Though he is not widely remembered as such today, Auguste Dupuis was a colonial celebrity between the wars. His story circulated widely in accounts written by journalists, travel writers, and even novelists. Yet amid the high officials, military conquerors, and missionary heroes who achieved their own measure of fame as a consequence of French colonialism, the renown of Dupuis rested on the most unorthodox of foundations. He was best known by a name other than the one with which he was christened. He had settled a long way from France, in a town whose name was practically a byword for obscurity, and clearly he had no intention of ever returning to live in his homeland. As some people had it, he was hardly even French anymore. Auguste Dupuis was the most famous example of what was known between the wars as adécivilisé. Auguste Dupuis, or Yakouba as he was more commonly known, was a Catholic missionary in the town of Timbuktu in West Africa. He abandoned his religious vocation in 1904 and married a local woman, with whom he went on to have a large family. Rather than settling into a life of obscurity in Timbuktu, however, over the years that followed, but particularly through the 1920s and into the early 1930s, Dupuis-Yakouba became an increasingly familiar figure as a host of writers encountered him and brought what he had done to public notice. What they wrote was often inaccurate, but the truth was less important than telling a good story, and Dupuis-Yakouba’s story was certainly good. As Dupuis-Yakouba’s renown extended beyond the region in which he had

Owen White is assistant professor of history at the University of Delaware. He is author of Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa, 1895–1960 (Oxford, 1999). He is working on a study of Catholics and France’s overseas empire between 1815 and 1962. The author thanks the British Academy for generously funding research for this article. He gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Father Ivan Page at the White Fathers’ central archive in Rome. He also recognizes the helpful suggestions of participants in seminars at New York University’s Institute of French Studies and the Maison Française in Oxford, as well as the anonymous readers for this journal.