This book, published on the occasion of the museum's opening, presents a collection of 77 important works from the Royal Museum for Central Africa's collections, analysed by academics, curators and connoisseurs of African art. Many of the works are included in the room dedicated to the temporary exhibition Art without Parallels. Other pieces, however, are related to the permanent rooms or open a window onto the hushed world of the RMCA's reserves, which are largely unknown to the general public. Coming from the Congo, but also from other countries such as Angola or Gabon, these pieces selected by researcher and curator Julien Volper are sometimes material witnesses of disappeared cultures dating from the 8th to the 10th century, or even from several tens of thousands of years ago! However, the majority of them belong to the recent period of the 19th - 20th centuries. The masks, statues, sculpted ivories, weapons, vessels and other artefacts on display all bear witness to a real creativity that the theorist Vladimir Markov summed up so well in 1919: "[...] this [African] art has no equal in the world".