For more than a century, people were taken from their homelands and exhibited in human zoos. They were displayed alongside animals. This little known and deeply disturbing part of colonial history played an important part in the development of modern racism.
Using previously unpublished archive material this documentary traces how racism was constructed and disseminated in these so-called ‘human zoos’. Children, women and men were displayed like exotic animals, and ordered in a hierarchy of "races." They were cast as ‘Other’ in a manner that served to justify colonialism, and described as ‘savage’. It is a little known and deeply disturbing part of colonial history. Only a handful of the thousands of men and women recruited from the four corners of the Earth ever managed to tell their experiences. This documentary tells the story of six of them: Tambo, an Aboriginal from Australia; Kalina from French Guiana; Ota Benga, a Pygmy from Congo; and Marius Kaloïe, a Kanak from New Caledonia.
For more than a hundred years - from the mid 1800’s until the Second World War -they travelled the world in search of people — human beings they classified as exotic animals to be exhibited in human zoos. These exhibitions were a worldwide phenomenon. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries some 35,000 human beings were exhibited, to one and a half billion other human visitors. Human beings exhibited by other human beings in zoos and circuses, theaters and anatomy rooms. At colonial exhibitions and world fairs. These men and women were placed on the same level as animals. This was extremely disturbing. At the same time, there was a degree of conditioning which was very difficult to escape from. Children, women, and men were put on display in order to support a hierarchy of ‘races’, and to justify world-wide colonization.
Thanks to human zoos, racism became accepted and commonplace. Visitors flocked to see the ever more terrifying savages, which were marketed accordingly. Tambo - an Aborigine from Australia;
Ota Bengal -a Pygmy from Congo; Marius Kaloïe, a Kanak from New Caledonia; and Moliko, a Kalina from Guyana. They represent many thousands of people who were exhibited, but whose names history has forgotten. Remembering is not about attaching blame to people. Remembering is, above all, about understanding what happened, and understanding the influence these actions have had on all of us. Before they became mass entertainment, human exhibitions were reserved for the elite. As early as the 16th Century, Europeans imported ‘strange savages’ from far flung lands, for the enjoyment of rich aristocrats at royal courts. But, by the beginning of the 19th century, this fashion had spread to fairs, pubs and theaters, thereby reaching a wider audience.
In the United States the king of human exhibitions was Phineas Taylor Barnum. From as early as 1841 his famous ‘Freak Shows’ had attracted huge crowds of people, and had earned him a fortune. He wanted to put the strangest people in the world on stage: dwarves, mermaids, conjoined twins, a bearded lady, a giant — they were all assembled in a gallery of the bizarre, where visitors could catch a glimpse of an amazing and fantastic world. Hollywood didn’t yet exist, but Barnum was responsible for
establishing a fascination for the strange. Barnum revolutionized the American circus when he created the Greatest Show on Earth: a huge travelling circus with 5,000 seats. This was also where he presented his savages to the public. He wrote to more than a hundred American commercial agencies and consulates throughout the world asking them to send him real wild savages in order to increase his worldwide troupe of what he called, freaks The Irishman Robert Cunningham was able to satisfy Barnum’s wishes. When he heard about Barnum’s letter in 1883, he was in Australia, in north Queensland, home to the Aborigines, the country’s indigenous people who had been oppressed by British settlers, since the 18th century.
Deprived of their most basic rights, victims of violence and racial segregation, they were considered little more than a part of the Fauna and Flora. Queensland wasn’t a state then, but a colony. This was a turning point for the Aboriginal people, who had been living there for thousands and thousands of years and countless generations, because their land was being taken by the Europeans. Aborigines were forced to live in villages called, black camps. Cunningham met Kukamunburra, a young Aborigine man whom he re-named Tambo. Tambo’s companions were also given new names:
The prevailing pseudo-scientific ideology ranked aborigines the lowest among the hierarchy of human races, making them highly sought after for human and folk shows. They were considered unsuited to modern life and facing extinction. I do know that not long after Cunningham got them on the boat at Townsville they wanted to go back to their communities, they wanted to go home. We know that the people were not aware of what they were getting themselves involved with. Cunningham actually had to remove all their clothes so they wouldn’t run away. When they got into Sydney two people actually still escaped. One of them actually stabbed a policeman and the whole matter ended up before the court.
