Networks of Missionary Collecting

On the Provenance of the Collections of the Missionaries of Africa – Weiße Väter e.V.

The goal of this project is to reconstruct the networks relevant to the collecting activities of missionaries in a colonial context. This is done using the Missionaries of Africa (colloquially known as the “White Fathers”), which has been active in sub-Saharan Africa since 1878, as a case study. As a contribution to foundational and contextual research, the project uses the example of the African Missionaries to reconstruct the complexity and multifaceted nature of the networks relevant to missionary collecting and examines their scope within the societies of origin and in colonial Germany. It highlights implications for provenance research, particularly with regard to the multitude of actors involved and the multilateral nature of missionary collecting in the colonial context.

“The collecting activities of missionaries were always embedded in complex networks that, to this day, have scarcely been understood or reconstructed. This project is intended as foundational and contextual research designed to enrich the discourse on provenance research, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.” Martin Radermacher, Project Director