Giant Masks from the Congo

The remarkable collections of the Royal Museum for Central Africa were assembled over a period spanning more than a century through purchases, field work, and donations. The collectors came in many guises: territorial agents, agricultural engineers, ethnologists, soldiers, physicians. And some were missionaries.
Jesuit missionaries acquired an impressive number of pieces from the south-western part of what is now the current Democratic Republic of the Congo. Their collection work and the scientific ties they created with the RMCA are the subjects of this book.
The Jesuits, men of the cloth who were also researchers, contributed to a greater knowledge of the diverse cultures of the RDC.
Numbering in the thousands, the pieces they gathered were initially divided between the museum in Tervuren and the Leuven-Heverlee missiology museum. The latter is now closed but its collections, a little-known part of cultural heritage, were entrusted to the RMCA in 1998.
A selection of these 'Jesuit objects' are presented in context in this book, which also discusses why and how these pieces, destined to become part of the museum realm, were procured. This book is also the catalogue for the Giant Masks from the Congo exhibition (BELvue, 13/05-08/11/2015).