Paris wasn’t the only city to enjoy this breed of spectacle. Other European colonial powers hosted similar events. Indeed by the time of the 1907 Paris Exposition, human zoos had been around for more than a century. In 1853 a troupe of Zulus undertook a grand tour of Europe. And forty-three years before this an advertisement in London’s Morning Post newspaper signalled the arrival of a woman who would go down in history as one of the most notorious of all racial freak shows, her story echoed by those to come. ‘From the Banks of the River Gamtoos, on the Borders of Kaffraria, in the interior of South Africa, a most correct and perfect Specimen of that race of people,’ it announced.
The ‘Hottentot Venus’, as she was described in the paper, was available for anyone to take a peek at, for a limited time only and at the cost of two shillings. Her real name was Saartjie Baartman and she was aged somewhere between twenty and thirty. What made her so fascinating were her enormous buttocks and elongated labia, considered by Europeans to be sexually grotesque. Calling her a ‘Venus’ was a joke at her expense. The Morning Post took pains to mention the expense shouldered by Boer farmer Hendric Cezar in transporting her all the way to Europe. He was banking on her body causing a scandal.
Baartman had been Cezar’s servant in Africa, and by all accounts, she had come with him to Europe of her own free will. But it’s unlikely that the life she endured as his travelling exhibit was what she expected. Her career was brief and humiliating. At each show, she was brought out of a cage to parade in front of visitors, who poked and pinched to check that she was real. Commentators in the press couldn’t help but notice how unhappy she seemed, even remarking that if she felt ill or unwilling to perform, she was physically threatened. To add to the humiliation, she became, quite literally, the butt of jokes across the city, rendered in relentless caricature.
At the end of her run, Baartman ended up in Paris. She found herself at the mercy of celebrated French naturalist Georges Cuvier, a pioneer in the field of comparative anatomy, which aims to understand the physical differences between species. Like so many before him, he was spellbound by her – but his was an anatomist’s fascination, one that drove him to undertake a detailed study of every bit of her body. When she died in 1815, just five years after being displayed in London, Cuvier dissected her, removing her brain and genitals and presenting them in jars to the French Academy of Sciences.
As far as Cuvier was concerned, this was just science and she was just another sample. The prodding, cutting, dehumanising fingers of researchers like him sought only to understand what made her and those like her different. What gave some of us dark skin and others light? Why did we have different hair, body shape, habits and language? If we were all one species, then why didn’t we look and behave the same way? These were questions that had been asked before, but it was nineteenth-century scientists who turned the study of humans into the most gruesome art. People became objects, grouped together like museum exhibits. Any sense of common humanity was left at the door, replaced by the cold, hard tools of dissection and categorisation.
Following a lifetime of being relentlessly poked and prodded, Baartman remained on show for a hundred and fifty years after her death. Her abused body ended up at the Musée de l’Homme, the Museum of Man, looking out on the Eiffel Tower, a plaster cast of it still standing there until as recently as 1982. It was only in 2002, after a request from Nelson Mandela, that her remains were removed from Paris and finally returned to South Africa for burial.
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‘In the modern world we look to science as a rationalisation of political ideas,’ I’m told by Jonathan Marks, a genial, generous professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is one of the most outspoken voices against scientific racism. Race science, he explains, emerged ‘in the context of colonial political ideologies, of oppression and exploitation. It was a need to classify people, make them as homogeneous as possible.’ By grouping people and dividing these groups, it was easier to control them.
It is no accident that modern ideas of race were formed during the heyday of European colonialism, when those in power had already decided on their superiority. By the nineteenth century, the possibility that races existed and some were inferior to others gave colonialism a moral kick in the drive for public support. The truth – that European nations were motivated by economic greed or power – was harder to swallow than the suggestion that the places they were colonising were too uncivilised and barbaric to matter, or that they were actually doing the savages a favour.
In the United States, the same tortured logic was used to justify slavery. The transatlantic trade in slaves officially ended in 1807 once the United Kingdom passed its Slave Trade Act, but the exploitation continued for far longer. The use of slave labour continued, people’s bodies plundered both in life and death. Dead black slaves, for instance, were routinely stolen or sold for medical dissection. Daina Ramey Berry, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, has documented the economic value of slavery in the United States. She notes that there was a brisk trade in black corpses in the nineteenth century, some exhumed by their owners for a quick profit. It’s ironic that much of our modern scientific understanding of human anatomy was built on the bodies of those who were considered at the time less than human.
‘If you could say that the slavers were naturally distinct from the slaves, then you have essentially a moral argument in favour of slavery,’ explains Jonathan Marks. Given this distinction, many feared that the abolition of slavery would set free the human zoo, unleashing chaos. In 1822 a group calling itself the American Colonisation Society bought land in West Africa to establish a colony named Liberia, now the Republic of Liberia, motivated largely by the desperate dread that freed black slaves would want to settle among them, with the same rights. Repatriation to the continent of their ancestors seemed like a convenient solution, ignoring the fact that after generations in slavery, most black Americans simply didn’t have a tangible connection to it any more – let alone to a new country that their ancestors may never have seen.
Louis Agassiz, a Swiss naturalist who had been mentored by Georges Cuvier and moved to America in 1846, argued passionately against blacks being treated the same as whites. Shaken by such an intense physical disgust towards black domestic workers serving him food at a hotel that he almost couldn’t eat there at all, he became convinced that separate races originated in different places, with different characters and intellectual abilities.
Enslavement was turned back on the slaves themselves. They were in this miserable, degrading position not because they had been forcibly enslaved, it was argued, but because it was their biological place in the universe. At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Plymouth in 1841, an American slave owner from Kentucky named Charles Caldwell had already claimed that Africans bore more of a resemblance to apes. In their 1854 book Types of Mankind, American physician Josiah Clark Nott and Egyptologist George Gliddon went so far as to sketch actual comparisons between the skulls of white and black people, alongside those of apes. While the typical European face was artfully modelled on classical sculpture, African faces were crude cartoons, exaggerating features that made it seem they had more in common with chimpanzees and gorillas.
Propelled by a belief that black people had their own unique diseases, Samuel Cartwright, a medical doctor practising in Louisiana and Mississippi, characterised in 1851 what he saw as a mental condition particular to black slaves, coining it ‘drapetomania’, or ‘the disease causing Negroes to run away’. Harvard University historian Evelynn Hammonds, who teaches Cartwright’s story to her students, laughs darkly when she recounts it. ‘It makes sense to him, because if the natural state of the negro is to be a slave, then running away is going against their natural state. And therefore it’s a disease.’
For Hammonds, another chilling aspect of Cartwright’s work is the way in which he methodically described the sufferers of drapetomania. ‘The colour of the skin is the main difference,’ she reads for me from her notes, ‘… the membranes, the muscles,