EVIL ETHNOLOGY

The dark history of the human zoo

While zoos and menageries have long been a place where people have been able to view and study the animal kingdom, some European zoos in the 19th and 20th centuries took these ideas to an inhumane level. The ‘human zoo’ became a popular attraction for people to come and view individuals from elsewhere in the world, primarily Africa and Asia. These poor people were taken from their homes and transported across the globe to be placed in ethnological exhibitions where they were displayed to crowds and kept captive in manufactured surroundings that were said to mimic their authentic living situations. The narrative of these indigenous people as ‘savages’ was perpetuated in these settings, and they were seen as comparable to the animals kept in similar enclosures.

The exhibitions held at the zoos were often temporary and provided an extra attraction to draw in the crowds. World Fairs were also often home to these ethnological exhibitions, where indigenous people were made to put on displays to entertain the Western attendees. Sometimes, people were displayed in cages and it wasn’t uncommon for them to die from disease or from cold. One of the most infamous examples of the displaying of humans in a zoo is from 1906 when Ota Benga, a Congolese man, was kept in a cage with chimpanzees and apes at the Bronx Zoo in New York. He was labelled as “The Missing Link”, implying that he was closer to apes than people. The zoo faced some backlash at the time and the exhibition was quickly closed. Benga, however, remained at the zoo.