The judge still released the two escapees into the care of Cunningham through a bond.
In the wake of this upset, the group hastily boarded a ship in Sydney and after a long crossing, they joined the Greatest Show on Earth in New York. Barnum had prepared his new acquisitions to be the highlight of his show. He created a back story for each of them, and gave them roles to play. “Cower before Billy the hunter with his terrifying scars. Succumb to the charms of Susie, Princess of Queensland!
Experience the thrill as fierce warrior Tambo performs his sensational war dance.” The tour travelled across America at breakneck speed. The troupe’s appearance in more than 130 American and Canadian cities pushed them to exhaustion. While Barnum and Cunningham made a fortune. I can only imagine, coming from a remote island in north Queensland to be paraded in front of 30 thousand people — the horror they were feeling to be exhibited there. Over in a strange land, strange people, strange noises, smells. God knows how that would be. In 1884, one year after arriving in America and having travelled the whole country, Tambo fell ill and died, while still on tour. Cunningham had the body mummified and sold his remains to a fairground museum in Cleveland.
More deaths followed in quick succession; however — the show went on. Despite these losses Cunningham knew his troupe could conquer Europe. He shipped them to London, the capital of human zoos. In London they performed nightly at the Crystal Palace which was constructed in 1851 for the Great Exhibition. I’m not sure whether the visitors at that time had enough distance to say to themselves: This is a business — it’s not really real, but just acting. I don’t think that the distance was there - and that the dangerous thing. After England, the aborigines set out on an extensive tour
through the old-world theaters and music halls. Capstans Panopticum in Berlin, the Arcadia in St. Petersburg, the Folies Bergère in Paris, where the last survivors were photographed:
Jenny and Toby Junior, who would both contract tuberculosis. The fate of Billy, Tambo’s companion is unknown. The eyes of Billy are very sad. Just wondering where he is. Just looking at him, he’s confused. It’s a depressed feeling. Low self-esteem. Going overseas into another world, you know,
he’s been stripped of his powers - in a sense of- he’s been humiliated, because he’s dominated by somebody else who is telling him what to do. In our society, he was respected as a law man, but now he’s not. I mean you see that. With the support of the Australian government, Grand Dad Walter has brought home the mortal remains of his ancestor Tambo, so that he can finally rest in peace on Palm Island among his people. Tambo’s mummified body had been found in 1993 in the United States, in the basement of a funeral home in Cleveland, Ohio. I feel strong because he is back on his ancestral country. I feel his strength. His spirit is back home and he is free. He’s free.
This story needs to be told, purely because the mistakes of the past don’t revisit us in the future. In this period when exoticism was all the rage, show organizers were not the only ones to grasp the interest
that the exhibitions aroused. The colonial powers saw a ready opportunity to introduce to their citizens both their colonies, as well as the validity of their imperialist policies. At the end of the 19th century,
a renewed impulse to colonize developed in the West, that prompted the European powers — but also the U-S and Japan — to freely divide among themselves those territories still available, in particular Africa. The world was gradually appropriated by those who saw themselves as uniquely civilized. At the same time human zoos proliferated to justify colonial domination of the world. Colonized people have to accept, share, and promote their own myth. And that is exactly what happened in colonial times not only in Africa, but also in Japan and elsewhere. In order for the ‘savage’ to exist, those who are presumed to be savages must accept that, that is indeed, exactly what they are.
At the beginning of the 1890s, the role of the human zoos was shifting, in response to political objectives which were masterly staged and orchestrated. Moliko’s story is that of a survivor.
After months of humiliation, she was able to return to her village and her people. One hundred years later, her descendants recall the suffering of the exhibited people, and shed light on their trauma. Moliko and her companions belong to the Kalina people, natives of Guyana. In 1882, Moliko together with other people in her village left the banks of the Maroni river in Guyana accompanied by the sound of drums. She, and 32 others had volunteered to undertake the journey to Europe. The old people told us that there was a big party before departure.
