Superior. Angela Saini
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difference were always tainted by power and money.
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I pick my way through a tall thicket of bamboo and find an intricate wooden pagoda.
Further still inside the sunlit Garden for Tropical Agriculture is a Tunisian house, coated in thick green moss. If their histories were unknown to me, I might find the buildings in this quiet maze beautiful. They are grand and otherworldly, ethereal relics of foreign places as imagined by another age. But of course, I’m acutely aware that each was also once a kind-of home to real people like me, pulled from their lives thousands of miles away for the entertainment of paying visitors. As a reminder, through the smashed window of a Moroccan castle, complete with battlements and blue tiles, I’m caught off-guard by a glaring red face that must have been painted by vandals.
However beautiful they are, these aren’t homes at all. They’re gilded cages.
It’s hard to imagine what life would have been like on the inside of the human zoos, looking out. The people kept here weren’t slaves. They were paid, similar to actors under contract, but expected to dance, act, and carry out their everyday routines in public view. Their lives were live entertainment. They were objects first and people second. Little effort was made to help them feel comfortable in their temporary homes, much less to acclimatise them. After all, the whole point of the spectacle was to underscore just how different they were, to imagine that even in a cold climate they would choose to walk around in as few clothes as they wore in a hot one, that their behaviour couldn’t change no matter where they lived. Visitors were made to believe that the cultural differences were woven into their bodies like stripes on a zebra. ‘When there was a birth, it meant a new show,’ Gilles Boëtsch from the National Center for Scientific Research tells me. People would flock to see the baby.
Science had created a distance between the viewers and the viewed, the colonisers and the colonised, the powerful and the powerless. For those confronted with people from foreign lands in this way, bizarrely out of context, referenced in a book or transplanted to some fake village in Paris, it only helped reinforce the notion that we were not all quite the same. For the spectators peering into their homes, the performers in human zoos must have been curiosities not just because they looked and behaved differently, but because control of their lives belonged to others who didn’t look like them. The ones outside the cage were clothed, civilised and respectable while those inside were semi-naked, barbaric and subjugated.
‘People are more readily perceived as inferior by nature when they are already seen as oppressed,’ write American scholars Karen Fields and Barbara Fields in their 2012 book Racecraft. They explain how a sense of inevitability gets attached to a social routine until it becomes seen as natural. The idea of race didn’t make people treat other people as subhuman. They were already treated as subhuman before race was invoked. But once it was invoked, the subjugation took on a new force.
There was something about treating human difference as a science that gave it a peculiar quality. The observation of humans turned humans into strange beasts. While the unimpeachable impression of scientific objectivity was maintained, somehow the gold standard of beauty and intelligence always turned out to be the scientist himself. His own race was safe in his hands. German naturalist Johann Blumenbach, for instance, idealised the Caucasian race to which he belonged, but described Ethiopians as being ‘bandy-legged’. If legs were different, there was never any question that Caucasians might be the unusual ones. The creatures caged in the human zoos were those who had failed to reach the ideal of white European physical and mental perfection.
The scientific distance created by believing that racial hierarchies existed in nature, this uneven balance of power, allowed human zoos to treat their performers as less than equals, making life for them fatally precarious. According to Boëtsch, many died from pneumonia or tuberculosis. Concerns were expressed in the press. There were always protests, as there had been about Saartjie Baartman, but they made little difference.
In another example around the same time as the Paris Exposition, a Congolese ‘pygmy’ named Ota Benga, who had been brought to the United States to be displayed at the St Louis World’s Fair, was put in the Monkey House at Bronx Zoo in New York, without shoes. Visitors loved him. ‘Some of them poked him in the ribs, others tripped him up, all laughed at him,’ the New York Times reported. He was eventually rescued by African American ministers, who found him a place in an orphanage. Ten years later, in despair because he couldn’t return home to the Congo, he borrowed a revolver and shot himself through the heart.
As I stand among the weeds and crumbling former homes of Paris’s human zoo, it’s difficult to avoid concluding that the reason anyone pursued the scientific idea of race was not so much to understand the differences in our bodies, but to try to justify why we lead such different lives. Why else? Why would something as superficial as skin colour or body shape matter otherwise? What the scientists really wanted to know was why some people are enslaved and others free, why some prosper while others are poor, and why some civilisations have thrived while others haven’t. Imagining themselves to be looking objectively at human variation, they sought answers in our bodies to questions that existed far outside them. Race science had sat, always, at the intersection of science and politics, of science and economics. Race wasn’t just a tool for classifying physical difference, it was a way of measuring human progress, of placing judgement on the capacities and rights of others.
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