In 1906, a zoo in New York City put a man inside a cage with an orangutan.
40,000 people came to watch in a single day.
They stood in line, bought their tickets, walked into the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo, and stared at a 23-year-old man from the Congo sitting on the floor next to an ape named De Hong.
The zoo had scattered bones around him to make the scene look primitive.
So, they gave him a bow and arrow as a prop.
They put a parrot in the cage, too, because apparently a man and an orangutan wasn’t theatrical enough.
His name was Ota Benga, and what happened to him at the end of this story is something I still can’t fully process.
But, here’s the thing.
Ota Benga wasn’t the beginning.
He wasn’t even close to the beginning.
He was one man in a machine that had been running for almost a century by the time he sat in that cage.
A machine that put over 30,000 human beings on display across Europe and America.
>> [music] >> A machine visited by 1 and 1/2 billion people.
Not million.
Billion.
>> [clears throat] >> A machine funded by governments, blessed by scientists, promoted by newspapers, and attended by kings.
The last one didn’t shut down until 1958.
That’s not a typo.
1958.
And the man who helped put Ota Benga in that cage, he went on to write a book that Adolf Hitler called his Bible.
[music] We’ll get to that.
But, first we need to go back, way back.
To the woman whose body was displayed in a museum in Paris in jars for 187 years.
Because she was the prototype, and her name was Saartjie Baartman.
London, 1810.
A 20-year-old Khoikhoi woman from the Eastern Cape of South Africa arrives on a ship.
She’s been brought by a British military surgeon named Alexander Dunlop and a free black man named Hendrik Caesars, >> [music] >> who had been her employer in Cape Town.
The story they told her, or the story she chose to believe, was that she’d make money >> [music] >> in England.
That she’d perform, that she’d come back.
She never came back.
They put her on stage at 225 Piccadilly.
Ticket price, two shillings.
She was dressed in a tight bodysuit that emphasized her figure.
Saartjie had a condition called steatopygia, an accumulation of fat in the buttocks that was common among Khoikhoi women, but considered extraordinary by European audiences.
They called her the Hottentot Venus.
The word Hottentot was already a slur.
The word Venus was ironic cruelty.
[music] The Roman goddess of love and beauty attached to a woman they were displaying as a curiosity.
And the audiences came.
Beau Brummell came.
The actor Charles Kemble came and reportedly muttered, “Poor poor creature.
” after meeting her backstage.
>> [music] >> But, he still came.
They all came because the show worked.
The mix of sexual curiosity and racial fascination was intoxicating to Georgian London.
People paid their two shillings, they stared, and some of them, for an extra fee, were allowed to poke her with [music] a stick or a finger.
Pay attention to this next part because it set the legal precedent for everything that came after.
An abolitionist group in London actually tried [music] to stop the show.
They brought the case to court arguing that Saartjie was being held against her will, and the court’s ruling was devastating.
Saartjie testified through an interpreter that she was performing voluntarily and receiving a share of the profits.
The case was dismissed.
The legal framework had been set.
If you could argue that the person on display had consented, the show could go on.
And that argument would be recycled for the next 150 years.
But, Saartjie’s story didn’t end on that stage.
After 4 years in London, she was [music] taken to Paris, sold essentially to an animal trainer named Réaux, who continued the exhibitions while also pushing her [music] into prostitution.
By 1815, she was an alcoholic.
She was sick.
She was alone.
In March of that year, three of France’s most prominent scientists, Georges Cuvier, Henri de Blainville, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, brought her to the Jardin du Roi to study her.
They enticed her with alcohol and sweets.
They wanted her to pose nude.
She refused to show her genitalia.
They made notes anyway.
On December 29th, 1815, Saartjie Baartman died.
She was 26 years old, maybe 27.
Nobody was sure of her exact age because nobody had ever cared to ask.
And then Cuvier did something that would haunt her for almost two centuries.
>> [music] >> Within hours of her death, he performed an autopsy.
He made a plaster cast of her entire body.
He removed her skeleton, and he preserved her brain and her genitalia in jars of formaldehyde, which were displayed at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris.
They stayed on display there until 1974.