They still remember a mast and that the ship gradually disappeared over the horizon. Until then they could still see what was happening. But when the ship was beyond the horizon, there was silence. The French explorer François Laveau, sent by the Ministry for Colonies, was able to convince the Kalina to head off into the unknown. He offered them money and beautiful sights, and vouched that they would be well treated. Molikos travel companions were men, women and children who came voluntarily, but were locked up in cages. They were supposed to make pottery in Paris and build dugouts. Instead they were forced to act as savages for the audience and were doubly humiliated in the process: they were not accepted for who they were, and they quickly realized that they are indeed, regarded as ‘savages’.
Subjected to constant humiliation, the Kalina, like all the other people exhibited at the time, were subjected to racialist scientific studies.
The exhibition of the Kalina was a great success. The public flocked to the Jardin d’Acclimatation. The Kalina embodied to perfection what human savages were meant to be like. The winter, disease and exhaustion rapidly caused the deaths of some members of the troupe in Paris. The show continued nonetheless.
Of the original 32 Kalina who travelled to France, only 10 returned to their village. Moliko was one of them. This part of Kalina history is very distressing, because the people could not mourn their loss. Grief is something very important for the Kalina people, and even a century later, it is still impossible to mourn. Caroline and Lydia are mother and daughter. They are direct descendants of Moliko. They have never seen these photos of Moliko and her fellow companions of misfortune, taken by Roland Bonaparte.
when I look at these photos. My father never talked about his grandmother leaving. I’ve never seen these photos. But I can look at them now. This unspoken trauma is something the descendants still struggle with today.
I don’t think it was right. What was the point?
The way the white people made them do all this nonsense!
What did they want with them?
Such behavior is mistreatment. If a white man takes them away, he must treat them properly. Such treatment was simply not correct. They wanted to force their will on the Kalina, but maybe they didn’t obey. Maybe that what happened. Nobody really knows what happened back then. There is no textbook, or course about indigenous history, and to date no historian has dealt with this aspect. Yet it is part of our identity, but also a facet of the history of France. That’s why we are interested in it today. The exhibition of the Kalina was an important first step towards a state exploitation of the colonized people,
for propaganda purposes. The Ministry of Colonies took control of human exhibitions. All private shows now needed its authorization. The productions spread across the Atlantic. America was now also getting involved.
Of all the peoples exhibited, one stood out in terms of popularity. Six diminutive Africans attracted everyone’s attention. They were Batwa pygmies from the Belgian Congo. The Saint Louis Anthropology Department had financed an African expedition led by the explorer Samuel Verner to bring them to be presented exclusively at the exhibition. Ota Benga was 1 meter 41 in height. This young man with the enigmatic smile was soon to be become the most popular among them. Samuel Verner was commissioned explicitly to bring back pygmies, because it was believed at that time that they were the least civilized people on the planet, and so the whole point of the Saint Louis World’s Fair
was to map human progress from the lowest to the highest, with the pygmies set to represent the lowest form of humanity. Since 1885 The Congo had been the property of the Belgian king Leopold ll. His authority was unchallenged and his rule was particularly violent and harsh. Acts of brutality were common place. Samuel Verner himself, said how he captured the pygmies; he wrote about how the people were crying as he was like loading these people onto ships and how some got away.
He also indicated how he had gone into villages with force — he was armed, and he had the consent, and the support of a brutal regime to exercise his mission. Of all the so-called specimens presented at the exhibition, the pygmies aroused the greatest curiosity among the visitors. They represented absolute savagery. Their small stature was due to a morphological adaptation to living in the equatorial rainforest. But according to Westerners, it signified that they were sub-human. They saw in them confirmation of man’s descent from apes; proof of Darwin’s famous theory of the ‘missing link’ between man and animal.
Day after day Ota Bengal was treated to the Americans vulgarity and contempt. Ota Bengal’s teeth were probably most responsible for the horrendous experience he had in the United States because of his
teeth which were chipped to points — a very common practice in The Congo. This imagery validated this idea that he had been a cannibal. Of course, he was not. This deception consummated Samuel Vermeer’s success: he received the Saint Louis gold medal at the closing ceremony of the exhibition, , which had attracted almost 20 million visitors. After travelling to the Congo again, the explorer finally took Ota Bengal to New York. His American adventure had resumed, but behind bars. It was 1906, Samuel Verder was unable to provide for his pygmy, so he loaned him to the head of the Bronx zoo,
who put him in a monkey cage. He was made to play the savage — with bow and arrows as props. In a few short years more than 40 thousand people came to see him in an enclosure he shared with a chimpanzee — his new partner with whom he performed small tricks.
