The article tries to demonstrate that cartography can create mythologies about Africa that can be defined 'of return', that is, created by western people and transferred into the project of the colonies, as if they were African qualifies. The first mythology makes Africa a territory rich in resources and possibilities of exploitation; the second considers Africa as a land that must be developed according to a colonialist perspective, as it seems empty of social and political meaning. The analysis of the cartographic language of the maps published in the geographical reviews at the beginning of colonialism in French Western Africa (AOF) shows that, through the semiotic mechanisms concerning the basic designators, the territory produced by the local populations had no importance. The mythologies 'of return', created by cartography, are not only undeserved attributions, but also means which can exclude a reality, a basic identity, that exactly on the territory and through the territory could have been recovered.