Let that land for a second.
Her body parts were on public display in a museum in Paris, one of the most civilized cities on Earth, until the year Richard Nixon resigned from office.
Her remains were not returned to South Africa until 2002 >> [music] >> after a personal request from President Nelson Mandela and years of diplomatic negotiations with France.
[music] She was buried near Port Elizabeth on National Women’s Day.
But, by the time Saartjie died, the idea she had been used to prove that certain races were inferior, closer to animals, scientifically fascinating in their primitiveness, that idea had already taken root, and it was about to become an industry.
The man who industrialized human exhibition was a German animal dealer named Carl Hagenbeck.
>> [music] >> He lived in Hamburg.
He sold wild animals to zoos across Europe, and in 1874, he had an idea that would change the entertainment landscape of the Western world.
What if he displayed people alongside the animals? His first show featured Sami people from northern Scandinavia, reindeer herders who were brought to Hamburg and displayed with their animals in a constructed native village.
It was a sensation.
Hagenbeck immediately saw the commercial potential [music] and began scouting for more exotic groups.
In 1876, he sent agents to the Egyptian Sudan to bring back Nubians.
[music] The Nubian exhibit toured Paris, London, and Berlin.
Attendance doubled wherever it went.
And this is where the money entered the equation.
Because Hagenbeck wasn’t a scientist.
He wasn’t a government official.
He was a businessman, and he discovered that people would pay more to see a human being from a distant land than they’d pay to see a lion.
That realization turned ethnographic exhibition into a commercial enterprise.
Within a decade, human zoos could be found in Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona, London, Milan, New York, and Warsaw with 200,000 to 300,000 visitors attending each exhibition.
The business model was simple.
You’d send agents to a colony.
You’d recruit or coerce a group of indigenous people.
You’d ship them to Europe.
You’d build a fake village on the grounds of a zoo or an exposition.
You’d dress the people in traditional clothing, or what Europeans imagined was traditional clothing, and have them perform daily activities while paying customers watched from behind a fence.
But, this is where it stops being just a story about one businessman and starts becoming something much worse.
Because the places hosting these exhibitions weren’t fringe operations.
>> [music] >> They were the most prestigious institutions in Europe.
The Berlin Zoo, one of the oldest zoos in the world, opened in 1844, began hosting what the Germans called Völkerschauen, people’s shows, >> [music] >> and they became a massive source of revenue.
On a single Sunday in 1878, 62,000 people came to the Berlin Zoo to see Nubians displayed alongside elephants and rhinos.
Kaiser Wilhelm II himself attended with his court.
That’s the head of state [music] watching human beings in an enclosure and considering it a perfectly normal afternoon.
The very first Völkerschau at the Berlin Zoo on March 9th, 1878, featured six Inuit from Greenland, a couple, their two children, and two young relatives.
They were made to paddle a kayak across one of the zoo’s lakes and ride a dog sled across a sandy embankment.
The Eskimo show had been such a success in Paris that the Berlin Zoo wanted its own version.
But, here’s the detail that never makes it into the promotional materials.
Later that year, another group of Inuit, this time from Labrador in Canada, spent a few weeks at the Berlin Zoo during their European tour.
They all contracted smallpox.
Lacking vaccination, some of them died in Germany.
The rest died in France at their next stop.
The show continued.
In 1900, 20 Samoans were sent on tour through German zoos.
Their island had just been claimed as a German colony.
A promotional poster described them as Germany’s new compatriots, right next to an illustration of a bare-shouldered young woman with a snake [music] wrapped around her neck, despite the fact that no such snakes exist on Samoa.
These compatriots were not treated as equals.
They were treated as attractions.
In 1901, the German authorities actually banned displays of people from German colonies, not because they thought it was wrong, but because they feared it would undermine colonial subjects’ respect for the white man.
The logic wasn’t moral.
It was strategic.
The scientific community loved it.
Anthropologists [music] and ethnographers used the exhibitions as living laboratories, measuring skulls, documenting physical features, writing papers about [music] racial hierarchies that would be cited for decades.
Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris, a zoological garden, remember, built to house plants and animals, hosted its first [music] ethnological spectacle in 1877, bringing in Nubians and Inuit.
That year, the garden’s attendance doubled to 1 million visitors.
>> [music] >> Between 1877 and 1912, the Jardin hosted approximately 30 separate ethnographic exhibitions, one after another, feeding Parisian curiosity with a rotating [music] cast of human beings from every corner of the French Empire.
But the exhibitions were never really about science, and they were never about education.
What they were about, and this is the layer that’s hardest to look at directly, was entertainment wrapped in the language of civilization.
Every display, every fake village, every carefully staged demonstration of native life carried the same implicit message.
Look at how primitive they are.
Look at how far we’ve come.
Look at the gap between us and them.
>> [music] >> The exhibitions didn’t just reflect racism, they manufactured it.
>> [music] >> They gave millions of ordinary Europeans a visual visceral experience of supposed racial difference packaged as a family outing.
And they kept getting bigger.
Paris, 1889, the World’s Fair.
The Eiffel Tower has just been built.
28 million people attend, and the major attraction is not the tower.
The major attraction is the Negro Village.
400 indigenous people from French colonies displayed in reconstructed habitats across the fairgrounds.
Visitors could walk through a Senegalese village, watch Congolese craftsmen work, observe Malagasy families going about staged daily routines.
>> [music] >> The indigenous people were the most photographed, most discussed, most visited element of the entire exposition, and nobody protested.
Not because people didn’t notice, because nobody thought there was anything wrong with it.
This was the high noon of European imperialism.
The scramble for Africa was in full swing.
Every major European power was carving up the continent, and the exhibitions were the marketing department of colonialism.
They existed to make the public comfortable with empire, to make conquest feel educational, >> [music] >> to make exploitation look like a civilizing mission.
The numbers tell the story better than anything else.
The 1889 Paris Fair, 28 million visitors, 400 indigenous [music] people on display.
The 1900 Paris Fair, its living diorama of Madagascar drew comparable crowds.
The colonial exhibitions in Marseille in 1906 and 1922 displayed human beings in cages, some of them nude or semi-nude.
>> [music] >> And then came 1907, when the Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale in the Bois de Vincennes built six complete replica villages, Madagascar, Indochina, Sudan, Congo, Tunisia, Morocco, and populated them with people brought from those colonies.
An estimated 2 million visitors came between May and October.
But none of those compare to what was happening in Belgium.
King Leopold II of Belgium never set foot in the Congo, not once.
But he owned it, personally.
The Congo Free State, a territory 76 times the size of Belgium, was his private property, >> [music] >> recognized as such by every major nation in the world after the Berlin Conference of 1885.
And what he did with that property is one of the most documented [music] atrocities in modern history.
He turned the Congolese into slave laborers to harvest wild rubber.
His private army, the Force Publique, would enter a village, take the women hostage in chains, and force the men into the forest to gather rubber.
Those who didn’t meet their quotas had their hands and feet chopped off, their children’s hands and feet.
Estimates of the death toll during Leopold’s reign vary, but the most commonly cited range is between 5 and 10 million people.
In 1897, Leopold wanted to drum up public support for his colonial project, so he organized a colonial section at the Brussels International Exhibition, built on his country estate in Tervuren.
He constructed a lavish colonial palace in Art Nouveau style.
He filled it with Congolese artifacts, mounted animals, geological samples, and economic products.
And then, [music] he imported 267 Congolese men, women, and children and put them behind a fence.
Three fenced villages were built near the ponds of Tervuren Park, [music] two Bangala villages and one Mayombe village.
90 soldiers from the Force Publique >> [music] >> were brought to perform in concerts and military parades.
A fourth village, named after the Flemish commune of Gizenga, [music] showcased young Congolese people who had been educated and civilized by a local abbot, presented as proof that the colonizing mission was working.
More than a million visitors came to the colonial section alone, most of them between late June and late August, >> [music] >> which happened to coincide with the dates the Congolese were actually present.
They weren’t there to see the Art Nouveau architecture, they were there to see the people.
And then the Congolese started dying.
