Human Zoos

In 1897, 267 people were brought from Congo to the Brussels International Exhibition. AfricaMuseum explicitly describes their removal as forced. Three fenced “villages” were built for them at Tervuren, where the exhibition held its colonial section. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, international exhibitions and amusement parks displayed people from colonised countries in such purpose-built “villages”. An encounter with another culture became a performance, while colonial rule was justified as a means of “civilising” its participants.

1. The girl by the wooden rail

2. Filipinos at Dreamland

A separate, fourth display was called the “village of Gijzegem”, after the Belgian commune where Abbot Van Impe taught young Congolese people. They were presented as evidence of his “civilising” work. The exhibition helped Leopold II seek support and investment for his colonial project.

3. A village at Tervuren

4. The “village of Gijzegem”

The summer was cold and wet. Many participants fell ill, and seven died. Refused burial in the local cemetery, they were buried in unconsecrated ground. Their remains were later moved to the grounds of St John the Evangelist church in Tervuren. Contemporaries criticised the treatment of the Congolese, and their deaths caused a scandal. In 1898, the Colonial Palace nevertheless became a permanent Congo museum.

Zoos also put such shows on their programmes. In Hamburg in 1875, animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck exhibited Sámi people with reindeer. His business combined animal displays with performances by people brought from different countries. Around 1900, Hamburg also hosted Gustav Hagenbeck’s “Indian show”. A postcard shows participants standing beside elephants before a palace backdrop. The show carried its organiser’s name; the catalogue does not name the people pictured.

5. Indian show in Hamburg

At St Louis in 1904, the Philippine exhibition served a similar purpose: to show Americans their new colonial possession and justify US rule there. The fair also staged Anthropology Days, recruiting people from its ethnographic displays. Contests in throwing, archery and other exercises were intended to support the organisers’ racist belief in white Americans’ physical superiority. They were separate from the official Olympic Games. Truman Hunt ran the fair’s “Igorrote village”. After the fair closed, he returned to the Philippines to recruit a new group to take to America.

6. Visayan participants

7. Archery at Anthropology Days

In May 1905, 51 people from the Bontoc region of the northern Philippines arrived at Coney Island. Luna Park opened a “village” where visitors paid admission. Hunt promised each participant monthly wages and earnings from the sale of their handmade goods. The full terms of the agreements are not known. Visitors bought a ticket to see life in the Philippines; Hunt determined what they saw.

Participants were made to build structures over and over, stage ceremonies and hold “dog feasts”. Newspapers spread Hunt’s sensational accounts. According to research by the Coney Island Museum, people complained of long hours, inadequate food and being forbidden to leave the site. Part of the group was moved to the neighbouring Dreamland park in August 1905. Their stay at Coney Island ended in September, but the tour of America continued.

8. People in an exhibition village

9. Entrance to Luna Park

10. Visitors at Dreamland

After leaving New York, participants told authorities that Hunt had withheld their pay. He was arrested in October 1906 and spent eight months in jail.

11. Dreamland after the fire

The photograph of the girl is often linked to the summer of 1905 and Hunt’s group. The Bain News Service negative itself says only “Filipino baby Coney Island”; the Library of Congress establishes neither the year nor the park. Her connection to that group is also unproven. The archive record gives no name and no account of her life after Coney Island.

The displays continued in Hamburg. In 1909, Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Carl Hagenbeck’s zoo and spoke to participants in a display. The company continued to stage such shows after the First World War. According to Tierpark Hagenbeck’s published history, it organised more than 70 over six decades, in Hamburg and elsewhere. The last at Stellingen took place in 1932, when Circassian horse riders performed for the zoo’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

12. Wilhelm II at Hagenbeck’s zoo

13. Woman and children at a fence

14. A path beside a fence

At the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, a “Congolese village” appeared again. More than 600 Congolese had come to Belgium; 120 were displayed by day in the “Tropical Gardens”. Racist treatment by visitors provoked protests. Many participants left, and the village closed early. Eight-month-old Juste Bonaventure Langa died during Expo 58; the cause is unknown. Congo became independent just two years after the exhibition.

15. Girl beside a fence