The 70,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa preserved in the musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac come from the former Africa and Madagascar collections of the “musée de l'Homme” and the “musée national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie”.

It was above all in the second half of the 19th century that these collections were constituted, with the first voyages of exploration to Africa, for example to the Congo by Savorgnan de Brazza. The development of ethnography was accompanied from the 1930s by field collection expeditions, one of the most well-known of which was the Dakar-Djibouti expedition. Also from this period onwards, colonial administrators as well as collectors and merchants became major actors in the enrichment of museum collections.