Seven of the 267 didn’t survive the exhibition.
The precise causes of death varied.
Disease, exposure, the Belgian climate was nothing like Central Africa, and the living conditions in the fake villages were not designed for human comfort.
They were designed for spectacle.
When Leopold heard that the Congolese were getting sick from candy that visitors were tossing over the fence, he didn’t close the exhibition.
He put up a sign, the equivalent of don’t feed the animals.
That detail [music] alone tells you everything you need to know about because everything I’ve told you so far, the Jardin d’Acclimatation, the World’s Fairs, Leopold’s fence, all of that happened in Europe.
What happened next happened in America, in the Bronx, in a zoo that still exists today.
And it involved a man whose story is so specifically cruel that it reads like fiction, except that every detail is documented.
Ota Benga was born around 1883 in the Ituri forest of what would become the Congo Free State.
>> [music] >> He was Mbuti, a member of one of the pygmy peoples of Central Africa.
His early life is largely unknown because nobody asked him about it, and he left no written account.
What we know comes almost entirely from the man who bought him.
That man was Samuel Phillips Verner, an American missionary and businessman who had been hired by the organizers of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St.
Louis to bring African pygmies to the World’s Fair.
Verner traveled to the Congo, purchased several Batwa people from the Bashilele tribe, and found Ota Benga for sale at a slave market.
The price was a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth.
Verner brought Benga and the other Africans to St.
Louis, where they were displayed at the World’s Fair alongside Apache warrior Geronimo in what the fair’s organizers enthusiastically called >> [music] >> a parade of evolutionary progress.
The pygmies were placed in the exhibition in a specific sequence designed to illustrate racial hierarchy, the most [music] primitive peoples positioned first, ascending toward European civilization.
[music] Benga became a particularly popular performer who drew large crowds.
After the fair, Verner took the Africans back to the Congo.
>> [music] >> But when Benga returned, he discovered that his entire village had been massacred by Leopold’s Force Publique while he was away.
>> [music] >> His family was gone.
His wife was dead.
The community that had been his world no longer existed.
He asked Verner to take him back to America.
Verner agreed, but by the time they reached New York in 1906, Verner was broke.
He needed somewhere to put Benga.
He contacted Henry Bumpus at the American Museum of Natural History, who paid Verner to have Benga stay at the museum and entertain visitors.
When Benga grew restless and began causing problems, Verner passed him to William Hornaday, director of the New York Zoological Park, [music] the Bronx Zoo.
Hornaday initially had Benga help care for the animals, but Hornaday noticed something.
Wherever Benga went on the zoo grounds, crowds followed.
People were more interested in the African man than in any animal in the park, and Hornaday, encouraged by Madison Grant, secretary of the New York Zoological Society, and a man who would later become one of America’s most prominent eugenicists, saw an opportunity.
>> [music] >> They placed Benga in the monkey house, not metaphorically, >> [music] >> literally.
They put his hammock in an exhibit space.
They gave him a bow and arrow to play with.
They scattered bones on the ground around him to make the scene look more primitive, and they put him in with Dohong, an orangutan who had been trained to perform tricks and imitate human behavior.
A parrot was added for visual variety.
On September 8th, 1906, the first day of the exhibit, a sign was posted.
The African Pygmy, Ota Benga, age 23 years, height [music] 4 ft 11 in, weight 103 lb, brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa, by Dr.
Samuel P.
Verner, exhibited each afternoon during September.
The sign was hung on the cage.
40,000 people came on the first Sunday alone.
They pressed against the bars.
They laughed.
They pointed.
They threw things.
They made monkey noises.
Benga, who spoke no English and understood nothing of what was happening around him, began to react.
He became agitated.
When visitors mocked him, he started shooting arrows at them.
He used [music] the bow the zoo had given him as a prop, and he turned it into a weapon of resistance.
After he wounded several gawkers, the zoo had to begin providing police escort whenever he left the monkey house.
But, the resistance that mattered came from somewhere else entirely.
A group of African-American ministers, led by Reverend James H.
Gordon of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn, immediately organized a protest.
Gordon went to the press.
He went to Mayor George B.
