The Dark History of Human Zoos

Paying to Stare at People

Between the 1870s and the 1950s, millions of Europeans and Americans paid admission to see other human beings displayed in enclosures, on stages, and in outdoor exhibits. The exhibits had different names: ethnological expositions, colonial exhibitions, savage villages, Völkerschauen. What they shared was a basic premise: that certain people, primarily from Africa, Asia, and the Americas, were different enough from European audiences to be worth displaying for entertainment and education.

This was not a fringe activity. Human zoos operated in Paris, London, Berlin, Brussels, New York, Hamburg, and dozens of other cities. They attracted enormous crowds. They were endorsed by scientists, governments, and colonial authorities. They were financially successful for decades. And they did profound, documented damage to the people displayed in them.

The Origins: Freak Shows and Colonial Display

The practice of displaying unusual or foreign humans for paying audiences predates the formal human zoo. European courts had long kept dwarfs, people with disabilities, and occasionally individuals from distant lands as curiosities. The traveling freak show, which flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries, blurred the line between entertainment and exhibition of difference.

What shifted in the 19th century was scale and ideology. European colonialism was expanding rapidly, and with it came a need to explain and justify the subjugation of non-European peoples. Scientific racism, the pseudo-intellectual framework that ranked human populations hierarchically with Europeans at the top, provided that justification. The human zoo was, in part, an educational tool for this ideology: audiences could see for themselves that the colonized peoples were simpler, more primitive, closer to nature, and therefore in need of European guidance.

Carl Hagenbeck, a German animal trader and zoo entrepreneur, is often credited with formalizing the human exhibition industry in Europe. Beginning in 1874, he organized what he called "anthropological-zoological" exhibitions, bringing groups of Laplanders, Nubians, Inuit, and others to be displayed alongside exotic animals. Hagenbeck was a shrewd businessman who understood that mixing human and animal display created a specific and powerful visual message about the relationship between the exhibited people and the animal kingdom.

Saartjie Baartman: The Most Famous and Most Exploited

No single case illustrates the human zoo phenomenon more starkly than that of Saartjie Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman from what is now South Africa. Baartman arrived in London in 1810 and was exhibited under the name "Hottentot Venus," displayed on a raised platform and invited to walk around so that audiences could examine her body, particularly her buttocks and genitalia, which European audiences found anomalous by their standards.

Abolitionist groups in Britain challenged the exhibitions as slavery. A legal case was brought on Baartman's behalf. She testified that she was a willing participant. Whether she genuinely consented, given her position of complete economic and legal dependence on her exhibitors, is a question historians have argued about ever since. What is certain is that after the British exhibitions ended, she was taken to France, where she continued to be displayed, was examined by scientists who wrote papers about her body as if she were a zoological specimen, and died in 1815 at around 26 years old.

After her death, the French anatomist Georges Cuvier dissected her, made a plaster cast of her body, and preserved her brain and genitalia in jars that were displayed in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris until 1974. Her remains were finally returned to South Africa in 2002, after years of diplomatic pressure by the South African government. She had been dead for 187 years.

The 1889 Paris Exposition and Scientific Credibility

The 1889 Paris Universal Exposition, the one for which the Eiffel Tower was built, included a "Negro Village" exhibiting approximately 400 people from French African colonies. The exhibition was designed to illustrate the scope and diversity of France's colonial empire. Scientists from the Museum of Natural History measured and examined the exhibited people. School groups were brought in for educational visits.

The combination of scientific endorsement and popular entertainment was the human zoo at its most institutionally legitimate. The Paris exposition drew 32 million visitors over its run. The colonial exhibition was one of its most popular attractions. The message sent to French citizens was unambiguous: their empire contained peoples who could be put on display for the public's education, and this was appropriate and enlightened behavior.

Similar exhibitions followed at every major European exposition through the early 20th century. Belgium's 1897 colonial exhibition displayed Congolese men, women, and children. Germany's exhibitions featured people from its African and Pacific colonies. The pattern was consistent across national borders and across decades.

