This article starts by tracing the history and evolution of the ways in which African writers have taken up the pen to voice their opinions, focusing in particular on their contributions to the newspapers published in French West Africa under colonial rule, before analysing more specifically how they participated in the Bulletin de l’Enseignement de l’A.O.F. between 1913 and 1959. The latter title mostly published ethnographic studies, but also accepted historical studies and literary texts, often related to African oral literatures. Such texts testify to the dynamics regulating speech and writing in a colonial context imbued with paternalism, yet which enabled various forms of critical distance and even of counter-discourse, as can be seen in the publications of the Bulletin, but also those of later titles – for instance Dakar-Jeunes, which in 1942 published a debate around the cultural evolution of French West Africa.