McClellan Jr.
He went to anyone who would listen.
>> [music] >> His words were direct.
“Our race, we think, is depressed enough without exhibiting one of us with the apes.
We think we are worthy of being considered human beings with souls.
” The mayor refused to intervene.
The New York Times ran an editorial that essentially defended the exhibit.
It suggested that the public should not quite understand all the emotion that the protest was generating.
Translation, “Calm down.
It’s educational.
” But, Gordon didn’t stop.
He threatened legal action.
He organized other ministers.
>> [music] >> He created enough public pressure that by late September, the zoo quietly removed Benga from the monkey house, not because Hornaday or Grant believed they’d done something wrong.
Hornaday had labeled the exhibit a valuable spectacle for the public’s edification, but because the controversy was becoming bad for business.
This is where this story breaks in half.
Benga was released into Reverend Gordon’s custody and placed at the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn.
He spent 3 years there, largely refusing to be seen by the public.
A newspaper reported in 1907 that visitors who came to the orphanage hoping to catch a glimpse of Ota Benga were consistently disappointed.
“He refuses to be looked at since his experience in the monkey cages.
” Later, in 1910, Gordon arranged for Benga to relocate to Lynchburg, Virginia.
A poet named Anne Spencer tutored him in English.
Gordon paid to have his teeth, which had been filed to points in the Mbuti tradition, capped so he could assimilate more easily into local society.
>> [music] >> Benga went to school.
He worked at a tobacco factory.
He adopted the name Otto Bingo.
He tried to go home, but by 1914, World War I had erupted, and all passenger ship travel to Africa was suspended.
Benga couldn’t get back.
>> [music] >> He was stranded in a country that had put him in a cage with an orangutan in a town that didn’t quite know what to do with him, separated forever from a home that no longer existed.
[music] On March 20th, 1916, Ota Benga walked into the woods on the edge of Lynchburg.
He borrowed a gun from one of his host families.
He built a small ceremonial fire, a Mbuti ritual, and he shot himself in the heart.
He was 33 years old.
He was buried in an unmarked grave at the Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg.
His grave wasn’t identified until decades later.
It took 114 years for the organization that runs the Bronx Zoo, the Wildlife Conservation Society, to issue a formal apology.
That happened in July 2020.
In its statement, [music] the WCS also denounced the eugenics-based pseudo-scientific racism, writings, and philosophies of its founders, Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn Sr.
Grant’s book, The Passing of the Great Race, had been used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials.
Adolf Hitler reportedly called it his Bible.
[music] The man who helped put Ota Benga in a cage wrote the book that inspired the Holocaust.
But, here’s what I need you to understand.
Ota Benga’s story is one thread in a fabric that stretches across decades and continents.
While Benga was being stared at in the Bronx, Paris was preparing its next round of colonial exhibitions.
While he was learning English in Lynchburg, the Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale had already hosted its 1907 exhibition with six reconstructed villages, and the machine kept running.
Between 1890 and the First World War, the displays shifted from noble savage spectacle to something darker.
As European powers pushed deeper into Africa through military conquest, the exhibitions began to reflect that violence.
Tuareg people [music] were put on display after the French conquered Timbuktu.
Malagasy people were exhibited after France occupied Madagascar.
Warriors from Abomey, the so-called Amazons of Dahomey, were displayed after their kingdom fell to French forces >> [music] >> in 1894.
The exhibitions became victory parades disguised as education.
Each new conquered people became a new act in the show.
And there was a racial hierarchy even within the exhibitions themselves.
When Cossacks were invited to the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris, the Russian embassy insisted they shouldn’t be confused with the African exhibits.
When Buffalo Bill brought his Wild West Show, the presence of Native Americans gave him an easy place in the framework.
The Indian occupied a clearly defined rung on the ladder of supposed civilization.
The system had its own internal logic, and that logic reinforced itself every time a new group was added to the display.
The 1904 St.
Louis World’s Fair, the same fair where Ota Benga was first exhibited, took [music] this to an extreme.
The Philippine campaign became the centerpiece of the American exhibition.
Filipino people were displayed in what the organizers called a parade of evolutionary progress.
