Thinking Big : Exhibit on Elephants Entices Schoolchildren to Learn About Africa

Elephants don’t forget. Marlon Dobbins certainly did not intend to either.

The 12-year-old glanced one last time at the notes on his clipboard, stepped up to the display case and took a deep breath.

The San Pedro sixth-grader is one of 60 children practicing to be pint-size museum docents Sunday to give a jumbo send-off to a unique exhibition of elephants that has been in Los Angeles for six months.

“These hats were worn by the kindi , the leaders of the Lega in Zaire,” Marlon told onlookers peering at a helmet-like headpiece displayed in a spotlighted gallery in Westwood.

The hat had a feathery-looking plume on top. But there was nothing frilly about it, the boy explained. The plume was an elephant’s tail, proof that “the chiefs who wore it were special.”

The exhibition, called “Elephant Tracks,” has been plenty special to the 13,000 fifth- and sixth-graders from San Pedro to San Fernando who have viewed it.

They started off visiting live elephants at the Los Angeles Zoo. Then they went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History to study dead ones--some stuffed and mounted in realistic settings, others fossilized.

The children ended up at UCLA’s newly opened Fowler Museum of Cultural History. An exhibit of artwork there, ranging from tribal masks to soapboxes, illustrates the elephant’s role in African culture.

Organizers at the Westwood museum say the project has been a first-of-its-kind collaboration between Los Angeles schoolteachers, museum curators and zoo operators. Corporate donations and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities covered the exhibition’s $700,000 cost, including school bus rides for many of the children.

As budgets become tighter, such inter-institutional cooperation is likely to become more common, even though rival organizations “have their own missions and their own slate of projects,” said Marsha Semmel, head of public programs for the humanities group in Washington.

“We’d definitely want to do it again,” said Jennifer Bevington, assistant chief of education for the Natural History Museum. Us too, said officials at the L.A. Zoo.

“There was room for each of the institutions to plan how to show their best,” said Cindy Wallace, educational director for the zoo.

Teachers such as 25-year veteran Marguerite Sawyer of Taper Avenue Elementary School in San Pedro said the three-way exhibition opened eyes as well as doors.

“The children came in with Disney-like images of elephants--you know, the ‘Dumbo’ character,” she said. “They left much more sensitive about a lot of things.”

Good, said Doran H. Ross, deputy director of the Fowler Museum. He coordinated the elephant exhibit with help from museum educational chief Betsy Quick.

“It is not about elephants. It’s about Africans,” Ross said. “We use the elephant as a hook to introduce children and adults to Africa. People think Africans live in poverty, half-naked and starving. Some people only trace the history of Africa from the colonization by Europeans.”

But the exhibit also underscores the plight of the Earth’s largest land mammal, whose numbers were cut in half between 1979 and 1989 to 600,000.

Among nearly 300 items displayed at the UCLA museum are tribal elephant masks and carved ivory tusks. The final display is a make-believe Victorian parlor featuring trinkets such as ivory shoehorns, knife and umbrella handles, and billiard balls.

The junior tour guides--who will be on duty between noon and 5 p.m. for Sunday’s free family-day finale--will explain to visitors that one tusk produces five billiard balls; 5,000 dead elephants create ivory keys for 350,000 pianos.

“I play the piano,” said fledgling docent Mindy Wynne, 12, of San Pedro. “I hope my piano has plastic keys, not ivory.”

The exhibit has struck the right chord, said docent-trainee Alana Roshay of North Hollywood. She was busy memorizing facts about the Igbo tribe of Nigeria that performs ogbodo enyi elephant spirit masquerades.

“I never paid attention to Africa before,” Alana said. “Now I will.”