Molly Wight, 7 December 2017
When my planning group was looking through the African Heritage Room archival documents for items to include in our exhibition, we stumbled across a booklet on the symbolism and thematic narratives in the room. Besides the overall desire of the Room Committee and the architects to convey Pan-African themes, there was a specific concept that they wanted to convey in the room. This was the concept of “Mother Africa”, which either mean thinking about the continent of Africa as the mother of the human race or the existence of a common ancestor of all African peoples. This theme is represented by the position of the Queen Mother of Benin in the center of the door of the African Heritage room.
When we were looking through the online archives of the objects in the Nationality Room collection which were not on display, however, we discovered that there were two bronze replicas of symbols that represented the Queen Mother of Benin. Neither of these objects had been included on our list of pre-selected artifacts, but we felt that they were important to include in our narrative of the concept of identity in the Nationality Rooms. The two objects were the bronze head of the Queen Mother and the bronze rooster that symbolized the power that the Queen Mother held. I particularly felt that the sculptural head of the Queen Mother Idia, the first Queen Mother of Benin, had the potential to be a key object in our exhibition.
As we further developed the plan and layout for the exhibition, it became clear that the African Heritage Room identity section of the exhibition would revolve around the Queen Mother and the position’s representation of the theme of “Mother Africa.” In the end, three of the five objects in that section of the exhibition offer information about her importance and invite the visitor to think about the ways in which all of Africa is connected. As a room that tries to represent the many nations and ethnicities of the continent of Africa instead of a single country, the Queen Mother offers ways to think about African diaspora as part of a historical narrative.