![]() Louis to see electricity for the first time, to hear the first telephone, and to witness around 3,000 “savages” from Africa, Asia, and the Americas living in “displays” that resembled their native villages. "I love black people!" - "Oh, you did better than I expected" - "The apartment's already rented".įor Salome Ysebaert, who conceptualised the museum's exhibition, such comments appear inoffensive and banal, but in reality are "microaggressions" revealing that racism is still lurking in minds, more than 60 years after the last "human zoo" in Brussels closed, in 1958.More than 20 million people attended the 1904 World’s Fair. In the final part of the exhibition, the issue of how this racist denigration persists in everyday language challenges visitors with cliched phrases written in big letters on a white wall. "And these stereotypes still exist today - proof that the colonial propaganda worked." Over and over again, "the same message was repeated thousands of times, and the public ended up truly thinking that the African was a cannibal, inferior, dirty, lazy," one of the curators, Maarten Couttenier, told AFP. Twelve years later their number grew 20 times bigger, and the colonial section of the World Fair in Brussels' satellite town of Tervuren attracted a million visitors. While Germany and France had already hosted their own "villages", Belgium got its first in 1885, near Antwerp, with 12 Africans. Some of the books and articles making up the collection in the "Human Zoo" exhibition Kenzo TRIBOUILLARD AFP Imported exotic decors gave a curious public the impression of visiting real African villages. In Europe, the "human zoos" reached their peak popularity from the 1880s after new colonial conquests. The reconstructed villages and the human "specimens" displayed in them owed part of their existence to "freak shows" where individuals with physical abnormalities - gigantism, dwarfism, or women with beards among others - were presented as spectacle by circus owner P.T. The curators of the show estimate that the "industry" of putting human beings on display lured in around 1.5 billion people between the 16th century and 1960 to gawk. Measurements of skulls - craniometry - were used to support theories of "inferior races". The old ethnographic displays were designed to "show the other as primitive" and to "manufacture the 'savage'" to "reinforce the superiority of whites," the organisers explained. ![]() ![]() That episode features in the museum's exhibition, which displays 500 items and documents showing what indigenous peoples suffered under various colonial powers. Seven of them died, from cold or sickness. "Human Zoo: The age of colonial exhibitions" at the Africa Museum outside Brussels until March next year has resonance, because its buildings are on the site where Belgium's King Leopold II in 1897 reconstructed three "Congolese villages" on royal grounds.Īt the time, the Belgian Congo - today the Democratic Republic of Congo - was Leopold's private property and 267 men and women were taken from it by force to be put on show in Brussels' World Fair, made to sit in front of the dwellings. They were also powerful vectors for racist stereotyping, as a Belgian museum show under way illustrates.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |