In the vaults of the Swedish national ethnographic museums, in Stockholm and Gothenburg, approximately 18 000 objects, from areas within the boundaries of today’s two states of Congo, are housed today. Most of them were acquired by missionaries and military officers active within the Congo Free State (1885-1909), the badly reputed private colony of the former Belgian king, Leopold II. The author approaches these collections, not as tokens of Congolese material culture, but as traces of a, for long rather forgotten, Swedish cultural history and as expressions of western material genres. Through case studies of a selection of collections, created by Swedish men and women with differing roles in the colonial process, the paper focusses on the ways in which objects have been selected, joined and charged with new functions and significances.