These horrifying ‘human zoos’ delighted American audiences at the turn of the 20th century
‘Specimens’ were acquired from Africa, Asia, and the Americas by deceptive human traffickers
More than 20 million people attended the 1904 World’s Fair. They came to St. Louis to see electricity for the first time, to hear the first telephone, and to witness around 3,000 “savages” from Africa, Asia, and the Americas living in “displays” that resembled their native villages. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Western world was desperate to see the “savage,” “primitive” peoples described by explorers and adventurers scouting out new lands for colonial exploitation. To feed the frenzy, thousands of indigenous individuals from Africa, Asia, and the Americas were brought to the United States and Europe, often under dubious circumstances, to be put on display in a quasi-captive life in “human zoos.”
These indigenous men, women, and children were brought to the fair to perform their “backwards,” “primitive” culture for eager American masses who could leave feeling a renewed sense of racial superiority. Due to poor record-keeping, backroom dealing, and the huge number of colonial governments involved, it’s impossible to know the exact number of those who participated in “human zoos,” but it’s not small. In his 1908 autobiography, Carl Hagenbeck, a human rarities agent, bragged that during a ten-year period, he — alone — brought more than 900 indigenous people to the U.S. and Europe for exhibition.
At the fair, the indigenous people on display faced a number of challenges over the eight long months of their stay. African tribal members were required to wear traditional clothing intended for the equatorial heat, even in freezing December temperatures, and Filipino villagers were made to perform a seasonal dog-eating ritual over and over to shock the audience. A lack of drinking water and appalling sanitary conditions led to rampant dysentery and other illnesses. Two “performers” died on the fairgrounds that season, Filipinos whose bodies still reside at the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C. Others, including kindergartners from Arizona’s Pima Indian tribe, were shipped home at the first sign of sickness — what happened after their return was not the fair’s concern.
In most cases, there were no bars to keep those in human zoos from escaping, but the vast majority, especially those brought from foreign continents, had nowhere else to go. Set up in mock “ethnic villages,” indigenous people were asked to perform typical daily tasks, show off “primitive” skills like making stone tools, and pantomime rituals. In some shows, indigenous performers engaged in fake battles or tests of strength.
Human rarities agents, the men who acquired human “specimens” for circuses, expositions, and other events in the West, were essential middlemen feeding this popular form of entertainment. Some agents were religious men who had begun their work as missionaries, or early anthropologists who lived in and studied distant communities. Others were entrepreneurs who sought to capitalize on the public’s desire to gawk and objectify. All, to some degree, were human traffickers.
Human zoos were most prevalent between the 1870s and World War I, but the practice began soon after the invention of the modern circus in London in the 1770s. By the 1830s and ’40s, there was an increasing “preoccupation with man being placed in a threatening position,” Fred Dahlinger Jr., curator of circus history at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, told Timeline. Like the inclusion of rare beasts from foreign lands, human zoos and other displays of indigenous peoples offered audiences a hierarchical narrative of race where the West triumphed over “uncivilized” cultures. Lion tamers overpowered big cats — and white men wrangled dark-skinned, “primitive” people who could be labeled as cannibals or vicious savages to clueless Americans encountering them for the first time.
Hagenbeck, as well as Barnum & Bailey Circus recruiter Robert A. Cunningham, anthropologist Frederick Starr, and, perhaps most famously, South Carolina minister turned trafficker Samuel Phillips Verner, created lucrative careers trafficking in “savages” for human zoos.
Despite questionable practices, however, not all of the men and women who performed in human zoos and traveling shows were coerced. Some participated willingly, even zealously, in theatrical and cultural performances. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, for example, provided Lakota Sioux activists like Chief Sitting Bull and Luther Standing Bear with the opportunity to appeal directly to American and European audiences regarding the oppression of their communities. The introductions to world leaders and international acclaim that Standing Bear achieved in his travels with Buffalo Bill eventually led to his participation in the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which emphasized Indian self-determination over the plundering and assimilation of Indian lands and communities advocated by the 1887 Dawes Act.
