Reflections on "African voices" at the Smithsonian's National Museum of natural history

African Arts, Summer, 2001 by Mary Jo Arnoldi, Christine Mullen Kreamer, Michael Atwood Mason

Unless you know the road you have come down, you cannot know where you are going.

--Temne proverb, Sierra Leone

In December 1999 the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History celebrated the opening of "African Voices" (Fig. 1). It had kept its promise, made seven years earlier, to open a new permanent hall of African history and cultures. Developed with substantial community involvement, this exhibition expresses a broad consensus about how to represent Africa and the African Diaspora to Americans.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Its title is emblematic of the philosophy behind its creation. The central voices of authority that tell about the exhibition's themes and "stories" are African and African Diasporan. Some voices appear as texts; others resound in recorded excerpts. All are drawn from either literature, songs, poems, proverbs, scholarly essays, or interviews, both contemporary and historical. These voices make the visitor's experience much more personal and immediate. At the same time they are joined by more than 400 objects, most belonging to the museum, in telling the story of Africa's long and dynamic history as well as its contemporary relevance and vitality. Through thematic galleries the exhibition explores Africa's diversity and global impact. This portrait of the continent, the result of a powerful partnership between the museum's research and exhibition staff and the various publics the institution represents, is unlike any other. (1) The following offers our reflections on the creation of "African Voices"--the process, intentions, and strategies.

PUBLIC CONTROVERSY

"African Voices" was born out of a 1992 public controversy surrounding the museum's previous permanent African exhibition, the "Hall of African Cultures." The latter had been developed in the 1960s to replace an African display that stood relatively unchanged since the opening of the National Museum building (now the Museum of Natural History) in 1913. While the Hall was a distinct improvement over its predecessor, whose framework was based on nineteenth-century theories of social evolution, by the mid-1980s it too began to be embroiled in controversy. Its anthropological interpretation and style of display were deemed by the museum staff and by a concerned public to be at best out of date and at worst offensive to Africans it represented. (2)

Throughout 1990 and 1991 the museum regularly received written criticism of some of the displays and label copy from Africanists, African diplomats posted in Washington, and local African American organizations. While the museum administration was not blind to the problems in the exhibition, its long-range plans did not call for renovation until 2004. (3) This situation, however, changed dramatically in September 1992, when a House of Representatives Subcommittee called the Secretary of the Smithsonian, Dr. Robert McCormick Adams, to testify on the National African American Museum. During that hearing Secretary Adams was asked directly about offensive and racist labels in the "Hall of African Cultures." (4)

The exhibition was closed in December 1992. The administration originally planned only to remove the offensive label copy, but in 1993 it acceded to its curators' strong argument for a complete renovation of the installation. It constituted a Core Team of museum staff (5) whose members were to work in concert with a diverse Extended Team composed of Africans, African Americans, Africanists, and community leaders. The counsel of the Extended Team, which numbered about 120 during the project's early years and about 60 in the later phases, resulted in a better final product. (6)

In 1994 the two teams agreed broadly along the following lines: the exhibition needed to highlight Africa's history, diversity, and dynamism; Africa's connections to the wider world; and African agency both historically and in the present. Moving from these general themes to a specific exhibition script and design would be a significant undertaking.

CHALLENGES

The initial exercise was to determine the target audiences for the exhibition. Two were identified. The first, constituting the majority of the National Museum of Natural History's ten million visitors each year, is composed of intergenerational family groups from around the United States. They spend an average of about an hour in the museum as part of their day-long visit to various destinations in the Smithsonian complex; many of them would be likely to devote only fifteen minutes to the Africa Hall, if they visited it at all. The second group includes local, regional, national, and international "stakeholder" audiences--Africans, people of African descent, and others interested in Africa--who would make "African Voices" a primary destination when they visited the museum. Our challenge was to hold the interest of both audiences.

Another problem we faced was the physical limitations of the Africa Hall--a long rectangle with 6,500 usable square feet of exhibition space interrupted by a colonnade that runs down one side, effectively dividing the hall lengthwise. The space is further complicated by two entryways (one at each end), meaning that there is no entrance or exit in the traditional sense. (7) The location is not central to the museum's traffic flow, and the space is sandwiched between the Asia Hall on one side and an exhibition devoted to the Ice Age on the other. Consequently visitors to the previous African installation sometimes became confused about where they were in time and place as they moved from one exhibit hall to the next.