Human Zoos: 16 Photos of People Put on Display and Their Stories

Human zoos were real. From the 1870s until as late as 1958, people from Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific were put on display in Europe and the United States in mock “native villages”, fenced enclosures and travelling shows, while paying visitors stared, threw food and took photographs. Often called ethnological exhibitions or, in German, Völkerschauen, they were staged at zoos, amusement parks and world’s fairs.

The shows were profitable entertainment, but they also did political work. They presented colonised peoples as “primitive” and the visitors’ own societies as civilised, which helped justify empire and fed the race science of the day. Some performers signed contracts and were paid; many others were deceived, pressured or simply taken. Disease killed a shocking number of them far from home.

The photographs below come from that history. For each one we explain, as far as reliable sources allow, who is shown, where and when, and why it matters. Several old captions that circulated online were wrong, and we correct them where we can.

How the “human zoo” business began

The German animal dealer Carl Hagenbeck, later famous for designing zoo enclosures without bars, staged his first people show in 1874, presenting a Sámi family with their reindeer in Hamburg. Nubians followed in 1876 and Inuit in 1880. In Paris, the Jardin d’Acclimatation hosted around 30 such exhibitions between 1877 and 1912, and the 1889 Paris World’s Fair displayed about 400 Indigenous people in a so-called “Negro Village”.

The formula spread quickly to Brussels, London, Berlin, Chicago and St. Louis. Organisers built backdrops of huts, palm trees and painted landscapes, then asked the people inside to cook, craft, dance or fight on schedule, as if visitors were looking through a window into the wild.

Taken from Tierra del Fuego: the Selk’nam and Kawésqar

This group of Fuegians was photographed aboard a ship, on the way to Europe for exhibition. Indigenous people from the southern tip of South America were among the most heavily exploited by the shows, because European audiences imagined them as the “last savages” at the end of the world.

Here a group of Selk’nam people sit in front of a painted set beside a European man in a hat. Two Selk’nam families were exhibited at the 1889 Paris Exposition, at a time when their people were being driven from their land and killed at home in Tierra del Fuego. Later scholars studied Selk’nam who had been abducted and shown in circuses in conditions close to slavery.

These portraits show members of the Kawésqar people, also from Tierra del Fuego. In 1881 eleven Kawésqar were taken for Carl Hagenbeck’s shows and exhibited in Paris, Berlin, Leipzig, Munich, Stuttgart, Nuremberg and Zurich. Five died of pneumonia and measles in Zurich and another on the voyage home; their remains were finally returned to Chile in January 2010, almost 130 years later.

Paris: colonial gardens and a giant exhibition

The gate of the 1907 colonial exhibition at the Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale, a tropical-agriculture garden on the eastern edge of Paris near the Bois de Vincennes. For the summer of 1907, organisers built villages there representing French colonies such as Madagascar, Indochina, Sudan, Congo, Tunisia and Morocco, and the show reportedly drew over a million visitors.

A footbridge and pavilions inside the garden. The settings were designed to look like everyday colonial life, with local-style houses and crops, but the people living in them were there to be watched.

A group of men stand in front of a large wooden pavilion. Old online captions describe one of the buildings in this series as a Congolese “factory” where African workers were made to perform labour for visitors; we could not confirm that detail, so treat it with caution.

Ornate Indochinese gates from the garden, photographed then and later. After the exhibitions the site was largely abandoned, and its decaying pavilions became a quiet, little-visited reminder of the colonial era when the garden opened to the public again in the 2000s.

A group of young dancers in elaborate costumes, a photo usually linked to the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris, where performers from French and Dutch colonies appeared. That exhibition, held in the Bois de Vincennes from May 1931, is often said to have drawn 33 or 34 million visitors; historians note that figure counts ticket entries, and the real number of people was more likely 8 to 9 million. A Communist-backed counter-exhibition, “The Truth About the Colonies”, attracted only about 5,000.

Germany’s people shows

A woman holding a child stands in front of visitors at a so-called “Negro village” in Germany in the early 20th century. Exhibits like this were widely advertised as educational, but they reduced real families to living props.

Another view of the same type of show, with a fence separating the people on display from the crowd. Such exhibitions toured German cities until around 1931. Under the Nazis, many former performers and their German-born children faced discrimination, lost what rights they had and were pushed into forced labour.