Ota Benga and the American Dimension

In 1906, the Bronx Zoo in New York put a Congolese man named Ota Benga on display in the primate house. He was placed in an enclosure with an orangutan. A sign identified him as a 23-year-old "Pygmy" from the Congo. Crowds flocked to see him. The zoo's director defended the display as educational.

Ota Benga's story is particularly grim. He had been purchased from slave traders in the Congo, where his village had been destroyed. He was brought to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair as part of an exhibition organized by the explorer Samuel Verner. After returning briefly to Africa, he came back to the United States with Verner and ended up at the Bronx Zoo.

African-American clergymen in New York immediately protested the display as degrading and racist. Their objections were initially dismissed or mocked in the press. Eventually, pressure from the Black community secured Ota Benga's release. He lived in Virginia for several years, reportedly depressed and unable to adapt to American life. In 1916, he died by suicide. He was approximately 32 years old.

The Belgian Congo Exhibitions: Colonialism as Spectacle

Belgium's relationship with the Congo, which under King Leopold II was run as a personal fiefdom and a site of extraordinary brutality, produced some of the most politically significant human zoo exhibitions. The 1897 Tervuren exhibition displayed 267 Congolese people in a specially constructed "native village" on the grounds of what would become the Royal Museum for Central Africa.

Seven of the exhibited people died during the exhibition from illnesses contracted in the Belgian climate to which they had no immunity. The Belgian government treated this as an unfortunate logistical problem rather than a humanitarian catastrophe. The exhibition continued.

The Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, which grew out of this exhibition, displayed colonial artifacts and presented a triumphalist narrative of Belgian colonialism for over a century. A major renovation completed in 2018 finally confronted the museum's relationship to Leopold's regime and the atrocities it enabled, adding context about the rubber terror and the estimated 10 million Congolese who died under Leopold's rule. Belgium's reckoning with this history is still incomplete.

The Scientific Framework: How Racism Made It Respectable

Human zoos could not have operated as publicly and for as long as they did without intellectual support. The 19th century produced a body of scientific literature that claimed to establish racial hierarchies on biological grounds. Craniometry, the measurement of skull sizes, was used to argue that different racial groups had different cognitive capacities. Anthropometry, the measurement of bodies, produced elaborate tables and comparisons. Evolution was misread, in a way Darwin himself rejected, to suggest a literal hierarchy from "primitive" to "advanced" races.

Scientists who attended and endorsed human exhibitions were not fringe figures. They were chairs of university departments, directors of natural history museums, members of prestigious academies. Their involvement gave human zoos a legitimacy that popular entertainment alone could not have provided. The ideology and the entertainment business reinforced each other.

This scientific framework did not survive the 20th century intact. The Holocaust, which applied racial science to its logical conclusion, made biological racism an intellectual and moral impossibility in the postwar European academy. But the damage it had done over 80 years of human exhibitions was real and lasting.

The Last Exhibitions and the Slow End

Human zoos did not end cleanly. The 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, held near the height of European confidence in empire, featured a Kanak village from New Caledonia. The 1935 San Diego Exposition displayed a group of people marketed as "Mayan." Belgium held a colonial exhibition in 1958 at the Brussels World's Fair that included a Congolese village, just two years before Congolese independence.

The practice faded rather than stopped, as the colonial empires that had provided both the ideology and the supply of exhibited people began to collapse. Decolonization, the civil rights movement, and the postwar rejection of scientific racism combined to make human exhibition politically and culturally untenable by the 1960s.

The legacy of human zoos runs through contemporary debates about museum collections, colonial restitution, and the representation of non-Western peoples in cultural institutions. The bones and biological samples taken from exhibited individuals still sit in collections in European and American museums. The repatriation movement, which seeks their return, is in part a reckoning with this history.

What happened was not a misunderstanding or an excess of curiosity. It was a systematic, institutionally supported practice of displaying human beings as specimens, built on a racial ideology designed to justify colonial domination. Naming it clearly is the minimum that history requires.