Visitors could inspect primitives who represented the counterbalance to civilization, justifying Rudyard Kipling’s poem, The White Man’s Burden.
One visitor commented approvingly that the human zoo displayed the race narrative of odd peoples who mark time while the world advances, >> [music] >> and of savages made by American methods into civilized workers.
That was meant as a compliment.
And then, after the devastation of World War I, after millions of Europeans had slaughtered each other with machine guns and poison gas, after the civilized world had demonstrated exactly what advanced societies were capable of, the exhibitions didn’t stop.
They got bigger.
In 1931, Paris staged the largest colonial exhibition in history.
The Exposition Coloniale Internationale opened on May 6th in the Bois de Vincennes.
It covered 500 acres, the most [music] extensive exposition in French history.
It surrounded an artificial lake with two islands.
It included a massive zoological garden.
Broad avenues separated the pavilions, giving visitors a sense of spaciousness that no previous Paris exhibition had achieved.
The whole thing was run by Maréchal Lyautey, a distinguished [music] military man who had organized the Franco-Moroccan Colonial Exposition >> [music] >> in Casablanca in 1915, and insisted on absolute precision in the [music] preparations.
Every exhibit had to be complete 15 days before the May 6th opening.
Anything unfinished would be torn down at the exhibitor’s expense >> [music] >> and it was a spectacular success.
If you define success by numbers, 33 and a half million paid admissions plus an estimated million free tickets.
Indigenous people from across the French Empire were brought to Paris to populate reconstructed villages, demonstrate traditional crafts and perform dances.
Around a hundred new Caledonian Kanaks were displayed at the Jardin d’Acclimatation.
Nomadic Senegalese villages were presented.
The exhibition made a profit of 33 million francs and left two permanent legacies, [music] the zoo in the Parc de Vincennes and the art gallery that became the Palais de la [music] Porte Dorée, which today houses France’s National Museum of Immigration History.
[music] Think about that for a second.
The museum that now tells the story of immigration to France literally sits in a building that was constructed to celebrate colonialism.
There was also a deliberate effort to shape the next generation.
The Colonial Office organized a program called Tour the World in Four Days that [music] brought school children from across France to study the exhibits.
Primary schools, secondary schools, trade schools, teacher training institutions, all of them participated and it worked.
[music] Historian William Cohen later documented that many of the men who entered the French Colonial Service in the 1930s specifically cited the Vincennes Exposition as having influenced their career choice.
The machine wasn’t just displaying colonial subjects, it was recruiting colonial administrators.
The French Communist Party organized a counter exhibition called The Truth About the Colonies, which called attention to forced labor, exploitation and the fundamental inhumanity of the colonial project.
It attracted 5,000 visitors in 8 months.
34 million people chose the spectacle, 5,000 chose the truth.
The surrealists, André Breton, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, signed a manifesto calling for a boycott of the colonial exhibition.
Almost [music] nobody listened because the exhibition wasn’t selling information, it was selling a feeling, the feeling of standing in a reconstructed Senegalese village and believing that you were seeing something authentic, something scientific, something that confirmed what you already believed about the order of the world, >> [music] >> the warm glow of civilizational superiority available for the price of an afternoon ticket and the machine still wasn’t done.
27 years later, 1958, Brussels, Expo 58, the first major world’s fair after World War II.
The Atomium was built.
41 million visitors attended.
The theme was evaluation of the world for a more humane world.
A more humane world, that was the official slogan.
And inside the exhibition grounds, Belgium built another Congolese village.
This was not a relic of the 19th century.
This was 1958, the same year NASA was founded, the same year the European Economic Community held its first meeting, the same year the integrated circuit was invented.
The world was launching satellites into orbit and Belgium was putting Congolese people behind a bamboo fence.
>> [music] >> Nearly 600 Congolese people, 273 men, 128 women and 197 children were brought from the Belgian Congo to Brussels.
They were housed in a reconstructed village behind bamboo fences.
During the day, they performed traditional crafts, danced, [music] sang.
