When ‘wild savages’ were put in the zoo Claire Prentice
Tells the disturbing true story of the tribesmen and women put on public display in 19th-century freak shows in Europe and the US
IN 1976, the staff of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris dismantled an exhibit which had been on show since 1816 and dispatched it to the storage vaults.
The macabre display, which consisted of the cast of a woman’s body, her skeleton, pickled brain and genitalia, was all that remained of Saartjie Baartman, better known as the Hottentot Venus, a black woman whose “enormous” hips, “oversized” buttocks and enlarged labia had thrilled and scandalised Georgian London.
Baartman had been brought from her home in South Africa to England in 1810 and put on stage wearing a flesh-coloured leotard, African beads and ostrich feathers. Scientists studied her voluptuous proportions and theorised about the voracious sexual appetites of “savages”, while the public paid a shilling to ogle and hurl obscenities at her.
Putting Baartman on display was one of the earliest and most famous examples of a phenomenon that became known as the “human zoo”.
Nineteenth-century Britain was fascinated by the strange and the exotic. Human zoos, which displayed people from far-flung corners of the globe in a “natural” or “primitive” state, became a popular form of mass entertainment.
These ethnographic exhibits can be traced back through 16th-century royal courts to ancient Egypt, where black “dwarves” from the Sudan were exhibited.
I had never heard of human zoos until I came across a blackand-white photograph of a group of tribesmen wearing loincloths, sitting around a campfire in a fenced-off enclosure, watched by white-skinned men in suits and bowler hats.
This chance discovery led me to write The Lost Tribe of Coney Island, which tells the true story of the Bontoc Igorrotes, who, in 1905, were taken from their homes in a remote, mountainous region of the northern Philippines to the US. There they were put on show at Coney Island and billed as “head-hunting, dog-eating savages”.
The Igorrotes (as they were known in the US) met the president’s daughter, were studied by anthropologists and courted by Broadway stars. Americans wanted to save them — visitors brought them clothes, offered to adopt them, and donated money to send the children to school.
On the other hand the government, which had recently colonised the Philippines, hoped to drum up popular support for its policies by showing the voters that the “savages” were far from ready for self-government.
The Igorrotes’ story ended with a court case and public scandal after their ill-treatment and shameful exploitation by their American manager became known. But the Igorrote show trade continued for a decade, with tours to London,
ICON OF BESTIALITY: ‘La Belle Hottentot’, above, a 19th-century print by an unknown artist, shows Saartjie Baartman being scrutinised SHARP COMMENT: Ota Benga, a Congolese, was displayed in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo in New York in 1906 Edinburgh, Paris, Ghent and Cuba, before the US government eventually intervened, in 1914, and banned the exhibition of Filipino tribesmen.
The appeal of human zoos extended to every level of society. In the US, the showman PT Barnum created the Grand Congress of Nations in 1884, presenting “strange and savage” tribes, including “ferocious” Zulus, Sioux Indians, a “savage” Muslim, a group of Australian Aborigines and a Nubian.
Barnum spawned hundreds of imitators and toured extensively around Europe.
But it was London that emerged as the capital of the human zoo, playing host to troupes of Zulus, groups from Ceylon, the Sami from Lapland, Native Americans, Inuit and Bushmen. In 1859 Charles Dickens saw a display of Zulus in London and was so inspired he wrote a pamphlet about them.
The popularity of human zoos in the second half of the 19th century led to the emergence of a new breed of showmen who toured distant lands looking for exotic human attractions.
Some of the human exhibits were coerced into appearing or even kidnapped. Others agreed to go on tour in return for a wage. As the trade grew, local middlemen began working as recruiters. They negotiated terms on behalf of the “exotic peoples”, drew up contracts and took a cut of the profits.
Sometimes the people they brought back were exhibited alongside animals and “freaks” — from the bearded lady to Siamese twins. Others were displayed in mock tribal villages.
As audiences grew more demanding, the human exhibits were pressed into performing native dances and religious rituals. They gave demonstrations — weaving tribal garments, cooking “authentic” dishes, and holding sham battles. They were often required to wear little more than strips of cloth to satisfy the curiosity of their visitors with an “authentic” flash of dark flesh.
As recently as 1914, at the World’s Fair in Oslo, 80 men, women and children, dressed in traditional clothes, spent five months living in palm-roof huts in a Kongolandsbyen — or Congolese village — where they were visited by 1.4 million Norwegians.
The exhibit was described by the newspaper Aftenposten as “exceedingly funny”, and the Norwegian magazine Urd concluded: “It’s wonderful that we are white.”
Their appeal was not purely commercial. Anthropologists and scientists flocked to the villages to observe the exotic inhabitants. They studied their customs and language, took measurements of their bodies, heads and facial features. These statistics were then used to back up theories about the racial su-
The US government eventually banned the exhibition of Filipino tribesmen
periority of the white man.
But, in time, scientists began to distance themselves from the ethnographic exhibits.
Sometimes the human exhibits were treated cruelly, and kept as virtual prisoners.
One of the most heart-rending stories is that of Ota Benga, a young boy from the Congo who was displayed in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo in 1906. Benga was described in the press as “a dwarfy, black specimen of sad-eyed humanity”. His teeth had been sharpened to points and Americans came in their hundreds of thousands to see him. He posed with them for photographs for 25c. A public outcry led to Benga being released and transferred to an orphanage. Eager to feel at home in the US, the adult Benga had his sharpened teeth capped, and began to study English.
He moved to Virginia, where, despite his eagerness to be accepted by his new neighbours, he continued to be treated as an oddity. In 1916 he removed the caps from his sharpened teeth before shooting himself in the head. He was 32.
Most visitors to human zoos looked on with appreciative fascination. There was, however, a vocal minority who objected to the degrading displays. Baartman’s case was taken up by antislavery groups in London who tried in vain to have her freed.
By the 1930s, human zoos had fallen out of fashion, replaced by other forms of mass entertainment such as TV and cinema.
What happened to Baartman? She was sold to a showman in France, where she began to drink heavily. She died in December 1815.
Napoleon’s surgeon, Georges Cuvier, carved up her body before displaying bits of it in the Paris museum. In 2002 her remains were returned to South Africa and given a ceremonial burial. It marked the belated end of exhibiting humans.
Today, we are intrigued that such displays were once thought acceptable. Artists Lars Cuzner and Mohamed Ali Fadlabi recently reconstructed Norway’s Congo village from 1914 as an art installation, using volunteers from around the world. And Exhibit B, a piece which opens on Saturday at this year’s Edinburgh Festival, before opening at London’s Barbican on September 23, presents 12 tableaux vivants, each featuring motionless, nearly naked African performers placed in settings inspired by real people and events. Attitudes have changed, but the fascination with this bizarre episode of human history remains. — © The Comment on this: write to tellus@sundaytimes.co.za or SMS us at 33971