Unles you know the road you have proceed down.

Unles you know the road you have proceed down, you cannot know where you are going.

--Temne dictum 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 lay open a new permanent hall of African history and agricultures Developed with substantial community involvement, this exhibition expresse a broad consensus about in what manner 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 relate about the exhibition's themes and "stories" are African and African Diasporan. an voices appear as texts; others echo in recorded excerpts. All are drawn from either literature, melodys poems, proverbs, scholarly essays, or interviews, the pair contemporary and historical. These voices make the visitor's experience earnestly more personal and immediate. At the same time they are joined according to more than 400 objects, mostly belonging to the museum, in telling the story of Africa's lengthy and dynamic history as well as its contemporary relevance and vitality. by the agency of thematic galleries the exhibition explores Africa's diversity and global impact. This portrait of the continent, the flow of a powerful partnership between the museum's research and exhibition staff and the various publics the institution give an account ofs is unlike any other. (1) The following propounds our reflections on the creation of "African Voices"--the proces intentions, and strategies.

PUBLIC CONTROVERSY

"African Voices" was born not at home of a 1992 public disputation surrounding the museum's previous permanent African exhibition, the "Hall of African Cultures" The latter had been unfolded 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 through the whole extent of its predecessor, whose framework was based onward nineteenth-century theories of social evolution, from the mid-1980s it too began to be embroiled in dispute Its anthropological interpretation and title of display were deemed on the museum staff and from a concerned public to be at best on the outside of date and at worst offensive to Africans it take the part ofed (2)

Throughout 1990 and 1991 the museum regularly received written criticism of a certain of the displays and label original from Africanists, African diplomats supported in Washington, and local African American organizations. While the museum administration was not blind to the question s 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 forward 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 clos in December 1992 The administration originally planned alone to remove the offensive label duplicate but in 1993 it acceded to its curators' athletic argument for a complete renovation of the installation. It constituted a Core Team of museum staff (5) whose members were to work in devise with a diverse Extended Team compos of Africans, African Americans, Africanists, and community leaders. The deliberation of the Extended Team, which numbered about 120 during the project's early years and about 60 in the later phases, be deriveded in a better final returns (6)

In 1994 the brace teams agreed broadly along the following lines: the exhibition urgencyed to highlight Africa's history, diversity, and dynamism; Africa's connections to the wider world; and African agency one as well as the other historically and in the current 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. pair were identified. The first, constituting the majority of the National Museum of Natural History's ten million visitors each year, is compos of intergenerational family clusters from around the United States. They part with 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 doom only fifteen minutes to the Africa Hall, if they visited it at all. The next to the first group includes local, regional, national, and international "stakeholder" audiences--Africans, family 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 detain the interest of both audiences.

Another point to be solved [i]or[/i] settled we faced was the physical limitations of the Africa Hall--a drawn out rectangle with 6,500 usable square feet of exhibition space interrupted from a colonnade that runs down the same side, effectively dividing the hall lengthwise. The space is further complicated from two entryways (one at each end) meaning that there is no entrance or exit in the traditional understanding (7) The location is not central to the museum's traffic be molten and the space is sandwiched between the Asia Hall forward one side and an exhibition devot to the Ice Age forward the other. Consequently visitors to the previous African installation sometimes became confused about where they were in time and place as they mov from undivided exhibit hall to the next