At night, they were transported to a separate facility in Tervuren, >> [music] >> the same Tervuren where Leopold had displayed 267 Congolese 61 years earlier.
>> [music] >> Far from the city center, far from temptation.
The Congolese who traveled to Belgium had been told this would be a cultural exchange, that they would represent their country with dignity.
Instead, they found themselves standing behind a fence while white Europeans threw bananas and peanuts at them.
Visitors made monkey noises to get their attention.
Parents brought their children to gawk.
The scene was identical to 1897.
>> [music] >> The only difference was that now there was television.
An 8-month-old baby named Juste de Bonaventure Langa died during Expo 58.
>> [music] >> He rests in the Tervuren cemetery.
On his grave, a marble plaque reads, “Exposition Universelle 1958, Congo pense à toi, Congo thinks of you.
” In mid-July, the Congolese had had enough.
They protested the condescending treatment.
They demanded to be sent home.
The village was shut down before the exhibition ended.
[music] European newspapers for the first time expressed some sympathy.
Two years later, Congo declared independence.
And here’s the thing that stays with me.
This isn’t ancient history.
It’s not something that happened in a distant era to people whose lives are separated from ours by centuries.
The 1958 Brussels exhibition happened 13 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, 13 years after the world said never again, the 13 years after humanity saw what happened when you classified people as subhuman and put them behind fences.
And Belgium built a Congolese village anyway.
The last Congolese people to stand behind those fences in Brussels are still alive today.
>> [music] >> They were children in 1958.
Some of them are in their 70s.
They remember the bananas.
They remember the monkey noises.
They remember being taken to Belgium for what they thought would be a dignified representation of their culture and discovering that they were the exhibit.
Saartjie Baartman’s genitalia were in jars at the Musée de l’Homme until 1974.
Her skeleton was stored there until 2002.
Georges Cuvier, the man who dissected her, was considered one of the greatest scientists of his era.
>> [music] >> His name is on buildings.
His discoveries are taught in universities and the jars with her organs sat in his institution for 187 years before anyone thought to send them home.
>> [music] >> Between 1810 and 1958, the human zoo industry, and that’s what it was, an industry, exhibited more than 30,000 people to an estimated 1 and a half billion visitors across Europe and America.
Those numbers are not disputed.
They’re documented, photographed, receipted, ticketed.
This wasn’t a secret.
It wasn’t underground.
>> [music] >> It was the most popular entertainment of the colonial era.
It was more popular than the Eiffel Tower >> [music] >> and it was erased almost completely.
Pascal Blanchard, the French historian who has done more than anyone to recover this history, has pointed out that human zoos have been completely [music] suppressed in our collective history and memory.
There are no monuments.
There are no memorials.
There are no plaques at the Jardin d’Acclimatation telling you that 30 ethnographic exhibitions took place there >> [music] >> between 1877 and 1912.
There’s no sign at the Bronx Zoo marking the spot where the monkey house stood.
The building was closed in 2012, 111 years after it opened and nobody mentioned Ota Benga during the closure.
In the Bois de Vincennes, at the eastern edge of Paris, the remains of the 1907 Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale still stand.
The pavilions are crumbling.
The Indochina pavilion has been partially restored.
The others are rotting.
The 10-ft tall red torii gate at the entrance stands like a ghost.
For most of the 20th century, the garden was locked behind padlocked fences, [music] kept out of public view.
As if hiding the evidence would make the history disappear.
It didn’t disappear.
It just went underground into the architecture of how we see each other, into the DNA of racial categories that scientists invented to justify these exhibitions, into the language of civilization and savagery [music] that was given visceral, visual reality every time a family bought a ticket and stood on one side of a fence while a human being stood on the other.
That sign on Ota Benga’s cage at the Bronx Zoo, the African pygmy exhibited each afternoon during September.
The words are clinical, neutral.
They sound like a museum label, like a display card at an aquarium, like something you’d read and nod at and move on.
40,000 people read that sign on a single Sunday in 1906 and decided it was worth the price of admission.
The sign is gone now.
The cage is gone.
The monkey house is closed, but the distance between the people who read that sign and the people who read this sentence is a lot shorter than any of us want to believe.
