The MEG holds the 85 objects sold when the “Black Village” went bankrupt. The list of their purchase by the Archeology Museum in 1896 only mentions their appearance and supposed uses. The Ethnography Museum’s inventories would subsequently imagine a specific geographical origin for them, by “stylistic” deduction, concealing the reason for their presence in Geneva and their confused and multiple identities in favour of a standardized, and therefore false, ethnographic description. With the texts of Émile Yung (1854-1918), at the time professor of racial anthropology and a regular visitor to the “Black Village” for his “measurements”, the press in 1896 promoted: “a room full of works of art, wooden and ivory statuettes, ornaments of all kinds, furniture, etc. that is
not one of the least curiosities in this exhibition”. It is as impossible to know whether this was the lot seized by the debt enforcement Office as it is to understand the value for the families exhibited of these objects left behind in Geneva. F. Morin/MEG