There’s an outcry in the press, and not just the African American press, but increasingly in the mainstream press, that this is so degrading and so contrary to what a civilized nation should be doing, that zoo authorities together with some of the ministers in New York work out an arrangement to have Bengal conveyed to an orphanage. Now free, and in the care of a religious community, Ota Bengal hoped finally to be able to integrate into his adopted country. The black ministers who took him in, in 1910 gave him a Western Christian education. He went to primary school and took English lessons. Subsequently he was sent to Lynchburg, Virginia, where he got to know Anne Spencer, a respected African-American poet and civil rights activist. She taught him to write. Protected and supported, Ota Bengal tried to live a normal life and to go to work. But as a Congo pygmy, he could not adapt to the country of the Ku Klux Klan.
The end of the story is the first world war breaks out and it’s clear to Bengal that it’s going to be very difficult to get back to the Congo. And we don’t know exactly what precipitated his action, but he takes his own life. He has a gun and leaves his residence and shoots himself through the heart. At the time of his death, 12 years after coming to the United States, he had become the most famous savage in American show business. His body was never claimed by The Congo. Ota Bengasi story is the story of racism. The thousands of people who stared at Ota Bengal failed to see a human being. We can see how throughout history these men and women have been denied their humanity, in order to justify the alleged superiority of white people. The first World War reset attitudes towards exhibiting people, and to colonial operations. The two great powers — Britain and France chose out of economic and military opportunism, to enroll people from their colonies from 1914.
They now believe they can be civilized and useful if they can be kept under supervision. Yesterday’s savages were today’s brave soldiers or indigenous workers. In the eyes of the countries they fight for, they are now fighting an even more primitive savage: the Germans. After victory was achieved, Afro Caribbean, Hindu, African American, Kanak, African and Asian soldiers from the French and the Allied armies paraded on the Champs Ellysée to the cheers of the crowds. The human exhibitions after 1918 are different. Now they are no longer savages. Of course, they remain natives and not our equals,
but they no longer live in darkness. They are on the road to civilization and are portrayed as being at the service of the great colonial nations. The pacification of these territories is staged - with the help of folklore, exoticism, even eroticism.
The result is a world that only functions due to the domination of the West. The message remains the same: we are the masters and they are the natives. Marius Kaloïe was 21 years when he agreed to leave his New Caledonian homeland to travel to Paris with 100 fellow Kanaks. It was 1931. He trusted the French official who suggested he and the others present their Kanak culture at the Colonial exhibition in Paris. They were to return in 8 months. Some 100 people agreed to undertake the journey including teachers, students, customs officers, waiters and seamen. Little did they know that they would become the tragic heroes of one of the greatest humiliations in French history. In the Jardin d’Acclimatation, Marius was told he could not leave his enclosure unaccompanied to rest or pray. None of the promises made were kept. He had been tricked — it was as if he’d returned to the 19th century.
It was terrible, - they had to perform from morning till night: the women had to breastfeed in public. They had to build dugouts and dance all day. They were slaves! I think that violates human dignity. Even though nobody died, people should not treat other people like that. Some of the troupe went to Germany while twice a week the others performed at the Colonial Exhibition in Paris. The organizers exhibited them as natives from New Caledonia, as part of the colony’s official presentation. Unlike in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, they were not presented as savages, but as bold natives of the empire. France wished to showcase the scope of an empire, which was at its speak with a population of a hundred million, and an area of twice that of the Roman Empire. The colonial exhibition was two to three times the size of Disneyland in Paris - and it took place not outside but in the center of Paris, in former workers districts, that had been completely redesigned.
At that time, cinema was still in its infancy, sound film had just been invented, and here an entire colonial empire was now being recreated - it was like Hollywood. The exhibition was inaugurated by the President Gaston Doumergue, and Marshal Lyautey, joined by the Under Secretary of State for the
colonies Blaise Diagne. In just a few months 33 million tickets were sold. I think 1931 was the peak.