Most indigenous people brought to the West, in fact, would have had some agency in their decision, University of Missouri at St. Louis professor of anthropology Susan Brownell told Timeline. By the late 19th century, slavery was illegal, and most colonial governments would have been wary of anything that recalled the practice. “On the surface it all looked legal,” she says, though it’s unlikely that future performers fully understood what would be expected of them across the ocean.
“Some of the agents were scrupulous, and some of them were real shits and left people,” says Nancy Parezo, American Indian studies professor at the University of Arizona. Agents would have promised money and the opportunity to see the world, but many “performers” never got either.
And there is no doubt that agents, at times, flat-out lied to or even abducted their targets. In 2010, the Chilean government apologized for being complicit in the 1881 kidnapping of a group of Kawesqar Indians by Hagenbeck, who brought them to Europe to perform in human zoos. Only five of the men made it home alive; the bones of five others were discovered in Zurich more than 100 years after their abduction. (An 11th man died on the return trip to Chile.) One of nine Australian Aboriginals from the Wulguru clan who were (at worst) abducted or (at best) severely misled by Barnum & Bailey’s Cunningham to perform in the touring show in 1883 died of illness less than a year after his arrival. Instead of being repatriated to his community, his embalmed body was put on permanent display in Drew’s Dime Museum, in Cleveland. The man, who had been called Tambo, could be seen by visitors until 1920. When the museum closed down, his body was passed among funeral parlors until, in 1993, a Cleveland undertaker told the Australian ambassador’s office about his existence and Tambo was finally returned home.
Maybe the most shocking example of human trafficking during this period was perpetrated by Samuel Phillips Verner, a Presbyterian minister from South Carolina. The first men Verner brought to the United States were not technically intended for display. He met Kassongo and Kondola, two young men from a region near the Upper Congo River in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, while stationed there as a preacher. When his mission was complete, Verner sailed home with a ship loaded with plants, parrots, monkeys, and the two young men, who were promised an education and a better life in the United States.
But once they reached the U.S., Verner’s primary goal appeared to be to make a buck off them. After unsuccessfully attempting to “rent” them to the Smithsonian Institution along with the other “pieces” of his collection, Verner eventually deposited Kassongo and Kondola in 1901 at the Stillman Institute, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, which at the time operated a middle school and high school. Just a year later, Kassongo was killed in a stampede that broke out after a fight during a Booker T. Washington speech in Birmingham, Alabama.
Word of the spoils Verner brought from Congo got around, and in 1903 he was hired to “acquire” 12 “pygmies” (among them an adult woman, two infants, a patriarch, and a priest or healer), four “Red Africans,” including one “fine type,” and two other natives of a “distinct ethnic type” for display at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.
Ota Benga, one of the Mbuti “Pygmies” Verner procured, became one of the event’s more popular characters. When the fair was over, Werner continued to capitalize on Benga, displaying him in a touring show that lasted until 1906. Later that year, when their tour ended, Verner transferred his care to William Hornaday, director of the Bronx Zoo, where he was caged at the Monkey House. A sign posted at the exhibit read: “The African Pigmy, ‘Ota Benga.’ Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches. Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Verner. Exhibited each afternoon during September.”
Though he was not the only indigenous individual to reside in an actual zoo intended for wild animals (Hagenbeck brought a group of Sami reindeer herders to live alongside a herd of reindeer at the Hamburg Zoo in 1875), Benga’s display in the Bronx stirred up controversy. After only ten days as a resident of the Monkey House, he was removed from the zoo and sent to an orphanage. Benga never made it back to Congo. In 1916, after more than a decade in the United States, at the age of 32, he shot himself.
In the end, it wasn’t outrage over the subjugation of humans that put an end to human zoos. In the years leading up to World War II and beyond, the public’s time and attention was drawn away from frivolity and toward geopolitical conflict and economic collapse. By the middle of the 20th century, television replaced circuses and traveling “zoos” — human or otherwise — as the preferred mode of entertainment, and the display of indigenous people for entertainment fell out of fashion.
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