While most of us have gone to zoos or museums, in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, there was a different kind of zoo with its roots in social Darwinism. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution had led some philosophers and scientists to promote that some humans were more evolved than others. In the framework of social Darwinism, some cultures or races were seen as weaker and would inevitably be subjugated by stronger cultures or races–and eventually die out. Social Darwinism joined previous attempts at scientifically-rooted racism that tried to place African peoples as a “missing link” between apes and so-called superior or modern humans. Ideas of scientific racism and social Darwinism developed into the modern eugenics movement by the early twentieth century.

Poster advertising a Sámi show arranged by Carl Hagenbeck in Germany.

In order to reinforce ideas of the backwardness and savagery of Indigenous and non-Western peoples, individuals and governments would set displays featuring not only exotic plants and animals but also people. While the founder of the modern zoo was creating enclosures that resembled more closely animals’ natural habitat, Carl Hagenbeck was also pioneering human zoos or “ethnic shows.” In 1874, Hagenbeck had the idea to display Samoan and Sámi people as a living exhibit. He attempted to recreate their “natural environment” just like the exotic animals. He followed up the success of this human exhibit by displaying Nubian people and two Inuit families from Labrador including their infant and toddler children. After being exhibited in cities across Europe including the Berlin Zoo, all of the Inuits–who Hagenbeck had failed to vaccinate against small pox–died of the disease. Abraham Ulrikab, an accomplished violinist and painter and the father of one of the Inuit families, kept a diary written in his native Inuktitut during his travels in Europe, and it was translated to English in the 1980s. The diary remains the only first-hand account of a person from Hagenbeck’s human zoos.

The Ulrikab family including Ulrike, Tobias, Abraham, Maria (on Ulrike's lap) and Sara (standing), c.1880.

Ota Benga, a Mbuti man, used as a human exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, 1906.

The people displayed and dehumanized in these exhibits often met tragic ends like Ulrikab’s. Ota Benga was out hunting one day in the Congo Free State when Belgian King Leopold’s forces came to his house and killed his family. Arriving back to find his wife and children murdered, Benga was taken captive and eventually sold to an American missionary, Samuel Phillips Verner. Verner brought Benga and several other African Pygmies back to the U.S. to be displayed as oddities and ethnographic specimens.

The group was first taken to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis where Benga was called "the only genuine African cannibal in America.” Next, he spent a period of time in a spare room at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In 1906, he was put on display at the Bronx Zoo, first inside the chimpanzee enclosure and then with an orangutan where he was labeled as “The Missing Link.” After a public outcry against what people at the time rightly saw as inhumane treatment and exploitation, Benga was removed from the zoo. Verner could no longer find employment for Benga as an oddity and so turned his care over to one of the more vocal exhibit protestors. While Benga attempted to return to Africa, he was stopped by the start of the flu pandemic which halted passenger traffic and died in the U.S. at the age of 32 in Lynchburg, Virginia.

The nomadic Selk'nam people of Tierra del Fuego, Chile were brought to the Paris World's Fair in 1889.

Human zoos continued in the U.S. and Europe into the 1920s. There were isolated examples of human zoos throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, including a German zoo in 2005 which created an “African village” where attendees could see African people making crafts.

You can read more about the Congo Free State, Paris World’s Fair, and social Darwinism in the upcoming 1880s Unboxed and about Eugenics in the upcoming 1910s Unboxed 16+.