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Gabonese reliquary statues and masks are icons of the "primitive art" invented by Western artists in the early twentieth century. At the same time, deep in colonial Equatorial Africa, many of the religious and cultural practices behind these traditions were disappearing. In this context Pastor Grébert set about collecting ethnographic objects in the Middle Ogooue, some of which came to the MEG.
Men and women who enter an initiation community in lineage societies in Central Africa seek to leave the secular world to become, irreversibly, that Other to whom the elders will pass on the tradition. There are about twenty such societies in Gabon, whose teaching and practices often overlap. Placed under the supreme authority of the protective ancestors, they rely on secrecy and the sharing of symbolic knowledge with a view to regulating the life of the group. The Bwete, which began among the Mitsogo, is the most widespread ritual society in Gabon.
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