The Boulanger-Bouhière collection is an internationally renowned reference collection, consisting of over 600 African sanzas (lamellophones). It represents the numerous different types existing all over sub-Saharan Africa (see below). The instruments have been collected by the Belgian engineer François Boulanger and his wife Françoise Bouhière over more than fifty years. 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...
The Boulanger-Bouhière collection is an internationally renowned reference collection, consisting of over 600 African sanzas (lamellophones). It represents the numerous different types existing all over sub-Saharan Africa (see below). The instruments have been collected by the Belgian engineer François Boulanger and his wife Françoise Bouhière over more than fifty years. 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, he thus collected an important African musical patrimony which by the end of the 1960s had disappeared from the continent’s daily music life.
Having their origin in two distinct and distant parts of Sub-Saharan Africa (the Cameroon savannah and the area around the lower Zambezi River), sanzas have subsequently spread over the continent and today can be found in almost every black African community, in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the slave trade has also led to their dissemination in several areas of Latin America (Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, etc.) where its practice is still very vivid.
Not only the diversity of the Boulanger-Bouhière collection is remarkable, also the quality of the pieces is exceptional, most of them are fully-fledged museum objects. It includes almost each type of sanza, ranging from spectacular anthropomorphic lamellophones to little-known exemplars: Raffia (Niger delta), Mbira (Zambesi region), Tabwa (East-Congo), Likembe (Southern Congo), Loango (north of Pointe Noire, Congo Brazzaville), Kisansi and mucapata (Angola). In 2021, the whole collection was jointly acquired by the Musée de la musique (Cité de la musique – Philharmonie de Paris) and the Belgian King Baudouin Foundation which has given its part in permanent loan to the MIM.
