named Thomas Ramananjato, was never unmasked, but from cross-referencing archival records of the Service de contrôle et assistance aux indigènes des colonies (CAI), a special police unit