Missionary situation and ethnographic practice in Oubangui-Chari: the beginnings (1906-1908)

Situation missionnaire et travail ethnographique en Oubangui-Chari : les débuts (1906-1908)

Andrea Ceriana Mayneri (1)

1 IMAF - Institut des Mondes Africains

The first real ethnographic research on the populations of the French colony of Oubangui-Chari, now the Central African Republic, was the work of some Catholic missionaries of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit (sometimes known also as the Spiritans or Holy Ghost Fathers) and it followed a precise scientific and apologetic programme. This contribution is based on unpublished materials held in the general Archives of the Congregation (Chevilly-Larue, France) and concentrates on one early period in this missionary research programme. At the end of 1907 Fr Joseph Daigre left the mission of the Sainte-Famille and began living in a village populated by a group of Banda Togbo. His notes on the Banda language, his ethnographic notes and his drawings were to form the basis for his own ethnographic work and that which other colonial writers were to publish in Europe in the following decades. Starting from Daigre’s correspondence with his superiors and from some manuscript notebooks of observations and personal recollections, we can analyse how Daigre’s ethnographic interest combined with life in an African mission at the start of the century, and, from there, with the politics of research and evangelization that the Holy Ghost Fathers promoted internationally.

Domaines: Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie

Andrea Ceriana Mayneri. Situation missionnaire et travail ethnographique en Oubangui-Chari : les débuts (1906-1908). P. Valsecchi (dir.), Persona, transcendenza e poteri in Africa/Person, Transcendence, Powers in Africa, pp.63-82, 2019, 978-88-6894-344-8. ⟨halshs-03092440⟩