One of the darkest aspects of the late 19th and early 20th century was casual disregard for the personhood of human beings from non-European cultures. This manifested in numerous ways, including horrific breeding programs, genocide campaigns, and literal human zoos, which paraded people from faraway places before the gawking eyes of Western ticket holders. People trafficked from Africa and East Asia often had it the worst, being forced to enact dehumanizing performances for the crowds, often without pay or adequate food, healthcare, and shelter. Fortunately, innovations in film helped bring an end to these barbaric events. This was the largest human zoo in history.
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00:00A human zoo is precisely what it sounds like. Even though they were once called
00:04ethnological expositions to make them seem more acceptable, they were still
00:08awful public displays of human beings. Popular during the 19th and early 20th centuries,
00:13the zoos were advertised in connection with a growing interest in other cultures.
00:17However, the interest likely wasn't educational, but instead, it was more about showing the
00:22superiority of Western society over the so-called uncivilized world. Human zoo exhibits were cruel,
00:28abusive, and exploitative. Most people in zoo exhibits received no money and no social help,
00:34and many ended up buried in unmarked graves once they died.
00:37It's also worth noting that human zoos were a completely different phenomenon from freak shows.
00:42Freak shows were mostly an American invention, where people with biological rarities were
00:46either exhibited or performed acts. Conjoined twins, obese or albino people,
00:51and even the bearded lady were often part of a human exposition, such as P.T. Barnum's
00:56American Museum. While the exploitative angle of freak shows might have looked
01:00very similar to that of human zoos, some freak shows paid their participants well,
01:04giving some a livelihood they otherwise would not have had.
01:12For example, conjoined twins Chang and Ang retired from working at freak shows at the age of 29 with
01:17an impressive $60,000 fortune. Adjusted for inflation, that's the equivalent of around $1.3
01:23million in today's money. Those exhibited in human zoos got no such courtesies.
01:28By the second half of the 19th century, human zoos were popular in all major European capitals.
01:33According to Ferris State University, exhibits regularly attracted hundreds of thousands of
01:38visitors, with some attracting as many as one million visitors. In Germany,
01:42wild animal merchant Karl Hagenbeck organized a Nubian exhibit that toured Europe,
01:46featuring people and animals from the Egyptian Sudan.
01:50Over 28 million people visited the 1889 Paris World's Fair, which displayed hundreds of
01:55indigenous people from various French colonies. At the time, this was the largest human zoo
02:00ever set up anywhere. Exhibits were divided into small areas in which people lived, slept,
02:05and worked, demonstrating the difference in the way of living between the so-called
02:09civilized and the savage. As with many human zoos, the exhibits were staged to entertain
02:14rather than to educate visitors, as many of the representations weren't authentic.
02:18Human zoo exhibits continued well into the following century. The two colonial exhibitions
02:23were organized in Marseilles in 1906 and 1922. They displayed semi-nude humans in cages,
02:29while the large expeditions in Paris offered performances by natives from the French colonies.
02:34By the time one closed after six months, it had attracted 34 million visitors.
02:38Although Europe was famous for its human zoos, the idea eventually made its way into the United
02:43States in 1904. That's when the massive 1,200-acre St. Louis World's Fair opened,
02:47and featured not only scientific and trade expositions, but also a number of so-called
02:52living exhibits. The largest one was the Philippine Exposition, which housed over
02:561,000 Filipinos from different tribes and had over 130 buildings. Within the Filipino exhibit,
03:02the Igorot Village attracted the most visitors. Advertised as the least civilized of all the
03:07villages, it featured semi-nude natives that were offered dogs to cook and eat daily.
03:12They were also made to perform ceremonies and dance for the entertainment to the visitors.
03:17The St. Louis World's Fair also offered other so-called native habitats to visitors,
03:21where Native Americans, Ainu people from Japan, and more performed and posed for photographs.
03:27One of the most heartbreaking stories of the fair is the one of a Congolese man named Ota Vanga.
03:31Ota was exhibited at the fair as a cannibal because of his teeth,
03:34which had been traditionally filed into sharp points when he was a child.
03:38After the fair ended, he was taken to the Bronx Zoo, where he was kept in a cage with apes and
03:42displayed as a, quote, savage pygmy. After being released, he tried to adapt to his surroundings
03:48by working in a tobacco factory and wearing Western clothing. Sadly, Ota shot himself
03:52in the heart in 1916 and was buried in an unmarked grave in a Virginia cemetery.
03:57By the mid-20th century, human zoos fell out of favor with the advent of movies,
04:01which satisfied the public's curiosity for foreign lands and populations.