An electronic map illustrates the movement of people over time, tracing the impulse to explore, trade and seek out education. What we were trying to show is that what Africa is, what Africa has been, and what it can become, can be told through the creative skills of the people. The staff at Natural History, and its consultant corps, faced a daunting challenge. The team decided to highlight both chronology and themes. Both are presented creatively, with the gallery itself divided into a series of passages, like ones you might find off a square in Casablanca or Accra.
New discoveries are always nearby.
Scores of visuals line the walls, and others are in cases, such as a 19th-century Kongo Christian staff and fanciful toys made in Rwanda from your basic wire. And there are the voices. They call out from ceiling speakers, video screens and listening stations. Nakunte Diarra, a textile artist in Kolo Kani, Mali, describes on video how mud cloth became her economic focus. With her aged dark face topped by an electric blue headwrap, she explains how she abandoned her work at the market and turned to an ancient skill of her village, making a special type of mud cloth, bogolanfini.