The text on the blade is very easy to read, at least for a native French speaker, and is in good French. The text seems to have been copied on the blade by someone that knew perfectly its meaning in French, because he added the drawing/representation of a long haired woman – the idealized woman the man that copied the text on the sword is dreaming about. Obviously, this is a local sword, but the owner or at least the guy that wrote/copied the poem on it must have been a French and mostly a French expatriate, and a cultivated and romantic one. Not the average adventurer nor the regular colonial soldier that we could find in these areas.
To put things in a different perspective:
-Don’t forget that the country called Sudan today was formerly an English colony but that it is only a fraction - the eastern fraction - of what was called Sudan in colonial time. In fact, you can see hereafter that the Sudan area was also made of a Western part, that was French, which have evolved in few modern countries with post-colonial names (Mali, Niger, Chad…).
-Concerning Arthur Rimbaud that spent 10 years in the Africa horn, here after an extract from this website (
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rimbaud.htm):
Rimbaud arrived in 1880 in Aden after short sojourns in Java and Cyprus. Rimbaud made business travels in modern-day Yemen, Ethiopia, and Egypt, and walked occasionally hundreds of miles at the head of trading caravans through dangerous lands. He was the first European to penetrate into the country of Ogadain. His expertise and learning of the language, religion, and culture of local peoples was acknowledged when the French Geographical Society deemed his commercial and geographical report on East Africa worthy of publication.
More infos on Rimbaud:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rimbaud
About the French Sudan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Sudan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Sudan
More about the French Somaliland where stayed Rimbaud:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Somaliland
Best
Nicolas