General Winter

Only in 1935/36 in Europe were closed the last cells with blacks in zoos - in Basle and Turin. Before this time white people willingly looked at blacks in captivity (as well as at the Indians and Eskimos).

Already in the XVI century Africans were brought to Europe as exotic, much like the animals of the new open land - chimpanzees, llamas and parrots. But until the XIX century blacks lived primarily in the courts of rich people, illiterate commoners could not see them even in books.

That all changed in the modern era - when the majority of Europeans do not only learned to read, but was emancipated to the point that they that has requested the same comfort that the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy had.In 1880s the zoos have become filled with exotic animals from the coloniesand also with negroes - eugenics ranked them as the simplest representatives of the fauna.




(Zoo Basel, 1930, the Somalis as the exposure)

The only excuse for the Europeans can be the fact that many whites up to the early twentieth century really did not understand the difference between the black man and the apes. It's well known that Bismarck onse came to look at the African in Berlin Zoo who has been placed in a cage with a gorilla: Bismarck really asked to show him where in fact a human in this cage.



(The Emperor of Germany Wilhelm II examines the blacks at the zoo in Hamburg, 1909)

By the early twentieth century Africans were kept in zoos in Basel and Berlin, Antwerp and London, and even in Russia Warsaw.Most often zoo keeper placed in the cells so-called "Ethnographic village", when in the cages were placed several black families. They walked there in the national costumes and led a traditional lifestyle - digging somethiing with a help of primitive tools, woving mats, cooking on a fire.

Usually Africans didn't leave a long under the European winters. For example, it is known that in the zoo in Hamburg from 1908 to 1912 died in captivity 27 blacks.



Africans were even in the zoos of the USA despite the fact that blacks and whites lived there side by side.Pygmies were placed into captivity there - American scientists believed that they were anthropoid apes standing on the lower level than the "usual" blacks.

General Winter

In fairness we should mention that in the zoos at that time contained not only the Africans but other primitive peoples : Polynesians, Canadian Inuit, Indians of Surinam (Dutch exhibition in Amsterdam in 1883), the Indians of Patagonia (in Dresden). And in East Prussia in 1920s in captivity in the ethnographic village were contained Balts who had to represent "the ancient Prussians," and to perform their rituals forf the audience.

Historian Kurt Yonasson explains the disappearance of the human zoo is not only by the dissemination of ideas of equality among nations,but by the Great Depression of 1929, when the common people didn't have money to attend such exhibitions.

Ancientgeezer

Describing them as "Zoos" is a bit unfair. The displays were intended to be an extention of Natural History exhibitions. Today such exhibitions might just show artifacts of mannequins dressed in the style of tribal people, back then the "natives" were quite happy to be actors in a tableau.
Bit of trivia in an Olympic year: such a tableau was staged at the 1908 Olympics in St Louis featuring a Boer War/South Africa theme. Two Tswana "tribesmen" ( actually college students from the OFS also decided to run in the marathon at the Olympics. Len Taunyane and Jan Mashiani had no previous sporting history and were the first Africans to compete in an Olympic event. Taunyane came ninth and Mashiani twelfth. Mashiani thought he could have done better if he had not be chased miles of course by agressive dogs and both thought that if they had shoes they might have been more competitive.

THis type of indignity is nothing compared to the fate of

Satuf

So much for civilising them... What's that baby's fault to be born in a closed off area for display and they couldn't leave?

hob

This is the difference between the Caste system in India and the Race system in Europe.

This is what the english and the other europeans wanted the caste system to represent.





Thanks for the upload. More people from India should see this kind of stuff to really understand the efforts behind the 'Aryan invasion theory' and the actual intent to distort Dharma to match European Race theory.


pretty sad stuff.

Ashiusx

I'm an admirer of European civilizations but this is sickening to read.


This is a well known case.

Lawnmowerman

Lets not forget it wasn't just africans in these zoo's, the defromed, dwarves, were also exhibited.

For a fee you could enter Bedlam and look at the lunatics!!!!!!

One woman whom survived a shipwreck and lived with Aboriginals in Australia for a year made a living exhibiting herself to the crowds of London. For a fee you could look at a woman whom had lived with the savages for a year.

unclefred

Then there was the case of 'Ishi' supposed to be the last of his tribe:

In August 1911, only one Ishi existed, and that just barely. Starving and almost naked, he straggled into the northern California town of Oroville. In a wicked irony, he took shelter in the local slaughterhouse. Most of the approximately 400 members of the Yahi tribe to which he belonged had been massacred by white vigilantes and bounty hunters.
The 1849 California gold rush had set off bloody attacks on Indian tribes in mining areas, many occurring in the years just after Ishi's birth around 1860. From 1870 to 1911, Ishi and 5 to 20 Yahi hid in wooded areas not far from Oroville. As apparently the last surviving member of that hardy band, a desperate Ishi crossed into the white world. The sheriff turned him over to University of California anthropologist Thomas T. Waterman, who on Sept. 4, 1911, took Ishi to live at his institution's anthropology museum, then located in San Francisco. Ishi - The Last Yahi Indian

Ishi was given a home at the University of California's anthropology museum -- then on the UCSF campus in an old law school building. He lived there for most of the rest of his life, except for the summer of 1915, when he lived in Berkeley with Waterman and his family.

While at the museum, Ishi often worked on native crafts, such as arrowpoints. By his own choice, he often did these crafts for museum audiences and would give some of his work away.
Ishi formed close friendships with Waterman and Kroeber and with Saxton Pope, a teacher at the university's medical school, which was next door to the museum. He also agreed to record linguistic material on the Yahi language for UC Berkeley.

02.05.96 - Ishi apparently wasn't the last Yahi, according to new evidence from UC Berkeley research archaeologist

Larrey

I don't think anyone could really try to imagine that Europeans were "nice". And these kinds of practices sort of bears that out. However, as public exhibitions for the education and instruction of people, this kind of thing might at least not have been worse than the 18th c. and prior popular pass-times of public torture and execution.

We did get some overlap, WITH public execution and torture and THEN the poor sods so dispatched were anatomised and put on display as curiosities.

Anytime people were about to get their heads lopped off in a late 19th c. European capital there would turn up some curious physiologists ready to prod the freshly severed head for signs om lingering consciousness.

Naomasa298

I'm assuming everyone realises that this is not representative of modern Western European attitudes.