A postcard from Carl Hagenbeck’s animal park at Stellingen, near Hamburg, with people arranged on artificial rocks beside a pond. Hagenbeck’s “panorama” landscapes, praised as a humane design for animals, were also used as stages for human performers.

A group of dancers performs outdoors in front of a large exhibition hall while spectators watch. The original caption said that pygmy groups were forced to dance at several world exhibitions; we could not identify the exact event in this picture.

America: Ota Benga and the 1904 St. Louis fair

Ota Benga, a young Congolese man born around 1883, holds a chimpanzee. In 1904 the American Samuel Phillips Verner bought him from slave traders and brought him to the St. Louis World’s Fair. In September 1906 the Bronx Zoo in New York put him in its Monkey House next to apes, with a sign calling him an “African Pygmy.”

Black clergy led by the Reverend James H. Gordon protested at once, and the display was stopped within days, though crowds still followed and mocked him around the grounds. Benga later lived in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he worked in a tobacco factory. Unable to return home after the First World War halted passenger shipping, he took his own life in March 1916. In 2020 the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the zoo, formally apologised.

Archery during the “Anthropology Days” held on 12 and 13 August 1904 alongside the St. Louis Olympic Games. About 100 Indigenous men from several continents, who were already on display at the fair, were entered in events such as running, throwing and pole climbing. The organisers presented their results as proof of racial hierarchy, ignoring that the men had no training, no coaching and often no explanation of the rules.

The 1904 fair also exhibited more than 1,100 Filipinos. Eight years earlier, in 1896, the Cincinnati Zoo had hosted about 100 Sioux in a village setting for three months to boost attendance.

Sara Baartman: a life on display

This censored postcard is widely shared online as a picture of Sara Baartman, but it cannot show her. Baartman died in Paris in late 1815 or early 1816, before photography existed; the image appears to be a later ethnographic photograph of an unidentified woman, itself a reminder of how colonised bodies were collected and circulated.

Baartman was a Khoikhoi woman born around 1789 in the Eastern Cape of today’s South Africa. In 1810 she was taken to London and exhibited as the “Hottentot Venus”, her body treated as a curiosity because of its shape. She was later shown in Paris, where scientists examined her. After her death the naturalist Georges Cuvier dissected her body, and her skeleton and preserved organs were displayed in a Paris museum until the 1970s.

After the end of apartheid, President Nelson Mandela’s government asked France to return her. Her remains came home in 2002 and were buried at Hankey in the Eastern Cape on 9 August, South Africa’s Women’s Day.

Brussels 1958: the last great human zoo

A white visitor holds out food over a bamboo fence to a small Congolese girl at Expo 58 in Brussels. The photo is often called the image of the last human zoo. Belgium’s Congolese village housed 598 people from 183 families, including 197 children. Many of the residents protested against the condescending treatment, and the village closed early; an eight-month-old baby, Juste Bonaventure Langa, died during the fair.

Echoes did not end in 1958. In 2005 the zoo in Augsburg, Germany, held an “African village” event that drew strong criticism for exoticising Africans, which shows how long these habits of looking can last.

Why this history still matters

Human zoos taught millions of ordinary visitors to see other people as specimens. That way of looking supported colonial rule, scientific racism and, in Germany, ideas later used by the Nazis. It also left real wounds: unmarked graves abroad, human remains held in museum stores and families who never learned what became of their relatives.

The repatriation of Sara Baartman in 2002 and of the Kawésqar dead in 2010, and the Bronx Zoo’s apology for Ota Benga in 2020, show that institutions can face this past. Remembering the people in these photos as individuals with names, families and homes is the first step. You can read more in our article on Ota Benga and the Bronx Zoo.

Sources: Wikipedia: Human zoo; Wikipedia: Ota Benga; Wikipedia: Sarah Baartman; South African History Online: Sara “Saartjie” Baartman; Swissinfo: Chile repatriates tribal remains from Zurich; Wikipedia: Selk’nam genocide; Wikipedia: Paris Colonial Exhibition; Wikipedia: 1904 Summer Olympics; Messy Nessy Chic: The haunting human zoo of Paris (photos of the Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale); 4sociales.cl (Selk’nam photos); Idealist Revolution via Unbelievable Facts (original photo selection).