Having travelled to Saint-Louis, Senegal, to perform Genet’s The Tightrope Walker, an actor (Philippe Clévenot) discovers what remains of the former capital of French West Africa. Saint-Louis is the very symbol of colonization: a European city built in the middle of the desert, with its banks, its churches, and its governor’s palace. It is also the first mixed-race city of Black Africa—a legacy vividly present in the words of the four Black or mixed-race women who give their testimony. Today, Saint-Louis has changed profoundly. “I never imagined Saint-Louis like this—so nostalgic, so disoriented,” the actor confesses. Yet within this parable of decline, the city suddenly comes alive again, and Africa asserts itself with its rhythms, colours and cries: women dancing in the street, men setting off to fish in long, brightly painted boats and children playing in the dust of this quiet town… Nostalgia, solitude, contrasts: what remains of the Saint-Louis of old?