THE CONGREGATION OF THE HOLY GHOST IN AFRICA
139
FIG. 15 (bottom):
Photo taken by a Spiritan.
Katanga, DR Congo.
C. 1920–1930.
© CSSp.
The reverse of this photo has a
detailed annotation: “The principal
wife of the chief is dressed in silk and
shelters her complexion under the
parasol, while her husband consults
the fetishes of the Tambwe sect to cure
her rheumatism. The witch, on the
right, holds the kalema, a formidable
weapon that is only a small blade with
a curved handle in a zigzag pattern.
All those that the witch touches with
the kalema must pay a goat. This
twentieth-century witch, with her silk
headscarf, wears a red velvet skirt. A
branch of the Congo is in the background.”
that as men of the church who are uniquely and
best suited to do so, they must be the ones to make
judgments on religious issues, even on ones they
consider to be archaic manifestations, such as beliefs
in the power of spirits and ancestor veneration.
A Few Spiritan Ethnologists
Alexandre Le Roy was a veteran in the fi eld who
spent eleven years in Kenya and Tanzania on the
East African coast and then four more in Gabon.
He was amazingly active in Africa. He founded several
missions, compiled the fi rst Kiswahili-French
dictionary, charted the courses of rivers, climbed
Kilimanjaro, and discovered unknown species of
plants and insects. Above all, he was interested in
people and in their ways of life and their beliefs. He
describes them abundantly in his travel notes, and
sketches of them illustrate his books: A travers le
Zanguebar (1884), Au Kilima-Ndjaro (1893), and
Sur terre et sur l’eau (1894). Two other important
works of his confi rm his status as an accomplished
ethnologist: Les Pygmées. Négrilles d’Afrique et
Négritos de l’Asie (1905) and La religion des primitifs
(1909). In the latter he published the series of
lectures he gave over a three-month period (1907–
1908) to inaugurate the History of Religions chair
created at the Institut Catholique de Paris with the
support of Pope Pius X.
Throughout his life, Le Roy tried to practice his
own precepts and to prove that one could be “a
good Christian and a good scientist at the same
time.”9 However, despite his signifi cant intellectual
infl uence, not many of his Spiritan peers followed
his example. One of his main disciples was
Father Henri Trilles (1866–1949), who was one of
the fi rst explorers of the Fang territory of northern
Gabon. He published several articles on the
subject and collected a number of objects, which
he gave to the Musée d’Ethnographie de Neuchâtel.
Among these is that museum’s famous Betsi
Fang reliquary head. Another was Father Constant
Tastevin (1880–1962), who became a specialist
on the Tupi Indians of Amazonia before going on
two scientifi c expeditions to Africa, from which he
returned with, among other things, an important
group of ritual objects of the Hoyo in Cabinda
(Portuguese Congo). Lastly, Father Charles Estermann
(1895–1976), who spent half a century living
in Angola, had a keen interest in the cultures of the
region and published a number of anthropological