The Boulanger-Bouhière's collection is an internationally renowned reference collection, consisting of nearly 600 African sanzas. It represents the numerous different types existing all over sub-Saharan Africa. The instruments have been collected by the Belgian engineer François Boulanger and his wife Françoise Bouhière over more than fifty years.
Because of the sheer volume of the collection, the collection has been equally divided between the MIM and Musée de la musique (Cité de la musique - Philharmonie de Paris). The MIM has obtained its part as a permanent loan from the King Baudouin...
The Boulanger-Bouhière's collection is an internationally renowned reference collection, consisting of nearly 600 African sanzas. It represents the numerous different types existing all over sub-Saharan Africa. The instruments have been collected by the Belgian engineer François Boulanger and his wife Françoise Bouhière over more than fifty years.
Because of the sheer volume of the collection, the collection has been equally divided between the MIM and Musée de la musique (Cité de la musique - Philharmonie de Paris). The MIM has obtained its part as a permanent loan from the King Baudouin Foundation.
Not only is the collection a very valuable acquisition for display, it is also an extremely rich source for research because of its richness, diversity and documentation. As a whole it provides a large and fascinating overview of a once important African tradition, closely linked with the history of Belgian / European contact with African musical cultures.
After having spent some years doing civil service in Congo at the end of the 1960s, François Boulanger started collecting sanzas which he bought at flea markets, antique shops and prominent African art galleries in Belgium and in France, as well as from Belgian ex-colonials. Together with his wife Françoise Bouhière, he collected an important African musical patrimony which by the end of the 1960s had disappeared from the continent's daily music life. Over a period of more than fifty years they succeeded in assembling abundant testimonies of this fascinating tradition, mainly in Belgium.
François Boulanger has also dedicated a lot of time to the documentation of the collection. Each of the instruments has been carefully described based on the main organological classifications of sanzas. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the collector produced a detailed and richly illustrated personal catalogue, mentioning the geographic origin, typology and provenance of each piece. This meticulous inventory was later replaced by the "Sanza Blog", a website François Boulanger created to present his acquisitions and the history of lamellophones as well as other African musical instruments. Gathering a unique iconographic documentation (colonial photographs or postcards, exhibition views, etc.), this blog is still regarded as a precious resource by African art collectors and scholars and has contributed to the international fame of the Boulanger-Bouhière collection. On the occasion of two major exhibitions dedicated to the collection in 2011 and 2012 (see annex), two catalogues were also published, presenting a significant number of sanzas.
