OF OTHER RACES IN HUMAN ZOOS AND THE FALLACY OF WHITE/CAUCASIAN MENTAL SUPREMACY

It is general historical knowledge that African civilization came before the rise of caucasian race. However, the Eurocentric historians have always tried to make Africa and other human race to seem inferior to the caucasian race. The historical achievement of civilizations like both the Egyptian and Nubian civilization were hidden until recently historians like Cheikh Anta Diop, Ivan Sertima, Amiri Baraka, Molefi Kete Asante,Rashidi Runoko and others came in to reveal it to the world.Africans and people from other race contributed immensely in literature,science,astrology,music and other forms of art. Despite all this, with the rise of caucasian race in human race recently in history, they rather saw all other race especially Africans (blacks)  as primitive beings whose mental capacity are akin to that of apes or monkeys. So in other to erroneously satisfy their myopic theory of Darwinism human zoos were erected across Europe to make mockery of other human race.
The Europeans/caucasians claim American native Indians were cannibals ( a word coined by Christopher Columbus upon landing in new world) but cannibalism has been well-known in Europe for many years.
In Gough’s Cave, England, remains of human bones and skulls from approximately 15,000 years ago, suggest that cannibalism took place amid the people living in the cave.
Archaeologists can trace back evidence to about 7,000 years ago proving mass cannibalism in Germany – even children and unborn babies were on the menu.
 Eating other humans’ flesh and drinking their blood for medicinal purposes is well-documented:
Take when Pope Innocent VIII was on his deathbed in 1492, his doctors used vampire-like technique on 3 boys and had the pope drink their blood. The boys were bled until they died, and the pope died as well. Of course this was the same time that Columbus “discovered” America and coined the word “cannibal.”
The medical journal, The Lancet, published an article regarding corpse medicine. The article recounts notable doctors of 1600s England digging up bodies to use the bones for medicine. Noted in the article was the fact the human body was widely acknowledged as the “therapeutic agent”.
Medical treatments included ingesting flesh, bone, or blood, along with a variety of moss sometimes found on human skulls right up until the late 18th century. Use of medicines made from blood and other human body parts was widespread in Europe. Fresh blood was used as a cure for epilepsy and other body parts to treat a variety of diseases, including arthritis, warts, diseases of the reproductive system, sciatica, and even teenage acne…
It’s quite a conceit to present the cultures of non-white peoples as deviant and hold them and their cultures up to spectacle….whilst whites and European cultures are quarantined as inherently sound and their cultures as apexes of civilization.
Europeans had no ethical or moral issues at all with cannibalism – for example – until the 19th century. The bodies of other humans was just another natural product available for use and recycling.
Candles made of human fat were used up until the 1880s.
King Charles II of England sipped ‘The King’s Drops’, a powder mix of human skull with alcohol.
Thomas Willis, a 17th-century pioneer of brain science, would routinely brewed a drink for apoplexy (or bleeding), that mingled powdered human skull and chocolate.
Did other Europeans consider these practices deviant and depraved? Was the King of England or respectable English scholar merely ‘racially primitive’ because of the liquids they drank?
Of course not, after all, a French Franciscan monk of the same time was making marmalade out of human blood, and even wrote a recipe for it. The instructions, in part, read like this:
“stir it to a batter with a knife…pound it…through a sieve of finest silk.”
Jam-making aside, the eating of human bodies could also be used as military weapon – something that was traditionally buried, down-played and ignored – in the way that rape in war has been hidden or dismissed.
Take the Crusades, for example.
The 1st Crusade in particular, and the Siege of Maarat, or Ma’arra, in 1098 in the city of Ma’arrat al-Numan, in what is modern-day Syria.
An eyewitness of the siege wrote, “In Ma’arra our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking-pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled.”
The chronicler Albert of Aix seemed to rank Muslims lower than dogs when he wrote, “Not only did our troops not shrink from eating dead Turks and Saracens; they also ate dogs!”
Guibert of Nogent, in his work Historia Hierosolymitana noted that the Christian barbarians (or Tafurs) were feared by the Muslims because of their cannibalism. For that reason, on at least one occasion, the Tafurs publicly “roasted the bruised body of a Turk over a fire as if it were meat for eating, in full view of the Turkish forces.”
Guibert notes that the Franks (Germanic clans) also practiced cannibalism, but they did so “in secret and as rarely as possible.”
With all these past,the blacks and people of other race did not see Europeans as primitive and of inferior brains to use against them. In fact, when Africa had introduced way of writing the white race was oblivious of how to communicate through letters. Yet when the whites of yore got the opportunity of enlightenment it did not take them long to see all other human race as inferior to them even when some of them were aware that that perception was and is still wrong. They rather went on to introduce human zoos to shame fellow humankind.
                                  Advertising post for human zoo in Germany



