By analysing the ethnographical work of the Dahomean writer Paul Hazoumé, this article aims at establishing a continuum between literature and science. Whereas Hazoumé’s historical novel Doguicimi has often been perceived as a clumsy attempt at fiction by a colonial informer, we propose to read the essay Le Pacte de sang au Dahomey and the articles published in La Reconnaissance africaine, a local journal created by the missionary Francis Aupiais, as narrative and poetic experiments. Hazoumé’s first writings allow the emergence of “ethnographical characters” such as the spy and the female warrior, and they suggest an aesthetic of ruins which would enable a nostalgic depiction of colonial Dahomey.