The emergence of Africa in the work of Michel Leiris testifies his willingness to know the other and at the same time to re-evaluate his own self through the encounter with the other. Leiris travels through Africa from the west to the east during the Dakar/Djibouti mission from 1931 to 1933 as the recording archivist of the ethnographic and linguistic mission headed by Marcel Griaule. This mission becomes an occasion for Leiris to get in touch with Africans and to be away from Europe for a moment. His stay in Sanga allows him to enter the sacred universe of Dogon people and to analyse the significance of the masks. As far as that goes, his stay in Abyssinia also gives him the opportunity to be in direct contact with the possessed people and the Zar spirits. Ethiopia is the last country visited by Leiris and it is the country which touches him the most. Blacks do not make any difference between Leiris and the other white colonialists during this particular period of colonisation. His encounter with Africa gives birth to several pieces of work such as Ghost Africa and The Secret Language of Sanga’s Dogons. Leiris hopes that his travel to Africa will help him find a therapy to his problems. In this vast enterprise, he will see the myth of a regenerative travel broken and will not be able to get rid of his obsessions. Ghost Africa is a testimony on the ambiguous position of ethnology of this particular period. Objectively; he tries to say everything on his own self and on what he feels while in Africa. The other becomes his main concern, from Africa to the West Indies; he is interested in the cultures of the black people with often a critical comment on them. He becomes ethnologist himself, questioning the world from the sample of human category that he is, as an external witness somehow, of what is happening in his own self and around him. Africa remains a ghost for Leiris because of the image of Emawayish, the Gondarian of Ethiopia with whom he falls in love during his stay in Abyssinia.