A photo mural of the striking palace facade welcomes visitors to view artwork and artifacts from the Royal Palace which functions as the king's residence, cultural center and museum to many sacred and ritual objects of the Bamum people. Commissioned by the Royal Palace, the double-headed brass serpent symbolizes the Bamum kingdom. In the 1800s the great warrior King Mbuembue adopted the python to represent his ability to fight two enemies at once. A multimedia presentation describes how the nkisi nkondi, or nail figure dating to the 1700s, was used to resolve major conflicts among the BaKongo people. Gorilla family research.
Visitors can peer through binoculars to view videos of a mountain gorilla family at play.
The mobile home of a caravaneer, an actual tent made of goat skins displays the belongings of a Tuareg family. Tuareg merchants love their nomadic desert life, crisscrossing the Sahara on camels to reach metropolitan trading cities. Within the darkened interior of a slave ship, spotlights illumine the silhouettes of four enslaved Africans as they tell their individual stories. Each story begins in a different African language, with its translation completed in English or Spanish. African Genius in the Americas.