Paper short abstract:

From the accounts of the missionary experience in Central Africa until the first quarter of the century XVIII, this presentation seeks to draw the complex framework of relationships that were woven from these objects between European missionaries and African societies .

Paper long abstract:

In 1691, returning from his mission in Nsoyo on the left bank of the Congo River, Father Andrea Pavia brought an indefinite number of African religious objects. Admittedly, the missionary gave those pieces in the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, but it is not known their final destiny. The african cultural objects are a constant presence in the reports produced by catholic missionaries who, since the sixteenth century, crossed the region and developed activity, both in Kongo, and Mbundu regions, further south. Referenced generically in reports of priests, persecuted so insistent during their everyday wanderings through Africa, these objects are rarely described both in its visual presentation, and in its practical purposes. In its uniqueness, the collection assembled and brought to Europe by Andrea da Pavia raises various questions referring both to the relationship that the Catholic missionaries had with these objects, and in general, with the cosmological universe that gave them meaning, and at the same time, for the way that in certain periods and in sectors of African societies such objects coexisted without apparent conflict with the sacred objects of Catholicism. From the path of Andrea Pavia and using other accounts of the missionary experience in Central Africa until the first quarter of the century XVIII, this presentation seeks to draw the complex framework of relationships that were woven from these objects between European missionaries and African societies.