Other Africas was on exhibit at the University Museum of Southern Illinois University from January 15 to April 21, 2002. This is an digital record of the exhibit that will be online indefinitely. This virtual exhibit can be navigated in a linear fashion with the navigation arrows above or in a nonlinear fashion using the navigation index to the left.

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What it all comes down to is that we are the sum of our efforts to change who we are. Identity is no museum piece sitting stock-still in a display case, but rather the endlessly astonishing synthesis of the contradictions of everyday life.

Eduardo Galeano
The Book of Embraces, 1991: 125

Critical observers have long noted that museum collections from Africa are composed largely of the spoils of colonial pillage. Thus the Africa we normally encounter in museums—the Africa of masks and ritual objects displayed on walls and in glass cases—is a fetishized Africa of colonial nostalgia. The objective of this exhibit is to offer images of Other Africas, perspectives that lead us away from the desolate and romanticized Africa of the Western imagination toward those places where African modernities are emerging.