Interact exhibit opens Oct. 28
By American staff
In a less enlightened era, Africa was known as the “Dark Continent.” The St. Louis Science Center will shed some welcome light on this ancient and fascinating part of the world with the interactive exhibit Inside Africa, which opens on Saturday in the May Exhibition Hall and runs through January 7.
Inside Africa fills 6,300 square feet of exhibit space and explores the diversity of the world’s second largest continent. The exhibit views Africa and its peoples from historical and contemporary perspectives, through hands-on activities, multimedia presentations and an impressive collection of artifacts.
Departing from science, narrowly understood, Inside Africa is divided into four sections: Families and Festivals, Safari, Caravan and Diaspora.
Families and Festivals opens with a contemporary cityscape of urban life in Dakar, Senegal’s cosmopolitan capital on the Atlantic coast. Museum-goers can observe modern family life through realistic settings in the courtyard of a suburban home and through videos of the family going about its daily life. This section contains an orientation gallery that offers basic facts about Africa: its diverse countries, cities, languages, religions and geography.
Families and Festivals features artifacts such as a kora, a stringed musical instrument made from a calabash. The great epic poems of West Africa – many of them more intricate and more ancient than the works of Homer -are still performed on this beautifully voiced instrument. The kora on display once belonged to traditional musician (or griot) Soriba Kouyate, though a member of a separate lineage of griots – Sankung Susso – recently lived in St. Louis and performed epics on the kora while living here.
In Safari – an aspect of Africa that is better known than its epic poetry – visitors will be able to peer through binoculars to view videos of a mountain gorilla family at play. Emphasizing African wildlife and ecological tourism, this section features life-size animal skulls and their environmental adaptations and a giant termite mound. Common to the savanna, termite mounds such as the one featured in the exhibit can reach up to 15 feet tall and 15 feet in diameter, with walls up to 20 inches thick.
Caravan displays an oasis and a Tuareg family tent to reveal the complex desert ecosystem. A Tuarag tent is the primitive mobile home of a caravaneer, an actual tent made of goat skins that displays the belongings of a typical Tuareg family. Tuareg merchants live a nomadic desert life, crisscrossing the 3.5-million-square-mile Sahara on camels using prehistoric trade routes to do business in cities. This section also displays an interactive well exhibit. An interactive pulley simulates the power needed to hoist a 13-gallon bucket up 98 feet. Visitors can imagine the effort needed to draw enough water for a family and its animals – goats, donkeys and a herd of thirsty camels.
Diaspora teaches about another much-discussed aspect of Africa, the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Within the darkened interior of a slave ship, spotlights illumine the silhouettes of four enslaved Africans as they tell their stories. In a nice multi-media touch, each story begins in a different African language, with its translation completed in English or Spanish. Visitors can discover African contributions to the creation of contemporary societies, as well as ways people of African descent celebrate their cultures today.
Inside Africa is a national traveling museum exhibit which was produced by Evergreen Exhibitions and is sponsored by the Procter & Gamble Company and (locally) by the St. Louis American and Foxy 95.5 Radio.
The exhibit was developed around a permanent display at The Field Museum in Chicago, with consultation by Deborah L. Mack.
Ticket prices for the exhibit will be $3 for adults, $2 for children under 12 and seniors, and free to Science Center members. Visitors who also want to see the Omnimax film “Kilimanjaro” or the Science Center’s “Sportworks” exhibit can add $1 and do both. For tickets and information, call (314) 289-4464 or visit www.slsc.org.
