Published on 03.03.2023 at 3:18 p.m. by Journal du Gabon. Com with Gabon Review
The President of the Republic received from the hands of French President Emmanuel Macron a copy of the recording of songs, tales, Mvet, worship ceremonies and traditional rites performed in Gabon between 1954 and 1970, on 1is last March.
As soon as he arrived in Libreville, Emmanuel Macron officially handed over to his Gabonese counterpart a copy of the Pepper and Sallé ethnomusicological collection made up of 900 sound sequences representing more than 700 hours of recordings, collected between 1954 and 1970 in Gabon. This disc contains “All aspects of the Gabonese oral and musical tradition are represented there: musical pieces produced with the major groups of instruments used by the main ethnic groups of the country, songs, tales, epics (“Mvet”), worship ceremonies (“Bwiti” ) and initiation rites”.
According to the Gabon Review site, it was in 2005, fearing that the originals stored in the archives of the Museum of Arts and Traditions of Gabon would deteriorate, that the Gabonese government had requested the support of France to carry out their duplication. For the past 12 years, ethnomusicologists Herbert Pepper and Pierre Sallée from ORSTOM (now the Institute for Development Research – IRD) have been in charge of this. At the end of their work, Gabon now has its very first collection of national sound archives.
The delivery of the hard disk containing the copy of all these sound archives, was made on the sidelines of the first edition of the One Forest Summit, an event devoted to the preservation of tropical forests.
