Blacks in zoos in Europe and the USA

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Already in the 16th century, Negroes were brought to Europe as exotics, much like animals from the new open lands - chimpanzees, llamas or parrots. But until the 19th century, blacks lived mainly in the courts of rich people - illiterate commoners could not even look at them in books.

Everything changed with the era of modernity - when a significant part of Europeans not only learned to read, but also emancipated themselves to such an extent that they demanded the same pleasures as the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. This desire of the white common people coincided with the widespread opening of zoos on the continent, that is, from about the 1880s.

Then the zoos began to fill up with exotic animals from the colonies. Among them were blacks, whom the then eugenics also ranked among the representatives of the simplest fauna.

Regrettable as it is for today's European liberals and tolerants, their grandfathers and even fathers willingly made grandmothers on eugenics: for example, the last black man disappeared from the European zoo only in 1935 in Basel and in 1936 in Turin. But the last "temporary exhibition" with blacks was in 1958 in Brussels at the Expo, where the Belgians presented the "Congolese village with the inhabitants."

The only excuse for Europeans can be that many whites really did not understand until the beginning of the twentieth century - how a black man differs from a monkey. There is a known case when Bismarck came to look at the Berlin Zoo at a Negro placed in a cage with a gorilla: Bismarck really asked the superintendent of the establishment to show him where the man was in this cage.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, blacks were kept in the zoos of the already mentioned Basel and Berlin, Antwerp and London, and even in Russian Warsaw, these representatives of humanity were exhibited for the amusement of the public. It is known that in 1902 about 800 thousand people looked at the cage with blacks at the London Zoo. In total, no less than 15 European cities then showed blacks in captivity.

Most often, zoo keepers were housed in the so-called cages. "Ethnographic villages" - when several black families were housed in open-air cages. They walked there in national clothes and led a traditional way of life - they dug something with primitive tools, weaved mats, cooked food on a fire.

As a rule, Negroes did not live long in the conditions of European winters. For example, it is known that 27 blacks died in captivity at the Hamburg Zoo from 1908 to 1912.

Negroes at that time were even kept in zoos in the United States, despite the fact that whites lived there side by side with him for more than 200 years. True, pygmies were placed in captivity, whom American scientists considered semi-monkeys, standing at a lower stage of development than the "ordinary" black ones. Moreover, such views were based on Darwinism. For example, American scientists Branford and Blum wrote at that time: “Natural selection, if not obstructed, would have completed the process of extinction. It was believed that if it were not for the institution of slavery, which supported and protected blacks, they would have to compete with whites in the struggle for survival. The great fitness of whites in this competition was undeniable. The disappearance of blacks as a race would only be a matter of time."

There are notes about the content of a pygmy named Ota Benga. For the first time, Ota, along with other pygmies, was exhibited as "the typical savage" in the anthropological wing of the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. Pygmies during their stay in America were studied by scientists who compared the "barbarian races" with intellectually retarded Caucasians on tests for mental development, reaction to pain, and the like. Anthropometrists and psychometrists came to the conclusion that according to intelligence tests, pygmies can be compared to "mentally retarded people who spend a huge amount of time on the test and make many stupid mistakes." Many Darwinists attributed the level of development of the pygmies "directly to the Paleolithic period", and the scientist Getty found in them "the cruelty of a primitive man." They did not excel in sports either. According to Branford and Blum, "a record as shameful as that set by pathetic savages has never been recorded in the history of sports."

Pygmy Otu was asked to spend as much time as possible in the monkey house. He was even given a bow and arrow and allowed to shoot "to attract the public." Soon Ota was locked in a cage - and when he was allowed to leave the monkey house, "the crowd was staring at him, and a watchman stood by." On September 9, 1904, an advertising campaign began. The headline in the New York Times exclaimed, "The Bushman Sits in the Bronx Park Monkey Cage." The director, Dr. Hornedy, claimed to have simply offered a "curious exhibit" to edify the public:

“[He]… clearly did not see the difference between a small black man and a wild animal; for the first time in an American zoo, a person was exhibited in a cage. They put a parrot and an orangutan named Dohong in Benga's cage. " Eyewitness accounts said that Ota was "a little taller than an orangutan … their heads are similar in many ways, and they grin the same when they are happy about something."

In fairness, it should be mentioned that not only Negroes were kept in the zoos of those times, but also other primitive peoples - Polynesians and Canadian Inuit, Surinamese Indians (the famous exhibition in Dutch Amsterdam in 1883), Patagonia Indians (in Dresden). And in East Prussia and in the 1920s, the Balts were kept in captivity in an ethnographic village, who were supposed to portray the "ancient Prussians" and perform their rituals in front of spectators.

Historian Kurt Jonasson explains the disappearance of human zoos not only by the spread of the ideas of the equality of nations, which were spread then by the Faces of Nations, but by the onset of the Great Depression of 1929, when ordinary people did not have the money to attend such events. And somewhere - as in Germany with the arrival of Hitler - the authorities forcefully canceled such "shows".