In 2014 Samuel Fosso's studio and house were looted during the conflict in the Central African Republic. The photojournalists Jérôme Delay and Marcus Bleasdale, with the help of Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch, managed to save his negatives and get them to Paris. For seven years the three trunks holding more than fifty thousand negatives stayed shut; it was in the spring of 2021 that they were opened again, and this volume comes out of that reopening.