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Reviewed by:
  • African Voices
  • Paul Gardullo
African Voices. A permanent exhibition at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Content Development Team: Mari Jo Arnoldi (1993-1999), Mark Auslander (1995-1999), Linda Heywood (1994-1999), Ivan Karp (1993-1997), Christine Mullen Kreamer (1993-1999), Michael Atwood Mason (1994-1999), Sulayman Niang (1995-1999), Fath Ruffins (1993-1994), Theresa Singleton (1994-1998), and John Thornton (1994-1999). Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.

Entering the dim rotunda of the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History from the National Mall, one is immediately greeted by the museum's icon, a giant African elephant. Once billed as the largest ever captured, it is now cast ironically in the role of an explorer: "Trunk raised, ears fanned, this elephant is on the alert. Something has caught his attention and he's off to investigate." We're invited to follow his lead. Alert and with ears fanned, one turns right at the elephant's left tusk and is led on a circuitous journey through the museum's collections of dinosaurs of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, past the fossil mammals, and through the Ice Age. Directly after passing the skeleton of a giant mastodon and a diorama of a Neanderthal burial, this stroll through the earth's prehistoric ages abruptly ends in a wide bank of video screens filled with vibrant moving images and awash with the sounds of contemporary African pop stars such as Baaba Maal and Angélique Kidjo. "Come listen to the many voices of Africa," the video announces at this one of two orientation entryways to African Voices,a significant and new permanent exhibition on the history, cultures, and peoples of Africa.

African Voices,which opened in December 1999, is the most recent large-scale renovation at the Museum of Natural History. The product of a seven-year development process with broad involvement from various scholars and communities, the concept for redesigning the old "Hall of African Cultures" was born of public controversy as the culture wars were just beginning to heat up in the early 1990s. The result is ambitious, challenging, diverse, and entertaining. The goals of the exhibition are explicit: to present the diversity and dynamism of Africa by showing how Africans and peoples of African descent have created a variety of rich cultures throughout history and how they actively shape their lives and identities within a complex contemporary world. Implicit within these goals is a vital recognition of and attempt to dismantle a long history of Western stereotypes that have pictured Africa as the "dark continent"—in turns exotic, savage, monolithic, timeless, romantic, primitive—and the role that institutions like anthropological and natural history museums have at times played in producing and reifying those representations.

African Voicesdoes some heavy lifting in this regard, and it does so by placing the voices of historical and living Africans at the heart of the exhibit. Linguistic, cultural, and geographic diversity is of central importance as extreme care is taken in educating the visitor that there is more than just one African history and culture. Within each one of the broad and unique national cultures portrayed (approximately 400 objects from fifty-four nations are on display), exists a rich and variegated diversity of art, life, and expression, which identifies itself across regions and local communities. Specific individuals (artists, entrepreneurs, priests, and others) are pictured and profiled throughout the exhibit. African voices are heard throughout, interpreting the objects on display, singing at interactive sound stations, and ringing out from multiple video recordings. There is, as well, a small theatre that shows two brief but compelling [End Page 464]documentary films: one on resistance to slavery in the United States and Brazil, the other on the origins of Pan-Africanism and the fight against colonialism and apartheid (both American and South African versions).

As one might suspect from such an introduction, it would be an understatement to say that the reach of this exhibit is wide. African Voicesis not merely satisfied with providing and interpreting material from each of the continent's nations and presenting a historical overview that reaches across the millennia. It also concerns itself with demonstrating how African cultures...

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