Friday, November 26, 2021

'Human zoos' were vectors for racism, a Belgian exhibition shows


'Human zoos' were vectors for racism, a Belgian exhibition showsPlaster heads from 1911 moulded from "real Congolese" for the musuem's "Human Zoo"" exhibit showing how racist stereotypes were propagated (AFP/Kenzo TRIBOUILLARD)More

Matthieu DEMEESTERE
Fri, November 26, 2021

In the late 19th to early 20th centuries, recreated African villages were set up across Europe as amusement parks that served to extol the supposed cultural superiority of colonising empires.

They were also powerful vectors for racist stereotyping, as a Belgian museum show under way illustrates.

"Human Zoo: The age of colonial exhibitions" at the Africa Museum outside Brussels until March next year has resonance, because its buildings are on the site where Belgium's King Leopold II in 1897 reconstructed three "Congolese villages" on royal grounds.

At the time, the Belgian Congo -- today the Democratic Republic of Congo -- was Leopold's private property and 267 men and women were taken from it by force to be put on show in Brussels' World Fair, made to sit in front of the dwellings. Seven of them died, from cold or sickness.


That episode features in the museum's exhibition, which displays 500 items and documents showing what indigenous peoples suffered under various colonial powers.

The old ethnographic displays were designed to "show the other as primitive" and to "manufacture the 'savage'" to "reinforce the superiority of whites," the organisers explained.

Measurements of skulls -- craniometry -- were used to support theories of "inferior races".

The curators of the show estimate that the "industry" of putting human beings on display lured in around 1.5 billion people between the 16th century and 1960 to gawk.

- 'Freak show' roots -


The reconstructed villages and the human "specimens" displayed in them owed part of their existence to "freak shows" where individuals with physical abnormalities -- gigantism, dwarfism, or women with beards among others -- were presented as spectacle by circus owner P.T. Barnum among others.

In Europe, the "human zoos" reached their peak popularity from the 1880s after new colonial conquests. Imported exotic decors gave a curious public the impression of visiting real African villages.

While Germany and France had already hosted their own "villages", Belgium got its first in 1885, near Antwerp, with 12 Africans.

Twelve years later their number grew 20 times bigger, and the colonial section of the World Fair in Brussels' satellite town of Tervuren attracted a million visitors.

Over and over again, "the same message was repeated thousands of times, and the public ended up truly thinking that the African was a cannibal, inferior, dirty, lazy," one of the curators, Maarten Couttenier, told AFP.

"And these stereotypes still exist today -- proof that the colonial propaganda worked."

In the final part of the exhibition, the issue of how this racist denigration persists in everyday language challenges visitors with cliched phrases written in big letters on a white wall.

"I love black people!" -- "Oh, you did better than I expected" -- "The apartment's already rented".

For Salome Ysebaert, who conceptualised the museum's exhibition, such comments appear inoffensive and banal, but in reality are "microaggressions" revealing that racism is still lurking in minds, more than 60 years after the last "human zoo" in Brussels closed, in 1958.

mad/rmb/

Bank of England museum to host slavery exhibition

Louis Ashworth
Thu, November 25, 2021

The portraits of Sir James Bateman (L), Sir Robert Clayton (C) and Sir Gilbert Heathcote (R) were quietly removed from public view over summer - Bank of England

The Bank of England’s museum will host an exhibition about slavery, Andrew Bailey said, as he rejected suggestions that the central bank had “gone ‘woke’”.

The display at the Bank’s Threadneedle Street headquarters will include portraits of former governors and directors linked to the slave trade that were taken down during the summer, the Governor said.

The museum has been closed since Covid struck but is set to reopen soon.

“We’re actually going to open up with an exhibition, a display in the museum, on the history of slavery,” Mr Bailey told students at the Cambridge Union.

He added: “Quite a bit of the material that we’ve moved is going to reappear in the public part [of the Bank].”

The Bank said in August it had removed oil paintings and busts of seven former leading figures at Threadneedle Street after establishing their links to the transatlantic slave trade.

Mr Bailey said the Bank of England had no direct links to the slave trade, but added: “Clearly some of my predecessors were involved in it.”

Explaining the decision to remove the portraits, he said: “If you’re a member of staff in the Bank of England from an ethnic background … should you be required to sit in a room looking at a painting of somebody who owned slaves?

“Honestly, we can debate this at great length. I think it’s better to do it in the public part of the Bank where we can explain it.”

Mr Bailey added: “It’s not because as some of the newspapers say we’ve sort of gone ‘woke’, whatever that word actually means. Let's not make people sit in rooms and feel difficult because they're looking at these images.”

A report commissioned by the Bank and released in July found that ethic minority workers faced “material disparities” at Threadneedle Street and were being held back by unconscious bias and microaggressions.

At the same talk on Thursday, Mr Bailey also warned that El Salvador’s decision to recognise Bitcoin as legal tender was worrying and risked harming its citizens.

“It concerns me that a country would choose it as its national currency,” he said.

“What would worry me most of all is, do the citizens of El Salvador understand the nature and volatility of the currency they have?”

Mr Bailey’s comments come after the central American nation announced plans for a $1 billion bond issuance, with the funds raised to be split between buying the cryptocurrency and building a new city near an active volcano.

The International Monetary Fund warned earlier this week that El Salvador should not use Bitcoin due to the instability of its price. The world’s biggest digital coin is known for its wild price fluctuations, having swung from under $20,000 to almost $70,000 in the past year.

Led by its president Nayib Bukele, an outspoken supporter of Bitcoin, El Salvador officially adopted the cryptocurrency as legal tender in early September, meaning it must be accepted as payment for goods and services.

However, the move has been plagued by problems with El Salvadorans reporting issues with the government’s bitcoin “wallet”.

Mr Bailey also offered a sceptical assessment of economic developments in Turkey, where the lira has plunged as its president Recep Tayyip Erdogan fiddles the dials of monetary policy.

“As far as I can tell, it's a policy stance, which says the best way to tackle inflation is to cut interest rates,” he said. “And that's an unusual combination… I don't comment on other people's policies much. But I’ll just say it's an unusual combination in economics, certainly.”


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