Colonial-era ‘human zoo’ exhibitions helped normalize the racial hierarchy that justified colonization

Evidence

Born in 1906, Tempels arrived in the Congo in 1933, just 48 years after the partition of Africa at the Berlin Conference and the very year of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. … Between the “civilized” conquerors and the colonized “primitive savages” reigned an absolute monarch. The subaltern could neither speak nor be listened to. … Between 1810 and 1940, 35,000 human beings were exhibited to 1.5 billion visitors! Human beings exhibited by other human beings in zoos, cirques, theaters, and anatomy rooms as well as colonial exhibitions and world fairs to foster the ideology of racial hierarchy indispensable to justify colonization and the looting of African natural resources. — Frans Dokman, Beyond Bantu Philosophy_…, 672

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ideological backdrop — dualistic civilization vs. primitive race hierarchy — against which Bantu Philosophy must be read.
• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on colonial knowledge production and subalternity (Spivak), and to the modern human-zoo scholarship.