The so-called "primitive" arts market on its guard against the "capture" of African works

Solange Bizeau remembers Saturday, March 26, 2022, as if it were yesterday. This Montpellier-based children's educator was attending a conference on Catholicism when she received an urgent call from a member of the Gabon Occitanie collective, of which she is the president. " He said to me: 'Meet me at the auction house, something serious is happening,'" she says. A Fang mask, used in the sacred rites of the Ngil society, is being auctioned a century after being brought back from equatorial Africa by colonial governor René-Victor Fournier. This elongated face made of fromager wood covered with kaolin, with a beard made of raffia fibers, is extremely rare.

" During colonization, rituals in which this type of object was used were forbidden. It was claimed that it was diabolical, that one should only read the Bible," Solange Bizeau explains over the phone. She adds: " This mask is not decoration, it is a mask of justice, imbued with the rites of our ancestors. It is the soul of a civilization, of a people. It could never have been given to Fournier, because such a mask is not given away; you have to be initiated to have it. It was taken; it is a form of capture." The Gabon Occitanie association is making a fuss to stop the sale. Without success. The mask is sold for 5.25 million euros.

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