In Brightest Africa

by Carl Ethan Akeley

The amount of light required on them will be relatively small because of the fact that they are to be viewed from a relatively dark central hall. We shall be looking from the hall into the source of light rather than from the source of light outward. Also, reflections can be reduced to a minimum and practically eliminated, owing to the fact that the groups are the source of illumination, by having the glass in the front of the case inclined at such an angle that it reflects only the dark floor.

In addition to the forty groups, twenty-four bas-relief panels in bronze (six by eleven feet each) are planned as a frieze just above the floor groups and along the balcony to form a series around the entire lower floor, becoming a part of the architectural decoration of the hall. The sculpture of each panel will tell the story of some native tribe and its relations to the animal life of Africa.

For instance, one panel will show a Dorobo family, the man skinning a dead antelope brought in from the forest to his hut, where are his wife and babies and two hunting dogs, their only domestic animals. A further interest in animal life will be revealed in the presence of the dead antelope as it is a source of food and clothing, for these people live entirely by hunting. Another panel may show a group in Somaliland with camels, sheep, goats, cattle, and ponies at a water hole, domestic beasts furnishing the interest in animal life. Still another panel completing the Somali story will represent a group of Midgans in some characteristic hunting scene. While each of these panels should be a careful and scientifically accurate study of the people and their customs, accurate in detail as to clothing, ornaments, and weapons, the theme running through the whole series should be the relationship of the people to animal life.

If an exhibition hall is to approach the ideal, its plan must be that of a master mind, while in actuality it is the product of the correlation of many minds and hands. In all the museums of the world to-day there are few halls that reveal a mastering idea and an interdependence of arts and crafts. Administrations change. One man's aim is replaced by an aim entirely different when another undertakes his work. The institution's inheritance of exhibits must usually be housed along with the new. Recently acquired specimens, satisfactorily mounted, are crowded in inadequate space and completely subordinate those specimens which, although they are of equal importance for the understanding of the spectator, give no illusion of life and have no appeal. Even when the architectural arrangement is good and the taxidermy acceptable, a heterogenous collection of exhibition cases or an inadequate lighting system may mar the harmony of the whole. Thus, there are plentiful opportunities in the meandering process, of which an exhibition hall is frequently the result, for the original plan to become fogged.

But no such conditions shall spoil the symmetry of Roosevelt African Hall. Every animal killed has been carefully selected with this great exhibit in mind. Each group mounted is being constructed as an integral part of the whole. A building has been especially designed to give the exhibit the most effective and appropriate setting. And the future is being insured by the training of men who shall carry forward the technique so far developed. Each man is carefully chosen. Each must have energy, common sense, a special ability, and a great love for the duties at hand. And although each may be a specialist in his own line, all are forming the habit of working together as day by day they assemble the carefully tanned skins, the clean, well-shaped manikins, the silk and wax leaves and grasses, and the painted canvases for the backgrounds. For the first time we have the opportunity to train a group of men not only to practise the various arts which are combined in making modern zoölogical exhibits, but also to further develop the methods that make this sort of museum exhibition worth while from the scientific and artistic standpoint. In this considerable corps of men I am resting my hope that the technique of my studio shall be carried on to higher perfection instead of scattering or being carried underground when my part shall be done. This is important not only for Africa, but for all other continents as well, inasmuch as we are making records of rapidly disappearing animal life. From my point of view, this school of workers is perhaps the most important of all the results of the work on Roosevelt African Hall.

Every group in Roosevelt African Hall must be made by the men who make the studies in Africa so that the selection of environment, the background, and the story to be told shall be typical and so that every detail of accessory or background shall be scientifically accurate. It was formerly the custom, and is still in many museums, to send hunters into the field to kill animals and to send the skins back to the museum where a taxidermist mounts them. The taxidermist does not know the animals. He has no proper measurements for them. Usually the hunter does not supply them and, even if he does, they are of little value; for one man's measurements are not often reliable guides for another man to work by. In making a group as it really should be done, we cannot rely on one man out in the field to shoot and another back at the museum to mount. The men who study the animal and who shoot him must come back and mount him, and the men who make the accessories and who paint the background must go and make their studies on the spot. When all this is done the cost of the skins, instead of being half the expense of a group, is not five per cent.

I shall make the gorilla group, on which I am now at work, a real example of the proper method. A gorilla group undertaken three years ago in the average museum would have been done in the following manner. Skins would have been purchased from hunters in Africa. The men who were going to mount them would have studied the available writings on gorillas. They would have found out that the gorilla was a ferocious animal who inhabited the dense forests and, like as not, that he lived in trees most of the time. And that is the kind of animal the group would have shown.

Not satisfied with such a method, I went to Africa to get acquainted with the gorilla in his home. I found him in a country of marvellous beauty, spending much of his time in the open forests or in the sunshine of the hillsides. I found, too, that he was neither ferocious nor in the habit of living in trees. He can climb a tree just as a man can climb a tree, but a group of human beings up a tree would be as natural as a gorilla group in the same position.

The setting of the group of five gorillas is to be an exact reproduction of the spot where the big male of Karisimbi died. In mounting them I have my personal observation, my data and material to work from. My own measurements are significant and helpful. I have photographs of the scenery, the setting, and the gorillas themselves. I have photographs of their faces—not distorted to make them hideous but as they naturally were—and death masks which make a record that enables me to make the face of each gorilla mounted a portrait of an individual. All this makes these unlike any other mounted gorillas in the world. After all the work that I had put on them I was glad to get the corroboration of one who knows gorillas as well as T. Alexander Barnes. He had followed gorillas in the Kivu country where I got my specimens. As he looked at the first of the group standing in my studio, he exclaimed, "Well, thank God! At last one has been mounted that looks like a gorilla."