Sunday, March 5, 2006

At San Francisco's newest museum, Exhibit A is you.

Upon entering the three-story Museum of the African Diaspora, visitors see their reflections in a mirrored wall with this greeting: "When did you discover you are African?"

Against the staircase is a mosaic of 2,700 sepia-toned photographs, sent in by ordinary people from around the world -- African tribal leaders, mixed-race couples, children of all colors. There's even a photo of two women from Vietnam (which I noticed right off, since I'm Vietnamese American).

The pictures make up a giant image of a pensive-looking little girl from Ghana.

The museum, which opened in December, initially was planned 10 years ago as a showcase for the African American experience. But the project morphed into something more universal and appealing. After all, visitors like me have seen African American museums and historic sites in major cities. And too often, Africa and African Americans are cast off in society and history as the "other," isolated from the mainstream.

The purpose of the Museum of the African Diaspora is to explore our common heritage as humans by focusing on Africa as the place where the oldest human remains have been found and from which so many migrations occurred. The exhibits are about Africa as the familiar, not as the exotic.

Here, you won't see any photos of starving children. Instead, there's an interactive computer display about food. Press a button and learn how coffee, greens, peanuts and other foods journeyed from Africa to your table. Coffee is said to have first been cultivated in the Kaffa region of southern Ethiopia. The word "goober," slang for peanuts, might have come from the African "nguba." The exhibit shows how slave masters in the antebellum South threw away the leafy tops of turnips and slaves turned them into lard-flavored greens.

Then there's the music. The computer displays are divided into purely African music, African American music, and African-influenced Latin American and Caribbean music. Press the buttons and listen: tribal songs, jazz, gospel, hip-hop, the rumba and reggae. There's a temptation to press as many buttons as you can and make your own mix CD. (Maybe the museum could come up with a way for future visitors to do that?) Unfortunately, the museum corridor is so narrow that visitors feel crowded around the food and music exhibits. It can be distracting hearing hip-hop beats while reading about rice and beans.

Thankfully, the museum's most emotional exhibit is down the hall, behind a heavy curtain. Voices boom from the darkened room.

The day I visited, a group of high school students was sitting on the benches lining the room. They were quiet. The taped voices were that powerful.

The voices belong to actors, reading actual slave narratives. They fill the small space with such details that no images are needed.

"The stench, the stench," moaned a man's voice, describing how he had just entered the packed hold of a slave ship. Two men, he said, had jumped overboard and drowned. Another tried to follow but failed and was mercilessly flogged for preferring death to slavery.

A woman recalled the market in Bermuda where, as a young girl, she was examined by buyers as if she were a cut of meat. Nearby, her mother wept.

I couldn't help thinking that most people -- in this America of immigrants and refugees -- have experiences that contain a similar strand of separation and sorrow, although our stories are certainly not as tragic as the slaves'. My own family fled communist Vietnam by boat; my father never saw his father again.

The two contemporary art exhibits on the museum's top floor, both running through March 12, mix Africa's bitter legacy with hope.

"Linkages and Themes in the African Diaspora" includes painting, photography and mixed-media pieces collected by Eileen and Peter Norton (he's the creator of Norton anti-virus software). An artist from Angola has a display of patterns in yarn: a woman in geometric print dress, the Mickey Mouse symbol and a silhouette of a lynched man hanging from a tree. Two silk screens from an African American artist depict a Japanese man and woman wearing kimonos, traditional white makeup -- and dreadlocks.

The other exhibition is "Dispersed: African Legacy/New World Reality," three works commissioned by the museum. One installation, "Safe House," is a house frame filled with silver dishes and other kitchenware. The first ones you notice are shiny, but look in the back and you see objects that are tarnished and battered.

The 20,000-square-foot museum is too small to house expanding collections, so officials say it will host traveling exhibitions and commissioned work. The British Museum lent stone tools from Tanzania that are 1.8 million years old -- among the oldest man-made objects in the world. The display had never left the British Museum, according to officials.

But ultimately, the museum is about ordinary people.

Future projects include an oral history with stories from the survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Already launched on the museum's Web site: "I've Known Rivers," a call for stories about people of African descent.

-- Phuong Ly

The Museum of the African Diaspora is at 685 Mission St., San Francisco. Admission is $8. Info: 415-358-7200, http://www.moadsf.org.