Human Zoos

Human zoos were 19th and 20th century public exhibits of people like a museum pieces (also known as “an ethnological exposition”, “the exhibition of human beings” and “a Negro Village”)- mostly non-Europeans. Africans, Asians, Indigenous people and many others were often caged and displayed in a makeshift ‘natural 
habitat’. These human displays were very popular and shown at world fairs where they drew Europeans
and Americans in their tens of millions - from Paris to Hamburg, London to New York, Moscow to
Barcelona.
                              The Edmond Pezon’s menagerie: this is Zizi-Bamboula.

This curiosity regarding indigenous races had a history at least as long as colonialism and Columbus
brought indigenous Americans from his voyages in the New World to the Spanish court in 1493.
Human zoos and exhibitions of exotic populations became common in the 1870s in the midst of the
New Imperialism period. They could be found in many places including Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona,
London, Milan, New York, and Warsaw, and hundreds of thousands of people visited these exhibitions.
                                          negro village
The goal of that was to demonstrate people born in Asia and Africa, and show their primitive and sometimes even savage lifestyle. Such zoos, especially in Germany, had strongly pronounced racist implication, which was taken from the Social Darwinism currents, when people from Africa were often demonstrated together with monkeys in order to show their common origin.
This is the settlement of Iroquoises. People wear their traditional costumes and headwears decorated with feathers.

 In 1874, Carl Hagenbeck, a German merchant in wild animals and entrepreneur of many Europeans zoos, decided to exhibit Samoan and Sami people (Laplanders) as ‘purely natural’ populations. In 1876, he sent a collaborator to the Egyptian Sudan to bring back some wild beasts and Nubian people.
            Hagenback`s human zoo "Sudanese troupe"

 The Nubian exhibit was very successful in Europe and toured Paris, London, and Berlin. He also dispatched an agent to Labrador to secure a number of ‘Esquimaux’ (Inuit) from the settlement of Hopedale; these Inuit were exhibited in his Hamburg Tierpark.
A family of Labradorean Eskimo is in Hamburg or Berlin Zoo, 1880. They adopted Christianity and took German names. Men’s name was Abraham Ulrikab, his wife’s name was Ulrika, they had two children — Sarah and Mary, their nephew’s name was Tobias; there were another family with them. It was the way to earn money for them; the family was to clear off debts and needed money. All of them died within five months because of smallpox which they didn’t have immunity to. Abraham Ulrikab made notes writing the Inuktuit language; he described all the humiliations that his family underwent.




 Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, director of the Jardin d’acclimatation, decided in 
1877 to organize two ethnological spectacles that presented Nubians and Inuit. That year, the audience of the Jardin d’acclimatation doubled to one million. 
                       African child in Negro village being fed like a monkey
Between 1877 and 1912, approximately thirty ethnological exhibitions were presented at the Jardin zoologique d’acclimatation.
 Native people of Suriname were displayed in the International Colonial and Export Exhibition in Amsterdam held behind the Rijksmuseum in 1883.
                  Ceylonese citizens were also shown at such exhibitions.

 Both the 1878 and the 1889 Parisian World Fairs presented a Negro Village (village nègre). Visited by 28 million people, the 1889 World Fair displayed 400 indigenous people as the major attraction.
   The idea of “a Negro Village” was the most popular in Germany, where the ideas of Social Darwinism were widely spread and accepted by many people. Even Otto Bismarck visited “the Negro Village” exhibition.
                        Negro village

 The 1900 World Fair presented tin nude.
in cages, often nude or semi nude.


               “Negro Villages” are at the exhibitions in France.

               Parisian world fair
                            
 The 1931 exhibition in Paris was so successful that 34 million people attended it in six months, while a smaller counter-exhibition entitled The Truth on the Colonies, organized by the Communist Party, attracted 
very few visitors.


                This is a Somalia village, which was demonstrated in Luna Park, St. Petersburg.