But that is not to say that a real decline was starting. It was important to show that France’s history, which had cost a lot of money and countless parliamentary debates, had finally paid off; and that the promise of educating inferior people to a level not too far removed from the nation’s standards, had been achieved. All over the world voices were beginning to denounce human zoos. For the first time an enormous scandal erupted. In France the human rights league, the communists, and even former colonists of New Caledonia were protesting.
All agreed that such displays were unacceptable. You could not glorify the civilizing mission of colonization, and at the same time exhibit fake savages. The Kanaks being exhibited in Germany also start rebelling and were less and less willing to play the game. The protests prompted the Minister of Colonies to order the Jardin d’Acclimatation to close the exhibition, and to bring back the part of the troupe in Germany at Hagenbeck. At stake was the honor of the French Republic, which could not be seen to be condoning such productions. The authorities decided to repatriate the troupe. The Kanaks arrived home in July 1932.
Marius Kaloïe did not wish to return. He saw his future in France and refused to board the ship in Marseille, and returned to the woman he loved. She was French, her name was Juliette Gabrielle Favre.
And meeting her was the only good luck he’d had in France. A few weeks later, the couple married in Bordeaux. What is surprising is that the marriage contract here says: The future wife wishes to keep her French nationality. Because Kanaks were considered to be foreigners, even though they came from a French colony. Sylvester was born one year later. She was only a few months old when Marius died in a tram accident. Her family always hid the fact that her father was a Kanak. Only in her old age did she discover her origins, thanks to a journalist friend. Today Sylvette has returned to the zoological gardens
where her father was exhibited.
It is a French, but also a New Caledonian story. I am proud, because he was my father, but the way he was treated is shocking. It’s not a very nice story, especially as I never got to know him. This place touches me. I have the feeling that these people are always present, here. In 2006, Sylvester arranged for Marius’s remains to be returned to New Caledonia. Today, he rests among his people in Nat halo cemetery, on the island of Lifou. We returned by ship and took him to the tribe. They prepared food, the children sang, everyone spoke about his story. He has returned. He is back home. The exhibition of the Kanaks was one of the last in Europe. The scandal was so great that such shows were no longer possible. In the decade prior to the 2nd World War, human zoos and colonial exhibitions gradually ceased.
The last of such exhibitions took place at the end of the decade in Britain, Portugal, Germany and Italy.
They were no longer profitable — the public was tired of them. Only a few diehards hung on, but their productions were so blatantly mediocre, that visitors shunned them. The end of human zoos marked the start of revolts heralding decolonization wars. To abandon the zoos was to abandon colonial domination. A new era had begun, but one of conflict and suffering. The next twenty years from 1940 to 1960 would be the darkest and most violent of the 20th century; the second World War, decolonization, the revolts against segregation in the United States — a wave of violent struggle swept all over the world. This long chapter of history really only concluded when the colonies won their independence from the mid -1950s through the mid -1970s. From there onwards, the west will try by any means to erase this shameful past.
The history of the human zoos is forgotten because it belongs to the history of folk culture, and not to the great colonial history. The researchers of the 50s to 80s found this phenomenon completely irrelevant. Today we are beginning to rediscover all this, and ask ourselves the simple question: how could people in the West believe that the human beings on the other side of the oceans, were all savages?
In the mid 1990’s, scientists and museum directors began to open the crates, search the archives, and even to exhume remains. It is important to study the past in order to understand what is happening in the present. For example, if you want to understand why racism exists in our societies, you only have to look at the human zoos, the history of colonization and slavery. Only then will you understand why there is still a claim for a superior domination today. To lay this past to rest, the bodies must rest in peace . Will we one day send home the bodies of the exhibited, as we did in the past with Tambo?
Will we one day write down Moliko’s story into the history books of Guyana and also France?
Or that of Marius Kaloie - to overcome the conflicting memories that persist — not least in New Caledonia?
What can we do, so that one day the body of Ota Bengal is reclaimed by The Congo, and written into his country’s history?
It is now the duty of a generation to rescue these stories from oblivion. Only by creating an enlightened culture of remembrance can we finally close the chapter on human zoos.
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