Africa

Objects


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The truck
Gouache on cardboard of the yakoma painter Clément-Marie Biazin (1924-1981)
Central African Republic, Bangui. 1966-1967. 24 x 17 cm
Gift in 2018 of Geneviève Dournon, ethnomusicologist and retired curator of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris.
MEG ETHAF 068195

Ketab protective scroll in Ge'ez
Ethiopia, Central Highlands
Christians (Amhara). 19th - 20th century
Parchment, ink
Acquired from Nicholas Donn in 1983
MEG Inv. ETHAF 043367

Male figure mbonga for receiving a magical charge
DR Congo, Kwango province, Kasongo-Lunda territory
Yaka. Late 19th century, 20th century
Wood, string. H 56 cm
Acquired from the ethnologist Hans Himmelheber in 1938; collected the same year in the village of Malambu.
MEG Inv. ETHAF 015945

Collective protective talisman ody mohara
Madagascar. Boïna, Sakalava
Late 19th - 20th century
Zebu horn containing nails, needles, bullets, coins, scissors, plants and resin; glass beads and fabric
Gift of Pastor Henry Rusillon, missionary in Madagascar, in 1930
MEG Inv. ETHAF 059881

The Africa collection covers the vastness of the continent, from North Africa to Madagascar. With more than 16,000 objects, it is distinguished by its great typological and material diversity. The pictorial works stand alongside writings, statues, masks, a very vast collection of everyday objects, as well as a large number of instruments related to religious practices and the exercise of power.

The vast majority of the African objects in the MEG’s collections were brought back to Europe on the fringes of colonization, between the early 19th century and the 1960s, at a time of massive "ethnographic" collecting and the evangelization of the continent. The Protestant missions in Africa are, along with the art market in Paris and Brussels, the major sources of the growth of the MEG's African collections, which have become material witnesses to the violence that characterizes the West's stranglehold of Africa.

Anthropologists Hans Himmelheber (1908-2003) and Conradin Perner (born 1943) contributed considerably to the enrichment of the collections, as did MEG curator Claude Savary (1939-2014). Finally, the Geneva painter Émile Chambon (1905-1993) donated his personal collection of African and Oceanic art to the MEG in 1981.

A random object

ETHAF 013031
monnaie traditionnelle en forme de tiges de fer

Congo, la République démocratique du

Kota

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