                          negro village

One of the first modern public human exhibitions 
was PT Barnum’s exhibition of Joice Heth on 
February 25, 1835. Joice Heth (c.1756–February 
19, 1836) was an African American slave. In 
1835 toward the end of her life, blind and almost 
completely paralysed (she could talk, and had some 
ability to move her right arm), she was purchased 
by PT Barnum. He began his career as a showman 
by exhibiting her, claiming she was the 160-yearold nurse of George Washington. She died the next year; in all probability no more than 80 years old.
 The Chinese Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker.
              A caricature of Saartjie Baartman, called theHottentot Venus. Born to a Khoisan family, 
                      she was displayed  in London in the early 19th century.
 Saartjie Baartman of the Namaqua, referred to 
as ‘the Hottentot Venus’, who was displayed in 
London until her death in 1815.
                               This is Tuareg.
 During the 1850s, Maximo and Bartola, two 
microcephalic children from Central America, 
were exhibited in the US and Europe under the 
names ‘Aztec Children’ and ‘Aztec Lilliputians’.
Five Indians from the Kawesqar tribe (Tierra del Fuego, Chili) were kidnapped in 1881 and transported to Europe to be demonstrated in a human being zoo. All of them died a year later.


The whole thing was staged and played to Western stereotypes:
African mother and child in negro village
  • Arabs were like in “Thousand and One Nights” from the 1300s.
  • American Indians were like in the cowboy-and-Indian books of the time.
  • South Sea Islanders were bare breasted and carefree – even though, as Gauguin discovered, that world was long gone if it ever was (but painted it anyway).
  • Black Africans were shown as savage hunters, spears and all, just a step above wild animals – even though most Africans of the time were herders and farmers. One show was called “Gorilla Negroes”.

      The picture of Australian aborigines, the Crystal Palace, 1884.
The Pygmies at the St Louis fair, on the other hand, liked to smoke cigars and wear top hats, which screwed up the show’s racist evolutionary ranking.
        Pygmies were made to dance during numerous exhibitions to entertain visitors.
Some feared for the safety of white women. In both Victorian England and Nazi Germany, some opposed the shows out of fear of race mixing between black men and white women.
           Africans shooting archery in 1904 St Louis "Savage Olympics Exhibition"

                                  human zoo

                     see:http://www.scotsman.com/news/international/zoo-sparks-row-over-tribesmen-props-for-animals-1-715365
At least as late as 2005 you could still see “African tribesmen” in grass skirts at a Western zoo (in Augsburg, Germany). But since the 1930s such things have become uncommon: film, and later television and cheap air travel, were able to give Westerners a much richer-seeming (but not always truer) experience of native peoples.


   It is a very shameful period for Europeans, when people earned money kidnapping other people and showing them to others. So, the last African disappeared from the European Zoos in 1936. However, the last “Negro Village” was demonstrated at the Expo exhibition in Brussels in 1958.


              Ota Benga at Bronx zoo
see:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xedc7pLWyRI&feature=player_embedded
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6WJPiZhmZQ&feature=player_embedded



MODERN HUMAN ZOO

As if this human zoo racism against blacks are over, recently in India the govt decided to use the tribal hinterland black Andamanese for human zoo to generate tourist attraction to their country. Though the intended human zoo did not materialized but some Indians force Andamanese to dance for tourist in their nakedness for money.
         Andamanese girls that were being used as human zoo by the Indian govt.
"A human zoo, which features women from a protected tribe dancing for tourists in exchange for food, opened on India’s Andaman Islands.
Jarawa tribal women — some of them naked — are being lured to dance and sing for tourists and to live in a “Jarawa Habitat”.
Under Indian laws designed to protect ancient tribal groups susceptible to outside influence and disease, photographing or coming into contact with the Jarawa and some of the Andaman aborigines had been banned, but the Indian government seems to be looking the other way on the Human Zoo.
  Tourists shoot photos and video of a ancient tribe, an indigenous people belonging to the Indian Andaman Islands, and treat them like animals in a zoo.


The tribe, thought to have been among the first people to migrate successfully from Africa to Asia, lives a nomadic existence in the lush, tropical forests of the Andamans in the Indian Ocean.
India’s Tribal Affairs Minister Sanjay Krishnabba Chandra said that they are looking into the situation to make sure that all the women in the zoo are treated properly – feed, bathed and cared for on a daily basis.

