LA CONGRÉGATION DU SAINT-ESPRIT ET L’AFRIQUE
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dispersed among various Congregation houses in
France, kept in little confi dential museums, or simply
displayed in the common rooms or hallways.
In the 1990s, the Spiritans renewed their efforts
to underscore the museum’s importance as a place
for the presentation of their collections by renovating
the Langonnet museum site. After the Second
Vatican Council, and in the context of decolonization,
the term “propaganda,” loaded as it is with a
connotation of conquest, seemed obsolete and inappropriate
for a church that saw itself as humble
and ever in search of dialog. “Missionary activity”
took over, and a dynamic of openness prevailed that
contributed to the Spiritans perceiving their ethnographic
collections in a new light. The museum became
a meeting place, where missionaries told of
their experiences and their knowledge of African
cultures with modesty and pragmatism, and visitors
were invited to participate in the discussions. The
collections were no longer seen as instruments of recruitment
or propaganda, but rather as a means for
nourishing exchanges in which every person could
talk about and question his own relationship with
the world around him.
This new approach is not incompatible with acceptance
of the methods of modern anthropology,
which provides a different and complementary
view of the Spiritan collections. Beginning around
2000, the relationships the Spiritans formed with
historians and ethnologists led the Congregation to
become aware that it had a responsibility to preserve
and transmit this unique heritage, of which
history had made it the guardian, but which, in
many respects, it understood very little about.
IV. THE SPIRITAN COLLECTIONS:
LITTLE-KNOWN EXAMPLES OF
ANTIQUE AFRICAN ART
The sale of a part of the Spiritan collections in the
late 1960s makes it diffi cult today to assess them
historically and in their entirety. A number of the
objects in them have now entered major private
collections (those of Morris Pinto, André Fourquet,
Armand Charles, and Alain Schoffel, among others)
and reappear sporadically on the art market or
in specialized publications.
Several of these works are masterpieces, including
prominently an extremely rare Luba-Hemba
caryatid stool from the Democratic Republic of the
Congo by the Buli Master, undoubtedly the fi nest