SeMany Indian citizens are outraged about the Human Zoo.
“It’s deplorable. You cannot treat human beings like beasts for the sake of money. Whatever kind of tourism is that, I totally disapprove of that and it is being banned also,”  an Indian MP added. "(source:ehttp://weeklyworldnews.com/headlines/42430/human-zoo-opens-in-india/) the story below:


‘Human Zoo’ Allowed Tourists to Throw Bananas at Islanders

What horrible human outrages does this monstrous world of ours bring today? Video of a "human zoo" in India's Andaman Islands, featuring women from the Jarawa tribe, ordered to dance for tourists in exchange for food.
The video, first published by Guardian sister paper The Observerapparently depicts a bribed policeman ordering the women to dance for tourists "on safari."
"Dance," the policeman instructed. The girls in front of him, naked from the waist up, obeyed. A tourist's camera panned round to another young woman, also naked and awkwardly holding a bag of grain in front of her. "Dance for me," the policeman commanded.
To shield tribes like the Jarawa from disease and culture shock, Indian laws ban outsiders from seeking out or photographing the people. Nonetheless,
On the day the Observer visited, when the gates opened the cameras immediately started clicking. Tourists threw bananas and biscuits to the tribes people at the roadside, as they would to animals in a safari park.
 This tribe began to have a contact with the modern world only at the end of XX century. Its population is about 300-400 people, locals and tourists are banned from contacting them, take their pictures and videos, otherwise, the offender will be arrested and brought to justice.However, for a bribe – about $ 560 – tourists may violate these prohibitions, and local police turn a blind eye to it. 
[T]he price of a day out with the Jarawa: up to 15,000 rupees (£185) to buy off the police, another 10,000-15,000 rupees on top of that for a car, a driver, gifts for the Jarawa, and biscuits and snacks. Contact is guaranteed, he promised.
Believed to be the descendants of the first humans to migrate successfully from Africa to Asia, there are roughly 400 Jarawa alive today, the AFP reports. They began "to venture out of the jungle in any numbers" in 1998, prompting the government to create "a buffer zone" for the tribe in 2007. "Forced coexistence would be total genocide for them," according to Anstice Justin, head of the region's Anthropological Survey of India.

Though officials mostly agree that outrage is the appropriate response to this video (even those opposed to the protection laws don't want this scandal attached to them) there is some dissent over the appropriate amount of outrage. We return to the AFP:

"Before the 2004 tsunami, people might have forced them to dance and there may have been some much smaller violations since then," Justin said by telephone from the capital Port Blair.
"The video appears to be six to seven years old when Jarawas remained unclothed but now they wear dresses in public," Director-General of Police Samsher Deol said.
                      Andamanese tribal people at the beach
The bribed officer from the video will reportedly "have his future promotion delayed by six months" as punishment. 

It is about time every black person living everywhere should be given a needed protection and right to their dignified way of living without exploitation by the governments that control their lives. These Andamanese are the original inhabitants of India before the so-called white Indian Skin came to occupy their land. They must be seen as the bonafide owners of the land and if no compensation is given to them by the Indian government,their right to a dignified living must not be exploited through human zoo experimentation in the name of tourism. It is so racist and disrespectful to this ancient tribe of African origin.

Comments

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Kweku-- keep up the good work! Thanks for educating us. I was aware of Sarah Baartman but had no idea that "human zoos" existed.

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  3. Wow! I'm grateful for the insight, knowledge and education! I'm speechless.

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  4. I was Googling for images of dancing girls for Gil Power dances I am holding for ages 4 and up. All I could find under "dancing girls" then "dancing young girls" were racist and sexist images. No actual girls just plain dancing for fun. I was aware of the exhibition and untimely deaths of First Nations people from now Canada. I was not aware of the human zoos, their popularity and longevity. Gives credit to the communists for organizing a counter exhibit. Remarkable that African migrants to Europe prior to mass colonization were not considered savage and could rise to prominence (ex Pushkin of Russia's great grandfather was from the ancient Kotoko kingdom of Logone-Birni, now northern Cameroon.). Thanks for shining light on this willfully neglected history.

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  5. Thanks for writing this. I'm glad I happened upon it.

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  6. I find a lot of this historical interesting but that a lot of points over stretched. And creating the opinion that only certain classes or groups were treated badly. As a history on only black culture well done but on humans as a world group rather one-sided.

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